The Customer Flywheel: A Better Sales and Marketing Funnel

We all know about the sales funnel — it’s Marketing 101. A sales funnel consists of four stages: Awareness at the top (widest part of the funnel), then interest, desire, and finally at the narrowest part of the funnel, action.

The funnel is a tried-and-true but imperfect way of looking at marketing and sales. A more effective approach is the customer flywheel.

What Is a Customer Flywheel?

Whereas the sales and marketing funnel is, well, a funnel, the flywheel is — you guessed it — a wheel. The funnel is all about conversions; it’s getting a visitor to take the next step down. The wheel is all about the customer experience. And the way you get the wheel to turn is by continually improving that customer experience.

When you’re using a funnel approach, the end goal is conversion. That could be a sale, sign-up, or however your business defines success. The flywheel is more focused on building and maintaining long-term relationships with customers and turning them into loyal brand advocates.

Much like the funnel model, there are variations on the flywheel. Elissa Fink, former Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Tableau and Pantheon board member, discussed the flywheel at a Pantheon virtual event earlier this summer, and she described it as having three distinct parts:

• The Product or Brand: Awareness stage, when the customer learns about your offerings.

• Customer Creation: Where conversion happens; where the customer makes a purchase or completes your desired action.

• Community Building: When the customer becomes an amplifying fan, bringing new prospects into the wheel.

The Center of the Customer Flywheel: Your Company and Culture

You’ve likely seen visual representations of the customer flywheel with customers or growth at the center. That’s an effective way of looking at it, but Fink takes a unique view, by placing the company and culture at the center.

“Of course, what's at the very center of this, which keeps this whole thing on the spindle and enables it to move fast is your company culture,” says Fink. “I'm a really big advocate for company and culture being a critical part of your marketing strategy. Who you are authentically, what your company represents authentically, how you think, how you solve customers' problems — it really comes out through company culture.”

Most companies have either a product-centric culture or a customer-centric culture. But when you have a customer-centric culture, you build better products and better customer experiences. You create deeper relationships. According to research from McKinsey & Company, “A fundamental change of mindset focusing on the customer, along with operational and IT improvements, can generate a 20 to 30 percent uplift in customer satisfaction, a 10 to 20 percent improvement in employee satisfaction, and economic gains ranging from 20 to 50 percent of the cost base addressed in the various journeys.”

Your company culture ties into every aspect of the flywheel, from your messaging to your processes to your customer relationship management (CRM). The healthier your culture is, the stronger the wheel.

The Final Piece of the Puzzle: Data

Many companies have more data than they know what to do with. Every visit to your website, every email address collected, and every purchase made generates tons of data points. The key is establishing which metrics are important to your flywheel and creating streamlined systems for collecting and managing these metrics.

According to a recent Deloitte survey, 63 percent of executives do not believe their companies are insight-driven. They say they are aware of analytics but lack infrastructure, are still working in silos, or are expanding ad hoc analytics capabilities beyond silos. On the flip side of that, the companies that had the strongest analytics cultures were twice as likely to exceed their business goals.  

“Company culture is what keeps that wheel on and it keeps us strong. Data can accelerate the movement of that flywheel,” says Fink. “There's so much data being created by all these digital transformations and digital experiences. We need that data to know what works and what doesn't, and how to ask questions of it and how to improve our ability, our marketing capabilities; all of this is so core to the customer flywheel.”

As a marketer, you have access to your own data. But the sales team also has data. The customer success team has data. The finance team has data. The more you share data and eliminate silos when it comes to data — again, this goes back to company culture — the more holistic view of your customer journey. 

Your Customer Flywheel Needs WebOps

Fink was the CMO of Tableau from around 2007 until the end of 2018. During that period, the company went from about five million dollars in annual revenue to well over one billion. How did they achieve more than a 200-fold increase in revenue? By embracing WebOps. First, they brought developers over to the marketing team. Then, they upgraded their technology and made Pantheon their WebOps platform.

“What a relief it was for me to know that we could have reliability and performance and that our developers could be focused on innovating and creating new experiences, rather than worried so much about keeping the ads or the website up,” says Fink. “I have such a strong feeling that the customer flywheel, the way that you get customers and you keep customers is really enabled by your system. And your technology, your systems, and especially your website.”

When you embrace a WebOps approach and create a cross-functional web team, you cut down on friction in your customer flywheel. Your team can focus on creating great customer experiences, which leads to strong customer relationships, and turning your customers into brand advocates who amplify your messaging and keep the flywheel spinning faster and faster.