What Is the Flywheel Model?

A flywheel is a heavy wheel that stores energy as it spins and releases it gradually. The image entered management writing through Jim Collins. In his 2001 book "Good to Great", Collins used the flywheel effect to describe how the companies he studied improved: with no single decisive action, through many pushes in the same direction that together eventually keep the wheel turning by itself. Collins was writing about the transformation of whole companies, not about marketing.

HubSpot took the image and applied it to the customer relationship. Its CEO, Brian Halligan, argued in Harvard Business Review on 20 November 2018 for replacing the sales funnel with the flywheel. On its own page, HubSpot calls it a model "adapted" by the company.

The flywheel overlaps with several terms in this glossary. The funnel and the conversion funnel describe a linear path that ends with the purchase. The customer journey describes that path from the customer's side. Inbound marketing is HubSpot's methodology, which the company rebuilt around the flywheel. Customer lifetime value is the metric that shows whether existing customers generate more value over time, which is exactly what the model promises.

HubSpot divides the cycle into three stages: attract, engage and delight. In the attract stage, the company earns the attention of people who do not know it yet, for example with content, SEO or advertising. In the engage stage, it makes buying and staying in touch easy through the channel the customer prefers; lead nurturing is one of the techniques used here. In the delight stage, it helps customers reach their goals after the purchase, with support, training or loyalty programmes.

According to HubSpot, the flywheel's momentum depends on three things: - Speed: how much force is applied. HubSpot calls the programmes that speed up the wheel forces, such as content marketing, a freemium model, a referral programme or good customer service. - Friction: anything that slows it down. HubSpot names poor internal processes, lack of communication between teams and clumsy handoffs between marketing, sales and support. - The size of the wheel.

The central idea is that the delight stage feeds the attract stage. A satisfied customer recommends the company, and that recommendation brings in others. In the funnel, the customer is the end of the process. In the flywheel, the customer is one of the forces that drive it. That is why the model spreads responsibility across all teams rather than leaving it with marketing and sales.

HubSpot does not propose getting rid of the funnel. On the same page it acknowledges that funnel-shaped charts will still be used to measure specific processes, and that each of them is one part of the larger wheel.

The flywheel changes where the budget goes. If existing customers bring in a meaningful share of new ones, spending on retention, support and the post-purchase experience becomes spending on acquisition. For SEO and content, there is a concrete consequence: help content for customers, such as how-to guides or knowledge bases, belongs in the content plan rather than being left to the support team.

It is worth being clear about what kind of model this is. The flywheel as applied to marketing is a proposal from HubSpot, a company that sells the software to put it into practice, and its page ends by offering those tools. The figures HubSpot cites next to the model describe buyer behaviour, such as the weight of recommendations, and come partly from HubSpot's own research. None of them compares companies that use the flywheel with companies that do not. Collins' work was based on comparative research into companies, but it was about their internal transformation, not about marketing.

Whether the model works for a particular business is therefore something its own data has to show: how many new customers arrive through referrals, how much value a customer generates over time and how many are lost.

• Measure the share of new customers who come through referrals before reorganising the budget around the cycle.
• Use customer lifetime value and churn rate to check whether the delight stage is working.
• Identify specific points of friction, such as forms, handoffs between teams or response times, and measure each one separately.
• Keep conversion funnels to measure each step within the cycle.
• Plan content for existing customers, not only for attracting new visitors.
• Present the flywheel as a HubSpot model, with its date, and not as a research finding.

• Presenting the flywheel as an empirically proven model.
• Crediting it to HubSpot without mentioning that the flywheel image comes from Jim Collins and from management writing.
• Renaming the funnel as a flywheel without changing anything in retention or support.
• Assuming customers will recommend the company on their own, without measuring how many do.
• Dropping funnel measurement, which HubSpot itself still considers useful for specific processes.