Marketing Funnel v/s Flywheel – Which Is The Best Inbound Framework?

So back in 2018 Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot, bid farewell to the age-old marketing funnel technique for capturing quality leads. However, there are some businesses that are still using the marketing funnel, in fact, back in 2021 the total number of websites using a sales funnel for prospecting was 570,000.

As a result, new business owners end up in a great confusion which is – marketing funnel v/s sales funnel, which is the best inbound framework for my business?

Whether you go with marketing or flywheel including a prospecting method is very important if you want your business to have a scalable amount of quality leads.

Here are some eye-opening stats on lead capturing and prospecting: from the Inbound 2018 event, that gave birth to the concept of flywheel:

• For 37% of salespeople, prospecting is the most challenging part of their job.
• Also, in the same study, it was found that lead conversion is the #1 priority for 69% of marketers.

In fact, these stats clearly back my point that to build an effective and efficient prospecting blueprint you need a framework. Now the framework here could be either a marketing funnel or a flywheel.

Today in the article, together we’ll be unraveling the concept of both the inbound prospecting models and, we’ll also find the answer to the marketing funnel v/s flywheel which is the best option for your eCommerce business.

All About Marketing Funnels

As I have said earlier, marketing funnels have been in our business world for a very long time for converting customers into qualified leads. If I have to give a brief overview of funnels, it would be – a funnel is an inbound marketing model that depicts a potential customer’s journey from becoming a prospect to a qualified lead.

In a marketing funnel, the customer journey is divided into different stages. At the beginning of the funnel, an individual is considered a potential lead and by the end of the funnel, these leads turn into loyal customers.

Let’s understand the marketing funnel in detail:

What Are Marketing Funnels?

A marketing funnel is an inbound model that clearly displays a potential customer’s start becoming aware of your brand and ends in purchasing your product or service.

So I have been saying that the marketing funnel is divided into stages depicting various stages of the buying process. But what are these stages?

Let’s see all of them in detail:

Awareness

The marketing funnel begins with the awareness stage. This is where the prospects first interact with your brand and make themselves aware of your products and services.

For bringing prospects to this state you need to attract them through planned marketing campaigns. You can invest in strategies like:

• Event advertising
• Creating content such as blog posts, infographics, etc.
• Organizing webinars
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Run display ads, search ads, and other PPC campaigns

All these marketing strategies can help you in attracting your target audience to the awareness stage of the marketing funnel.

Interest

The second stage of the funnel is called the interest stage. Once the leads are generated, it’s time to generate their interest in your brand’s products and services.

In the interest stage, you get the opportunity to build a strong relationship with the prospects and convert them into qualified leads. And, to do so you need to present them with content that is highly targeted around your industry.

Consideration

In the consideration stage, your leads can now be your possible customers. As a result, the marketers share with them information about offers and deals with the help of automated email campaigns. But remember the prospect is still a qualified lead in the consideration stage, and you still need to present targeted content such as case studies, free trials, and more.

Action

Finally, we’re at the end of the marketing funnel where your prospects turn into customers. In the action stage, customers make a decision and are prepared to invest in your brand.

However, I personally recommend the action stage into the following 3 sub-stages:

• Intent: In the intent stage you verify whether a customer is actually interested in buying from you. This can happen after a customer has added the product to the cart or taken a survey of one of your services. In short, the marketer’s role is to form a case for the customers to present why buying the product is the best decision they can ever make.
• Evaluation: In the evaluation sub-stage the buyers are ready to take a final decision whether to buy or not buy the product. In this substage, the marketing, and the sales team work together to nurture the decision-making process of a customer in a positive direction.
• Purchase: This last sub-stage of the action stage and final stage of the marketing funnel. If a customer has reached this stage this means that they are ready to buy the products and become a loyal member of your business.

So these were all the stages of a marketing funnel. Business owners use these stages to make an effective marketing blueprint for converting the maximum number of leads.

However, the marketing funnel with time became obsolete, and hence, came the flywheel into the picture. But what are the reasons that made the marketing funnel outdated? Let’s learn them in detail?

Why Has the Marketing Funnel Become Outdated?

The marketing funnel has been in the business world for more than 120 years!

Yes, the consumer-focussed marketing model was developed by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898 to map a theoretical customer journey from the moment a customer discovers a brand to the point of action which is buying from the discovered brand.

But what went wrong suddenly with this traditional yet highly effective marketing model?

Let’s have a look at a few points.

1. Too Linear

Over time customers have evolved and so have their buying habits. Today, the buying process is no longer linear which means, prospects don’t directly enter the top of the funnel they can enter at any stage.

Let’s understand the scenario. For example, you are shopping for a product on an eCommerce website and the website recommends a product. Consequently, you add the recommended product to your cart as a result, you directly enter the consideration stage and finish with the action stage.

2. Ends With A Finite End

The marketing funnel ends when a customer has made a purchase from your business. But today, you not only need customers but advocates that promote your brand as referral marketers.

Marketing funnels do not focus on grooming the customers as loyal brand advocates. Also, as you might be aware of the fact that the cost of acquiring a new customer is far more than retaining an old one.

3. Oversimplifies The Process

The marketing funnel oversimplifies the buying process in which a customer moves from the awareness stage to the action stage. But in reality, the buying decision isn’t this simple and linear.

If you consider today’s online selling and buying set up the consumers have carried channels to interact with your brands. Therefore, it’s impossible to see how it would fit into the classic sales funnel at all.

4. Relies On Customers’ Attention

When the marketing funnel was founded in the 1890s, the information was scarce, and it was very easy to grab the attention of customers. But using the sales funnel in the era of online shopping there is an abundance of information and sales executives find it very difficult to attract customers to the attraction stage of the funnel.

A study conducted by Marketo tells us approximately 96% of visitors aren’t even ready to buy, they just want to explore your products.

Due to all these reasons, the marketing funnel has become outdated and marketers of the modern era need a model that is:

• Firstly, it is less linear and more cyclic.
• Secondly, it doesn’t end when a lead is converted to a customer but focuses on turning them into your brand’s advocates.
• Lastly, the model should consider the fact that a customer can enter at any stage of the buying journey.

To cater to all these needs HubSpot, the inbound marketing experts invented the Flywheel model. Let’s see how these two models are different and how the flywheel is better than the classic marketing funnel model.

Welcome, The Flywheel Model

The flywheel model was born in the 2018 Inbound event with the idea to find a better way for the organizations to grow better.

HubSpot closely noticed the fact the traditional marketing funnel model excelled in moving prospective customers towards the end of the funnel with the closing of the deal. However, the marketing funnel model didn’t focus much on the customers’ buying experience.

Let’s learn more about this inbound marketing framework.

What is a Sales/Marketing Flywheel?

Funnel and flywheel aren’t originally marketing terms, they are mechanical tools.

Flywheel — invented by James Watt (inventor of the light bulb) about 200 years ago. A flywheel is simply a wheel or disc on an axis that’s incredibly energy-efficient. Practically, flywheels are used in power plants, cars, and trains.

It has a large rotating wheel that stores the kinetic energy in the form of rotational momentum and smoothens engine operation by compensating the energy in and out at times of need. Now in this, we have to see how this analogy makes sense for your marketing.

But, have you ever thought about how these customers are interacting with your business at every stage?

Well! It’s more like a flywheel concept. The businesses spend their energy on their customers and that energy is efficiently returned back to the businesses helping them to grow, and this keeps ongoing.

Conversely, funnels can help you to generate customers. But unlike flywheel, it has never talked about how those customers would help you to grow.

How Flywheel is Linked With Marketing? New Business Model on a Go!

Each and everything revolves around ‘Momentum’. This momentum decides how efficient your marketing flywheel is. The sales flywheel represents a circular process. In which customers are placed at the center and taken as input to marketing and sales, instead of output.

Flywheel stores and releases energy to continue to feed your company’s growth.

These are some of the factors that depict how much momentum your flywheel contains:

1. How Fast Do You Spin it?

The speed of the flywheel increases, when the force is applied to those areas where it could have a larger impact increases.

In the marketing funnel model, all the force was applied to attract prospects and convert them. While in the flywheel system, more force is applied to delight those customers by making their purchases more satisfying and repeating them.

2. How Much Friction Does it Contain?

When there is a lack of alignment between sales and customer success, it slows down your wheel. In easy words, when you have a trail of unhappy customers, it adds friction to your spin.

To reduce that friction you need to look through the inefficiencies and the point where your customers are losing momentum. Turn up to improve conversion rates, and address customer experience to increase the speed of your flywheel at scale.

3. Size and Weight Composition – How Big it is and How Much it Weighs?

Focus on increasing speed and decreasing friction. When you have delighted customers the Flywheel grows heavier in weight. It produces more energy when turned at a high speed. As customer count increases, your flywheel produces more growth.