Flywheel - The new marketing funnels of 2020s

The marketing funnel known for 120+ years no longer works.

Why?

🌀 The buying behavior over the past decade is not linear; instead, it's cyclical, moving with different velocity driven by external forces.

👉 Enterprise hiring a new CMO: suddenly, new RFQs pop up in the next 3 to 6 months for CRMs, websites, landing pages

👉 AI revolution kicks in: all industries get intrigued by AI implementation and augmentation solutions

👉 Several key members churning: SME objectives shifting from sales to recruitment and onboarding

We see this firsthand at DevriX.

The core premise of the funnel

Marketers have been obsessed with the funnel since forever.

This model makes it easy for campaigns to go through a lean flow, moving from top to bottom in three stages: TOFU, MOFU, BOFU (top, middle, bottom of the funnel).

Each stage is represented by content types and topics suitable for different stages - depending on whether you approach prospects higher up that require awareness (just seeing your brand) or ready to convert (near the bottom).

This premise works well in some environments - such as low-ticket B2C where products cost virtually nothing and purchases are pretty easy when shot straight from a paid campaign.

The same goes for freebies or free trials - low friction resources that are a no-brainer.

However, when it comes to expensive purchases (products, services, solutions), the buying process is significantly longer. It often entails months of due diligence, brand research, reviews, reddit posts, and going through a long checklist of items one needs to cover before the point of contact.

This is where the flywheel shines.

Shifting business needs

2019-2022 were a heavy mix of 80-90% R&D and heavy engineering services while 40 to 50% of our demand now is building innovative solutions (the rest going to growth marketing and GTM strategy). 📶

The pressing need shifts from feature expansion & TAM domination to customer retention and unlocking new acquisition channels.

Some SQLs bounce and disappear, only to come in 2-6 months later after a project is unpaused or a different vendor failed to deliver on a promise. 🤷‍♂️

Even CEOs got replaced in multiple companies in our portfolio in Q1. Projects were put on hold while new initiatives were delegated due to change of priorities.

And as the buying cycle goes in and out, traditional funnel fails to read in the right metrics or score leads in the best possible manner.

Buying behaviors change

In companies founded 5 years or older, buying decisions are often based on old signals. Processes and playbooks that worked long ago, with marketers repeating the same exercise - publishing content for SEO, or delivering leads to SDRs to call in consistently, or running a few campaigns a month and refining creatives.

But in reality, conference talk or a networking dinner meeting 3 years ago may be the culprit to making the choice during the cycle today. This is the power of long-term brand building, with executives impacting signals through PR, podcasts, interviews, 1:1s, former employees who elevated to a larger company, and other signals unrelated to the buying cycle (and especially the funnel).

Continued brand awareness while "not in market" will make it to the top of the shortlist when sourcing a new vendor.

Word-of-mouth and referrals while executing on post-funnel stages is what decisions are based on.

"Bending the funnel to a flywheel" as my former team at Rush said continuously (as we were building a post-purchase order tracking and upsell solution increasing the number of repeat purchases).

The flywheel history

The modern flywheel was introduced by HubSpot's own Brian Halligan, after years and years of shaping the "inbound marketing" methodology based on the original funnel.

As enterprise organizations speed up their launch cycles and cut down their annual roadmaps to quarterly rocks or OKR cycles, buyers move in and out of market faster than ever. And repeat purchases are more common than they used to be in the early 2010s.

❗Moreover, the marketing vs. sales battle fails to account for CX participation or product quality. In a densely populated market filled with vendors and SaaS, PMF is increasingly more important, with buyers unwilling to make compromises in a red ocean of alternatives.

The flywheel accounts for that continued journey, from marketing and sales to product and CX, including areas like NPS and retention rates.

If your scorecards bet on the traditional funnel, bend it in a circle and add a few more KPIs in the process. This is what the modern growth toolkit looks like in the 2020s.