
Funnel is dead, long live Flywheel
According to the statistics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the most frequently used enterprise software nowadays (11,2% of budget share). Moreover CRM software accounts for over a third of total software spend per employee. Companies spent billions on developing efficiency in sales and intelligent processes to drive revenue. There are hundreds of vendors on the market who want to sell turnkey solutions. No wonder that worldwide CRM market grew 12.6% to $69.3 billion in 2020.
Traditional CRM software is built around the sales and marketing processes. Typical customer or a “Lead” moved along the sales funnel from qualification, to negotiation and later close. This behavior was expected and the behavior of buyers, especially buyers of digital software / SaaS products changed recently due to a major trend - the consumerization of enterprise tech. It means that software is transforming as corporations adopt consumer-like solutions for business use, and often purchased through consumer channels. Nowadays, employees are not waiting for the long-term approval to get enterprise solutions that can be outdated, they are turning to solutions that can be downloaded and installed fast. Three points that describe Software consumerization:
New software buying is happening over longer periods of time, so users are no longer moved through a linear sales funnel with the beginning and an end. In SaaS, there is no end, because there should be constant renewals, advocacy, referrals and other services. We see an entire loop of the customer life cycle. This idea is the heart of an inbound business approach.
One of the best examples of how Flywheel can be defined is coined by HubSpot Inbound - an approach of attracting, engaging, and delighting clients to grow a business that builds trust and value. In contrast to the traditional approach of thinking of your business as a funnel, with leads running in at the top and customers coming out at the bottom, you need to think of your business as a loop or circle — as a flywheel.
The flywheel is creating a remarkable customer experience when you align your whole organization around creating customer value. The ideal process to inbound of your business:

Picture 1 - The Flywheel by HubSpot.com
This cyclical flywheel motion is truly never ending, and that's the value of it.
The traditional sales funnel focuses solely on prospects and how to quickly move them through the process of becoming a customer, without consideration of how customers can feed back into the funnel for repeat purchases.
Funnels lose the energy you put into them once you reach the bottom, but flywheels are remarkable at storing and releasing energy.
In the next sections, we’ll get into detail about each part of the flywheel.
Attracting Strategies
Attracting customers includes drawing valuable content and conversations. It will indicate your company as a trusted advisor who shares quality and useful content.
The prospects who have taken interest in your solution method of revenue operations to their problem and provided their contact details in exchange for content that is helpful to them. To understand how your business attracts people, reflect on:
Create a list out of the ways your company attracts with customers (digital and physical) along with any metrics you use to measure how well those tactics are working, then you will know and can track all activities and improve them.
Engaging Strategies
Engaging the customer includes presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals, so they are more likely to buy from you. Engaged prospects are those who are considering your solution method to their problem and want to actually connect with someone at your company about it. To understand how your business engages people, you need:
Delighting Strategies
Delighting people includes providing support and help to empower your clients to find satisfaction with their purchase. Delighting strategies include:
Delighted customers are those who want customer support to help them troubleshoot their problems and customer success to strategize with them on how to best succeed with your product or service.
To understand how your business delights people, survey your customers to see how happy they are about working with you. Use surveys that measure your customers' Net Promoter Scores, or NPS. This survey assesses how likely they are to recommend you to a friend. Find out why certain customers come back and do business with you again. Seek out and analyze what complaints your customers have. List these all out, and include all the relevant metrics you can.
Conclusion
Use the flywheel motion to grow better and unlock the secrets that will unleash your customer-facing team's full selling capacity with RevOS.
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