Today’s society feeds us with thousands of different impressions a day. “Look at this product”,...
Society today feeds us with thousands of different impressions a day. “Look at this product”, “this product is the best”, “this product can be custom made for you” or “this product is cheap and high quality!”
But, who do we trust? And who can we rely on to give us the correct information?
Can you guess what the strongest type of marketing is right now and probably will be for a very, very long time?
Word of mouth!
We all remember the classic funnel, marketing and sales work together in order to produce a customer in the end of the funnel. However, in 2018 Hubspot has scrapped the old funnel and instead introduced us to the flywheel, which I would like to tell you more about. I have gathered inspiration to write this article from the original post from Hubspot.
The flywheel was introduced to the world 200 years ago. The genius thing about it is that it is incredibly energy efficient and uses momentum in order to store energy. The amount of energy it stores depends on how much energy you use to spin it with (adding weight and friction to the equation of course).
Hubspot has taken the basic idea of adding momentum to an object that stores energy and developed an entirely new funnel around it.
The flywheel
This is Hubspots new “funnel”. You recognize the three areas; attract, engage and delight. What stands out is that the customer is no longer a product of the funnel. Instead, the customer is the main focus of the flywheel. Everything we do is supposed to correspond with the customers.
In the flywheel, think of these three areas as follows:
- Attract: This is the stage when our prospects first come in contact with our company and interact with us.
- Engage: This is where we engage with our prospects in order to close deals and start retainers.
- Delight: This is the stage where we have our new customers onboard. What is even more important, this is the stage where we have the opportunity to turn our customers into promoters.
The secret ingredient in order to make the flywheel go faster and faster is friction. Or actually, less friction.
The less friction, the better
When our flywheel is in full spin with marketing, sales and delighting customers we really don’t want it to slow down (slow our business down) with unnecessary friction. Our main focus should be making the delight process friction free in the first place. Friction can be described as anything that causes processes to slow down. By eliminating as much friction as possible we can make sure that our company runs smoothly like a well oiled machine. As I wrote in the beginning of this article word of mouth is the best method for marketing, and by making sure our customers are delighted we can capitalize on this type of marketing. And it’s easy! All we have to do is to make our customers happy (which is what we set out to do in the first place!). So in order to delight our customers and turn them into promoters, we need to eliminate friction from the equation. This means that we need to make sure the customer experience is as good as it possible could be.
Start examining your organisation and look for key points where friction is high and try to correct it.
- Where are our points of friction?
- What can be automated?
- Can we get rid of friction trough reorganizing our teams?
- Can we minimize friction trough shared goals?
- What does it lead to?
Simply put, by using the flywheel as our new business model and really giving it all in order to eliminate friction and produce a great customer experience. We can capitalize on the best marketing method ever, by delighting customers with spotless customer experiences.
Conclusion
In today’s world, where we are being bombarded with different messages, the customer is no longer to be seen as a product of our sales, marketing and services. Based on the new flywheel model released by Hubspot, we now look at customers as the central aspect of our entire operation. The flywheel consists of attract, engage and delight. The most resources should be spent on the delight stage in order to turn our customers to promoters and maximise the amount of word of mouth marketing for our company. Which is the best type of marketing.
