Flywheel vs Funnel: Which Approach You Should Adopt

Sales or marketing funnel has been in the practice over the decades. A lot of business organizations have taken the help of this sales funnel. But now expert marketers are saying that creating a strategy for the sales funnel is an old school task. In order to get the best business benefits, now companies should focus on the flywheel. Apart from this, according to research, now the sales funnel is not offering the best value rather it is failing in many organizations. And that’s why now they are suggesting focusing on the marketing flywheel. So, today we are going to discuss each and everything about sales funnel and flywheel and how to easily switch from funnel to flywheel.

What is Funnel? Why It is Out-dated?

We all know that sales funnel was a common model for lots of businesses over the decades. Sales funnel is the journey of a random visitor to become a customer. There are many stages in a sales funnel and marketing experts used to create effective strategies to fasten each stage. But with the increase in competition and different business strategies, this business model is losing its importance. Or we can say that now it is not that much effective. Why businesses are tending towards other models instead of this one that we can understand from the below discussion –

Sales Funnel is Too Linear – here we can see very little communication or direct engagement with the customer. Now we have a lot of ways to reach our potential customers. And people simply do not have that much time or patience to wait for a particular company to buy something. I mean if the company offers a newsletter once in a year according to its sales funnel, almost every user will forget about this company. Today we have a lot of ways to remind a user about the existence of a company.

The sales funnel is completely sales focused. It does not care about engagement. Now staying in the head of your users is a true business need. But the typical sales funnel does not care about it rather makes the business model or style old school. The sales funnel does not try to make a customer purchase again. When a business has a specific target audience, a one-time customer goal is not appreciated at all. But at the same place and same situation marketing flywheel performs much better.

What is Flywheel and How It Works?

A sales flywheel concentrates on three important factors such as sales, marketing, and services. Without any doubt, these are the core areas of any business regardless of the industry type. The flywheel was invented by James Watt. You know that a flywheel is a simple disc or wheel on the axis and it is amazing energy-efficient. We have seen the use of flywheel in many power plants, cars, and trains. Basically a flywheel can maintain the momentum and smooth the engine operation. But how is this going to be used in a normal business setting! If your goal is to only make one purchase by a customer, it’s not your cup of tea. But if you want to bring back your customers and let them make more purchases, sales flywheel is the best model for your business. A successful flywheel attracts the new leads, delight the customers, and do these on a regular basis in a cyclic manner.

When it comes to how flywheel works, we can say that it mainly depends on three important factors such as speed, friction, and size. When the speed increases, the areas where you should do improvements, those get automatic boosts and make the user experience more satisfying. After that, you will understand the blockages of your business or reasons for not making your flywheel speedier. So, after that, you can easily recognize the blockages and remove those effectively. When you speed the spin and remove the blockages, automatically your customer base will start to grow.

Why Switch on Flywheel

It has been noticed that businesses that put customers at the centre of the entire process, the customers become the major contributors to business growth. Without paying for promotional purposes, you can gain promotional benefits via this flywheel business model. The flywheel has made it possible that the journey of a customer will not end just after the purchase. The journey will end when a customer will recommend your service or product to another person. And this will be continued on a cyclic or wheel motion. This smart and effective methodology helps to develop the simplified customer experience. This flywheel business model effectively helps the teams I mean marketing and sales teams to work hand in hand without putting a lot of effort. Teams can better identify the common goal and work for that. Apart from this, we can say that flywheel measures business growth as well as evaluates business efforts. For all these reasons, a lot of businesses are simply switching to the flywheel model and leaving behind the old school sales funnel practices.

How to Switch from Funnel to Flywheel

Now you can understand that 2020 is the time to leave the sales to funnel behind and hold the hand of sales flywheel. The process is easy. In just three steps, you can switch from old school funnel to Flywheel.

At the first step, you need to do the required homework. The homework is evaluating your business organization’s performance and the main forces of your inbound marketing strategy. In order to switch, now you have to recreate the same forces but your intention will be a maximizing delight, customer engagement, and satisfaction.  

Your inbound marketing strategy contains a lot of stages. Now you have to set goals for each stage. Apart from this, you have to implement tools so that you can track the efforts as well as align them to achieve the goals.

After that, now you have to recognize the elements or points that are creating friction between your business departments. Here you may need to improve the communication regime, organizational practices, and productivity to ensure the achievement of the goal.

Flywheel Follows Customer-Centric Methodology

In the sales funnel practice, we have seen that it treats customers as outsiders. And it only focuses on the short term goals and does not think about future goals. But when it comes to Flywheel, we can say that it follows customer-centric methodology. It lets or directs the organization to invest in improving the customers’ satisfaction. Business organizations that follow the flywheel method, they invest for the customers, offer something before a customer asks, and do so many other things for the overall improvement. Apart from these, there are three main factors that modern businesses that follow flywheel, prefer to do such as- going mobile, going virtual, and doing behavioural pairing.

Flywheel Takeaways

Without any doubt marketing flywheel is strong as well as an effective approach to accelerate the growth of a business. It makes businesses understand how important it is to stand apart from the crowd. I mean what your competitors are doing and what you should do for being unique- a business owner needs to understand that. And the business flywheel simply makes this possible. In order to do that you can enable new practices and compare it with the previous one and track the growth.

Conclusion

Understanding the right business model is very important to boost the growth of a business. From our today’s discussion we understand that due to lack of proper understanding and following the old methods, a lot of businesses are just lagging. When it is a business and there is high competition in the market, you have to always update the business practice. In the same way, today flywheel is the best thing to follow instead of a sales funnel. Switching from funnel to flywheel is no hassle if you go systematically.

So, why to wait for more, adopt the best business module, and boost business growth!