The flywheel model explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience. Customer experience means the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey.
Your customer experience needs to be 10x better than the competition. Investing in a flywheel function sets companies apart because it fundamentally focuses on creating customer value throughout the customer journey.
Fueling the Flywheel with RevOps
Using the flywheel model as part of your RevOps strategy can help you think about growth in new ways, centered on the customer. Whether you’re a startup trying to expand or an established company looking for a more efficient go-to-market (GTM) approach, the flywheel model is the best model to unify teams.
Attract: Draw prospective customers to you with helpful content that is easy to discover.
How does your company attract people?
• Your online properties
• Targeted content you’ve created
• Live and virtual events
Engage: Make it easy for prospects to learn about your product on their own terms and in their own time, and ultimately buy it.
How does your company engage people?
• Nurture campaigns
• Free trials
• Self-service options
Delight: Design your product to be as easy to get started with as possible.
How does your company delight people?
• Customer happiness metrics
• Offer documentation and knowledge bases
• Solicit customer feedback and act on it
When your sales team's incentives are aligned with their customers' long-term success, the outcome will be more delight for your customers.
Force vs Friction
Achieving the flywheel effect requires removing friction and applying force. In business terms, that means creating a self-serve purchase flow and applying “forces” to make the wheel spin faster. You can think about force as the places your company makes investments. RevOps is all about finding non-obvious opportunities for growth.
Friction, as a tool, is very much in line with the sorts of things you'll be doing in RevOps. The idea is that you want to identify every piece of the customer experience that's disappointing, frustrating, or in anyway unpleasant. The secret to success when deploying friction intentionally is to make sure the amount of friction matches the level of value.
Ways to Remove Friction
Customers/Prospects: Remove the friction that your customers and prospects face directly.
Let people educate themselves about your product through online content. Get rid of most forms, gates, and other barriers to information. Post your pricing online. Make the purchase process simple and familiar.
Common customer friction points:
- Long wait times for customer support
- Requirements to talk to employees for self-service tasks
- A lack of response to internet forms
- Difficulty finding information on your website
- Delays in delivering your product or service
- High prices or surprising fees
Internal Teams: Remove the friction that your internal teams face when serving your customers and prospects. Internal friction creates gaps in the customer experience.
Common internal team friction points:
- Different systems of record for different teams
- Difficulty finding customer information
- Duplicate or conflicting processes for different teams
- A lack of consistent processes for individual teams
- High employee turnover
- Insufficient employee onboarding and training
Breaking Down Silos
Silos happen when you have an isolated grouping, department, etc., that functions apart from others especially in a way seen as hindering communication and cooperation. The flywheel is designed to break down silos.
How to break down silos across the flywheel:
- Align teams and operating cadence.
- Create and communicate a customer-in strategy.
- Establish accountability by measuring what matters.
When focused attention is given to understanding different operations functions like this, you can create a unified RevOps structure within your business without actually having to change your organizational structure.
Team Alignment with Customer & Company Values
Reinforce your flywheel with customer company values that actually matter. Revenue Operation teams are tasked with delivering visibility across the entire revenue team, improving efficiency across the revenue process, driving revenue predictability, and ultimately achieving revenue growth.
None of this will work unless you have a cohesive team with shared values and a shared understanding of the company’s big goals. That’s what keeps you grounded as you grow. Connecting marketing, sales, and customer success operations using the flywheel model brings your company closer to a 10x better customer experience by prioritizing customer value.
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