Back to the Flywheel: Unpacking the Laws of Inbound Physics With Max Cohen

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the Hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers before we begin.

Once again, we can start without that jargon. Devin is not with us today, so we're sad, of course, but I'm actually glad that we can dive into this. For those of you that don't watch the podcast. Yeah, Max, I wouldn't drink that. Yeah, my life depended on it. But like, a can of something that looks like it was about ready to explode, and I'm like, nabra, should I.

Open it for the viewers watching?

No, I don't think you should. That's going to be a really big mess. No, forget that. Forget it. Cuz then you got to explain it to the wife of like, it was for tv, baby. It was for tv.

Nah.

No. No. So, hey, here's the deal. Welcome back to another out of this World episode of the Hub Heroes. I am super excited. This week's episode is a little bit different. Maybe as you've guessed, if you're listening to this, you've only heard two voices. Also, I'm doing the intro, so instead of the whole Hub Heroes crew, it's just me, your boy, George B. Thomas, and of course, Ma Cohen. Hi, Max Cohen. We're rocking the mics today, and I got to be honest with you, Max. I have been excited for this episode right here ever since the first time we were brainstorming months and months and months ago, and you said the word inbound physics, and my brain went, huh? And so now that we're here and we can actually do it, this is a perfect opportunity, right? This is a perfect opportunity to, like, take a deep dive into what is truly spectacular. Maybe even shift your mind mindset a little bit. It might change how you think about and implement inbound. What I really love is we're gonna do our darndest to talk about this so that those of you who are listening can. Can stay up with the story and what we're talking about. But those of you that choose to go over to community.hubheroes.com and watch it. Well, Max is going to be able to share a screen. You're going to be able to see some visuals, and it might even make a little bit more sense when you're in there and can do that. So we're going to talk about inbound physics. What is it? Why does it matter? Why is it so radical? And how can this immediately shift how we execute in. But I cannot. I cannot for the life of me, Max Fathom radically shifting or executing inbound in a different way than I have. But again, I'm excited. I'm excited, and I'm going to try to be the listener and ask the questions that the listeners might have as we go through this. But how should we get started? What. Where's your mind at when as like, an entry point for this conversation of inbound physics? First of all, are you excited about it?

Oh, I'm stoked. I love talking about inbound physics just because it's kind of me sort of sharing the way that I kind of developed a simple understanding of what the flywheel actually meant. I think the other thing that's, like, interesting is, you know, ever since the inbound methodology, which, by the way, the original inbound methodology is just. There's just the flywheel simplified, like, it was always the same thing. But, you know, ever since there was the inbound methodology or the flywheel, I think you've seen a lot of folks kind of, like, put their own spin and iteration on it. And when you really kind of look at it and understand what's happening at a fundamental level in any of those strategies, it's all the same thing, right? Like, inbound is inbound is inbound. There's many different ways to do inbound. There's many different ways to do outbound. But, like, the fundamental motions of what's happening are ultimately the same, even if you spin it in different ways. And I. I think the reason that I like to kind of talk about the basic physics, if you will, of what's happening, when you look at that strategy of inbound represented through that flywheel, it's going to make it easier for people to look at that strategy and have comfort in knowing, like, okay, here are these big three giant phases of this thing. What do they literally, in the most simplest terms mean? What I don't want people to do is look at something like the flywheel and start going through a crazy analysis paralysis of, like, what sort of content do I need to write? What sort of keywords do I have to Go after. What sort of funnels do I need to set up? What sort of KPIs and metrics do I need to look at? Like, that is just a really easy way to just not do anything and to say, oh, this is too hard, and just go back to traditional outbound methods and not actually think about why the flywheel works and respecting why it works and then saying, okay, what can I do to drive this general motion in my own way, with my own audience, with my knowledge? What, what knowledge gaps do I need to go, you know, fill in order to do something like this? Right. And as long as I can see the bigger picture. Because inbound is always about seeing the bigger picture versus like hyper focusing on a specific piece of it. And I think folks who are really able to take HubSpot and deploy inbound, have a healthy set, have a, and see success with it, have a healthy sense of what that big picture looks like. Because until you know what the big picture looks like, you can't really go in there and fill in the details. So I love talking about it because it unlocks a lot of stuff for people as it unlocked it for me. And when I started visualizing it this way, all of a sudden I became more confident in speaking about it.

Right?

And I was able to say, hey, if something's going wrong, here's probably why.

Right?

And, you know, you can follow things back, but I'll stop.

Yeah.

One of the things that I love and the reason I, I'm saying that I'm so excited about this is for, for me and I think for other HubSpot users, one of the best things you can do is you can realize for your brain you can insert like new modules, new books. And one of the most important things to understand about HubSpot and Inbound is the connective tissues, being able to connect the dots. And so understanding that I'm. I'm getting ready to plug in a module that I've never taught, never thought about, don't understand what has been in your brain that you've been formulating for years around this. I'm able to plug that module in that the listeners are able to plug that module in. And again, those, you know, those new wires are going to be connected. That new way of thinking. The maybe for some of you it might be like an aha moment. And I love, I love when we're working with clients and we can provide those aha moments. I love when we're on a podcast and I have those aha moments or we know that we have listeners that have those aha moments. So here, Max, let's start at the beginning, though. Like, fundamentally, you know, somebody could say, oh, HubSpot, they made up the inbound methodology. You know, it's just a thing. It's kind of this tactic, and, like, the. It's the religion to, like, then you got to the tool. I would say you're probably in the wrong room if you are saying those things, but. Yeah, but I really want to dive into. Why does it matter how we think about inbound? I mean, can we just read all the books, take all the HubSpot certs, be on our way, execute the inbound strategies to our heart's content, and, hey, let's call it a day? Why is it even important that we're talking about this idea of thinking about it differently?

Yeah, and I mean, like, I don't. It's. It's tough for, like. Sure. Like, HubSpot called it inbound and really took on the. The really kind of evangelized the idea of inbound. And, yeah, it has kind of turned into, like, this weird religion that we all follow, like, so, you know, in our professional lives. But, like, I. The. The thing that I. I don't necessarily think they invented anything here. I think what they did is they found a very cool, clear way to communicate the most basic building blocks of what you need to do in order to, like, grow a business. These. And this is why I call it, like, physics. This is always all.

All.

Since. Since any business has been created, this. These three things attract, engage, delight, have always, like, had to kind of happen in order for a business to succeed. And I think what they're doing when they show it as the flywheel is they're. They're just giving you an easy way to kind of interpret these, like, big three motions. So if I could, like, kind of go through them.

Right?

Yeah, and I'll share my screen here. Yeah, and I'll. I'll share here. Can I.

In other words, like, are you showing the three big sections, or are we done teasing and we're actually gonna, like, talk about what inbound physics is?

Let's get in there. Oh, there's this presentation button. I can just share my screen or my. I'm not going to upload a slide. I'll just do screen. All right, so for the folks watching at home, and by the way, if there's any reason that you should go on to Hub Heroes website to see the video episodes, this is the reason why. But for the folks that are listening Just go ahead and just google the flywheel and go take a look at it. But yeah, I mean if we were to take a peek at this, right. Attract engagement, delight. What is this like not like what is each one of these things fundamentally mean? Not the, not all the different micro tactics and all the other stuff you're doing to like do the stuff really well. But like what, what does it mean and what are the physics involved with it?

Right?

So attract. That quite literally means getting people just. I'm just saying, I'm not going to say aware, I'm not going to say trusting, I'm not going to say just getting people to become aware of the presence of your business in the first place. Finding you have to get them to you somehow. And you know, oftentimes you're doing this with some kind of content. But the fact of the matter is if they don't know that you exist, they can't engage with you. That's just a, that's just a fact of life. If they don't know you're there, they can engage with you. Never mind how they found you, nevermind how much they like you, never mind any of these other things. If they don't know you're there, they're never going to engage with you in the first place, right? When we think about engage, this is just sort of like how you interact with them when they finally find you. And usually it's because they're buying something from you or they're hopefully going to buy something for you, but they're aware of your presence and you're communicating and interacting with them somehow. This is a fundamental truth for how a business has to operate. Because if no one buys anything from you, it's kind of hard to be a business, right? Even if you're not a business, that's like a for profit business. Even if you're a nonprofit, maybe people are donating to you or donating their time. There's a process in which they interact with you to create whatever that sort of business or business like transaction is. And there's a way you interact with them. There is efficient ways, there's inefficient ways, but you have to engage with them somehow to have some kind of interaction with your organization.

Right?

And usually that's under the context of them buying something and then delight. This is, you know, the essence of saying like okay, they gave you money, did they get what they paid for? Did you provide good service to them? Did you not do them dirty enough where they went and told someone else about you and helped more people become attracted to you. So it's like a lot of people, like, look at this stuff, and then they immediately start thinking about, how do I use software to do all this? And it's like, no, no, no. You just need to realize. It's like, these are the three fundamental things that need to happen. You'll see. See other. You know, I've seen a lot of HubSpot partners do it. I've seen a lot of, like, you know, other. Other folks that talk about this stuff online kind of make their own versions of the flywheel, where they just take this and they add a bunch of phases to it and they go, this is the real flywheel. And then you look at all those different phases. You can go, that's actually part of a track that's also attracting, that's engaging, that's engaging, that's engaging. And that's like two different forms of delight. Like, it's all this. A lot of it's the same thing. So the reason I love the flywheel so much is that this is the most simplest form because if you remove any of these things, it becomes really difficult to grow. So, for example, if you remove the delight piece, which could mean your product is trash, so people don't like it. It could mean your customer service is terrible or it doesn't even exist, and no one gets help. All of a sudden, you don't have anybody else going out there and being advocates for you. So your ability to attract people becomes that much harder, that much more expensive, that much more difficult. Let's say you get rid of the attract phase. You're not doing anything to make people aware of your business. You're not doing anything to create content that people are actually searching for. And that's another big piece of it, right? You break that piece off and all you do is just like, have a salesperson ready to sell someone, to sell something to someone, but those people never come to them. Yeah, your business is fundamentally broken. Let's say you get rid of the engage piece. You just tell people that, oh, we have this great business and nothing's there.

Don't.

No one picks up the phone, no one responds to emails. No one has any way of communicating with people. No panic plan. Then it's like, okay, you get a fake business. So the reason I've always loved this is because, like, these are the fundamental building blocks. I like to think of this, and I was talking to Liz about this the other day. The inbound methodology is almost like the water Cycle. You have water on the ground, it evaporates up into the sky. It forms, I don't know, crystals or crystals or some. And it, like, it, it condenses or whatever. It falls, down it goes, the runoff goes back into the water and it does the same thing over and over again. You can, you can say, oh, there's all these different micro processes. And like, actually when the water rises and it gets into a cloud, it does this, I don't know, reverse osmosis. And then there's these three stages of the crystal forming. And then once it gets heavy enough, it falls and. And then when it hits the ground, it does a bunch of different filtration and like, do all this, this other stuff before it actually gets to the. You could make it more complicated. But those three big things are still the fundamental things are happening. You take away any of those one pieces, all of a sudden it doesn't work. And so I've used this, this inbound methodology kind of like in the same way. I don't know, George, if you have any thoughts. But that's kind of the basics of why I like to look at it this way. And then. Well, I'll show you the complicated version.

Yeah, well, we'll, we'll keep diving in here in a minute. But it's funny, Max, because I. When you're listen. When I'm listening to you, there's a couple things that have been going around in my brain. One, why is there a need to complicate it? There isn't. Simplifying the complex is always going to be a little bit easier road to travel down than something that you've just manufactured to be like a stopping block or hurdle or potholes or things like that. Now, here's also where I'll go is like, if you polled a thousand marketers and asked them, where does the flywheel start? I bet many of them would say, say, attract, because the old school methodology was like, attract, convert, close, delight there. Here's the thing about that rain cycle. Nobody knows really where it starts or ends that you were mentioning. And so when I think about attract, delight, engage, there is no starting or stopping point, right? It is literally like a wedding ring that you wear around your finger. There's no beginning or end, which is kind of the point because you could be, by the way, attracting new clients as you're delighting the ones that you already have. Like, this is where I think about things like referral programs. You can be attracting new people that you don't even know. Of course, this is like content marketing, inbound marketing, social media marketing, all of the marketings that we know that we have. But you can also be engaging those new people, engaging historical clients, and like, it's just this almost like life that I live that happens to be this circle of things that I can break down in my brain. Here's the one piece, though, I'm going to go nerdy for a second because when you're starting to talk about the attract, and I don't know why this is going on my brain, but I, I have always loved magnets. Like, I just love magnets and the idea of attract and the idea of magnets or having magnetism, it's. Magnets are producing a force. There's a force that your business needs. There's this, there's this motion. Magnets work on motion. Motion that needs to happen. And what's fun is the right parts of magnets attract each other. But if you've ever tried to put a magnet together the wrong way and it just, it forces itself away. And so this is where I go into. If we bring it back to business and we're thinking about attract and magnetism and force, the right fit clients like you mentioned, filtration system through the earth. The flywheel can be a filtration system for the types of people that you should be working with. All right, I'll let you dive back into kind of what you've now shown on the screen. By the way, if you're still listening to this and you haven't gone To Hub Heroes community.hub heroes.com, you're missing out. But, Max, go ahead and explain what we're, what we're looking at here.

And I'm so bummed because I, I, I don't know what happened to it, but I used to have a version of this that like, layers everything on piece by piece. So it's not like that difficult. But just to kind of like, talk to what you said is like, where does it begin? I think that's a really interesting question. I think when you see a lot of businesses or the way that I kind of have seen a lot of businesses when, when I was, you know, doing a lot of heavy HubSpot consulting, especially when we would talk about the strategy is like, they're generally decent at one part of this or maybe two parts of it, or maybe they're like, decent at all of them, but, like, it's not spinning fast enough.

Right.

But, like, let me tell you this, let me ask you this, George. When, when you were like, you know, onboarding people onto the marketing hub. And I'm sure you always asked businesses the question, like, how have you been getting business, like, up until. And what did you. What's the one where they all say.

Well, if we're talking about buying lists, that's probably the number one answer.

But.

But other than that.

Number two.

Yeah, number two, honestly, I got a lot of, like, it just seems to happen or they just show up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's because the number one answer I would always get is word of mouth.

Yeah, right.

Referrals.

Yeah, referrals. Word of mouth and referrals. Guess what? Can't physically happen unless you're doing some kind of delight. And a lot of these, like, businesses, they're good at knowing how to take care of people, but they're less skilled at the whole. Let's make. Let's do content marketing and, like, really focus on how we're attracting people. And. And, you know, let's. Let's build these sales funnels and process it. Like, they're not great at that, but they're good at, like, making sure their customers are taken care of or that they produce a really quality product. Building a really quality product is part of delight. People aren't happy with your product. They're not going to be delighted with it. You know, they're not going to say, hey, go buy this cool widget that, like, you know, if it's bad.

Right.

They're not going to recommend it to a friend. A lot of the times it's like people told me, oh, it's mostly just been word of mouth and referrals. It's like, all right, cool, where you're doing something. Something. Right. Because that wouldn't be happening. It couldn't happen if you guys weren't delighting people, if you were, you know, screwing them over, had a bad product, bad customer service, however you want to think about it. But you're going to say, yeah, well.

I want to dive into you because we're talking about delight. And I literally want to ask the question if you can delight too much. Because I had something happen recently. Max around referrals. Since you brought it up. I have a client who has sent me four referrals that have turned into clients. And every time, yeah, it's. I'm, by the way, listeners. This is not bragging, but every time I talked. Yeah, every time I talk to this human, this is what they say, oh, I could be doing more. I wish I would. I could send you more. And I'm like, am I delighting you to the point that you feel guilty? Like, I want us to like, maybe unpack this idea or maybe that's just a human element that we're bumping into. But like, the question truly is, when you think about the delight phase, when you think about doing it right, when you think about getting referrals, is there a too much of the apple pie and now you're sick or is it just. No, you should delay it as much as humanly possible.

Yeah, I mean, I think really depends because there's, there's every time you, Every time you hyper focus into like a specific part of the flywheel, what happens is you end up creating a. An imbalance and force. Yeah, the flywheel can still spin, but it can get wobbly. So like, for example, if you're engage phase isn't fortified and your attract phase has got some gas behind it, what would that translate to in the real world? Maybe you're running these like you, you. You pick up a killer marketer. They understand content, they really get the inbound thing in motion. They're doing some real crazy demand gen stuff. They're hyping up the product, they're building a community, they're getting people super stoked. And you know, maybe one day like you got a piece of content that hits, be it about your product, about, you know, some sort of goal or challenge that people have or, or whatever. And all of a sudden you create these like, you know, high intent leads, like a, a large amount of people that are just like really stoked to talk to sales. But you haven't set up a sales process to catch that ball going really fast, right? Yeah, yeah. The, the dams break and all of a sudden, you know, leads are falling through the cracks. Like people aren't getting called back. Your sales team is no infrastructure to handle it.

Right.

That flywheel is technically spinning.

Right.

Like you're attracting people like crazy. They're getting through engage as fast as they can.

Right.

But it's, it's wobbly, right, because like engage can't handle that like throughput. Now does that happen all the time? No. It can.

Right?

But just in the same way, you can build up this amazing sales process that's like super ready to take anything you throw at it and then you do nothing from the attract phase and it's like, cool. You got this wicked heavy end of the engage wheel.

All right?

And nothing spins because it's all out of whack and there's nothing supporting it. There's no balance around the other parts of the strategy.

I sure hope. I sure hope the listeners are hearing what I'm hearing. And that is you always have to be paying attention to what is your weakest link in. In these three main phases and the things you're doing in business. What is your weakest link? And it's funny, when you talk about wobbly max, I think about tires, and I was literally getting this visual of, like, you've got your whip ready, you've gone to, like, the racetrack. You get ready to punch the gas and give it a good old burnout, and then pop, your tire pops. You ain't going nowhere. You ain't in no race. Because your weakest link was what was supposed to be getting your car moving down the road. You spent so much time working on the engine content, by the way, that you weren't paying attention to the sales team and the sales enablement, by the way, that you needed, right? And they're just spitting out, they're closing everybody because everybody fits our product now. People aren't delighted, by the way. Yeah, you about to jack some junk up.

Yeah, yeah, don't jack your junk up.

Don't jack up.

See, the other thing, I. I made this graph, like, probably in some kind of, like, manic episode during the pandemic, I think when I was, like, super bored at home, and I was like, I wish I could take, like, what my brain sees when I look at the flywheel and, like, post it out there for everybody. So this was, like, a picture I post on LinkedIn, like, a long time ago. There's, like, other stuff here that I think, you know, you may see that I've, like, overlaid the original life cycle stages and the lifecycle stages that HubSpot kind of came with. Because I was using it as a way to kind of explain, like, how do you overlay all this stuff on top of each other? Like, you've even got the buyer's journey, like, right there in the middle. And maybe that's another episode, but, like, the back to the physics thing around the flywheel, right? The. When we start to kind of take this more sort of holistic look at, like, kind of the general motions that need to happen for, like, a business to kind of, like, grow in any sort of meaningful way, I start to kind of, like, you say, like, okay, if you're looking at this as, like, a marketing, sales and service sort of focused growth strategy, right. I like to kind of make it, like, easy and less amorphous, right? Because you look at this and Go. Okay, Max, you're telling me a track could mean sort of, like, anything to get people, like, awareness of my, like, they have to find me. I get it. But it's like, what? Like, could you give me, like, a little bit more of a specific. Of, like, what you mean in, like, a marketing, sales and service context, right? Yeah. So I. I've got you. You. If you're looking at it, you'll see that I have these, like, phase one and phase two of each part of these flywheels. Each part of the flywheel.

Right?

But you're meant to first look at that by looking at these, like, red dots. And. And for the people who are just listening, if you look at attract, engage and delight, you'll notice that there's these, like, chevrons where attract meets engage. Where engage meets delight. Yeah, chevron.

I love chevron.

Right.

Just look at where the stages kind of touch each other.

Right?

The. The. The first way to, like, really think about the physics of, like, when are you in one phase versus another? And like, here, let me also just say it's a spirit spectrum, right? Like there, you know, and some people depending on, like, the strategy that you go for, right? Like, if you're. There's plenty of room in this strategy for folks who don't like to gate any content, and there's plenty of room in the strategy for folks that do like to gate content. This is not a gate or not gate content thing. You need to remember, like, especially, there's a lot of people that go. Inbound is just about gating content and getting someone to download an ebook so you can get their email and give it to yourself. Sales team. No, no. That is doing inbound. Wrong, wrong. There are right ways to do that and wrong ways to do that.

Right?

You know, and then people go and call it something different. They go, oh, you should do demand generation, dude. You're still generating demand when you do inbound. Because all the demand generation you do is with content and community and people actually care about, right? You're doing the same physics, my guy. It's all the same, right? No matter how you want to kind of break it and switch it off into a new strategy. The basic physics are the same. And I'm not discounting it. What I'm saying is you have a really, really good way of doing parts of this.

Right?

And you should do that. You should usually lean on it, because people need frameworks for the more intricate parts of this general overall motion.

Right?

And you do what works for you.

Right?

Anyway, so the thing that I like to kind of get people in the mindset of when they're looking at this flywheel thing is like, look at where each one of the phases meet and what does that, like, generally mean, right? So like, if we're looking at in the more like traditional inbound sense, like back when we were talking about, like, hey, you know, you got to get people's information so you have a way to communicate with them, right? So, you know, whether this is, I'm putting every ebook behind a frigging pay behind a gated landing page, or I'm not talking to people until they like, request to speak to it, like, you know, request a demo, that really doesn't matter, right? But when you're thinking of the attract phase, right? Attract kind of goes into engage. When you've built enough trust with someone to actually convince them that, like, it's okay to give me some of your information so I can contact you in some kind of way. Again, whether it's early on in the, what do you want to call it, funnel or the buyer's journey, or it's like really late and they're already like a super high intent league because you did some dope, demand generation, whatever it is, right? At some point the physics there means I need to trust you enough because he either heard about you through somewhere else or, or some content you created is great. Or like, whatever it may be to actually trust you with my information, knowing that like, you're going to use it to reach out to me, right? And then engage, once you've actually like gotten that information from them, that's like everything you're doing to actually like use that information, not abuse it, right. Some people say lead nurturing inside of here. The sales process, I would say definitely firmly sits within engage. You can make arguments that it bleeds into delight, right? And there's also the fundamental truth that no matter if you're in marketing, sales or service, you should be thinking about ways that you as an individual, org a chunk of the business, a department or whatever you want to call yourself, right? You want to be thinking about how you're contributing to the ethos of attracting people, delighting them, engaging them. How do we engage people? How do we delight people?

Right?

You know, for example, like, you can think of your sales team. How do you create a delightful sales process? Right. You don't have to put that on the shoulders of your service equivalent, right? But anyway, at some point, like, generally that engage phase is going to kind of shift into delight or like the broader idea of delight, when someone becomes a customer, in most businesses, there is a point where someone exchanges money for whatever it is you got, right? Whether you're a for profit business and they're buying a service or a product from you, or maybe you're a nonprofit and they're giving you money and then you got to go out and do something with it that makes them feel delighted that you spent it again, whatever.

It may be, right?

There's a place where someone becomes a customer or an equivalent of a customer, right? That's like the kind of the, that's where you graduate from engaged to delight. It's more of a, in a lot of cases, it's more of a fade versus a jump cut, right? But it happens at some point. There's some point that it happens. And then when you're thinking about delight, that's everything you do to do right by that person, keep them happy, all that kind of stuff. And the reason delight kind of pushes into attract is because at that point they are going to sort of become a marketer for you in some capacity, right? They're going to go tell a friend about you, tell a colleague about you, write a positive review. They're going to do something to say, I trust these folks enough and they've delighted me to the point that I'm willing to put my reputation on the line, be it in a very minor way or a very major way to go advocate to them to somebody else besides myself, right? Whether that's saying like, hey, I moved to a new job and like, I want to, I want to, I want to buy you guys again, right? Or I'm advocating, advocating for your solution to my boss. Or I wrote a, you know, awesome Facebook post about the great customer service that I got. Whatever, right? But that generally doesn't happen until you've done something to delight them. Whether that's just having a great product that you didn't oversell or, or false advertise, right? And just having like a great product or you took care of them, you provided great customer service, you created a great experience for them, right? Or something went wrong and you helped them, right? It could look a million different ways, right? But until something like that happens, they don't really have a reason to go like, tell someone else, hey, this thing is cool, you should buy stuff from these people, right? And then so that's like sort of the, the overall physics and kind of how these phases sort of like either, you know, jump cut or kind of blend into each other, depending on what Your thing looks like. And the other thing I want you to kind of visualize in your head, right. When you see the flywheel, you see three, even sort of like circularly linear. Maybe you're, you're, you're, you're. You're looking at it almost as like a passage of time where you're doing these phases.

Right.

If that helps you. Great. The other thing I want you to think about is, like, your business is probably not going to spend even amounts of time in each one of these phases with something.

Yes. Right.

It's totally okay to think like, oh, we've got a really long sales cycle, and it takes a lot of content and a lot of community stuff to really get people on board. So maybe my attract phase is, like, much bigger. My sales process might be pretty quick, so maybe my engage is a little tighter, and then we do a lot of leg work to really help it. So maybe like, you, you know, it's okay that, like, if you kind of visualize these phases as being like, longer or shorter, I guess, if you will.

Yeah, I love that.

Either way, they're all there in some capacity. They have to be there, or else it's. It. It doesn't really work. Something's fundamentally broken. Again, like we were saying earlier. But, Georgia, talk before I talk about the phases.

Yeah, yeah. No, and so here's the thing. I love that you mentioned a fade versus a jump cut. Because when I look at this and I see the red exclamation marks again, because I can see the screen as we're doing this, I see the red exclamation marks, and I have to go into the mindset of a relay race. And a relay race with the baton is one on the handoff.

Right.

It's the fade. The. The five, the seven, the ten steps from one runner to the other, the baton being tossed off. And so it's funny that you use large circular red and white exclamation marks in these areas, because I feel like those are somewhat of the most important areas that you need to pay attention to in your business. The, you know, marketing to sales handoff, the sales to service handoff, the service to win backs, cross sales, like that type of.

Right.

Yeah.

Like, there's just so many ways that this is a very. Three very poignant places that you need to pay attention to.

And this is also. Oh, sorry.

So then the other thing that's going through my mind, and I can't wait till you get to the phases. And I can't wait till you get to like the phases and also life cycle stages. Because we did have somebody who's watching live, by the way. Yes. If you're listening to this on the podcast app of your choice, you could be tuning in live and actually asking us questions along the way. So at some point, Max, make sure we tie back into the stages and the life cycle stages of. So the stage of the flywheel and life cycle stages in here. But something that's going around in my mind as I'm looking at this, this beautiful graphic and listening to the song that you're singing around inbound physics is for some reason around this entire circle, my brain jumps to story brand. And every department needs to be able to tell a great story. Every department needs to have story as the foundation of the communication that they're having. Then I don't care what you pick, but I'm going to use three examples here. There's probably a framework or a belief in each one of these phases. So for instance, I think about attract and I think about Marcus Sheridan and they ask you answer and the ability to use they ask you answer to create content that is middle to bottom of the funnel that people are searching for before they're actually going to engage with your sales team. I look at this engage and I think of Ian Altman and same side selling, where it's actually you're partnering with the person who is trying to actually achieve the goal that they're trying to instead of like closing them or smashing our funnel or. Right, same side selling. And here's how we're going to be a great organization. And then when we think about delight, I go back to John Jantz, right. And something like the referral engine. And you're literally building the delight phase into this engine that gets you referrals. So think about this full circle story brand. You know, they ask, you answer same side selling referral engine pieces that you could put around your business that is now all being run by HubSpot and going through these attract, engage, delight phases that Max is talking about for this inbound physics.

Yeah, I think it's also really important for like rev ops or whatever. I don't want to get into a what is rev ops debate. Whoever Max, what is revo, whoever, whoever the in charge of all this stuff because every business is different and we can all call each other whatever the hell we want and that doesn't matter.

Right.

But you know, for the folks who are in charge of like looking at the bigger picture and making all this shit is functioning correctly, these red dots I think are places to really look at because this is where a lot of stuff can get screwed up, right? Like when you think about this, like first one between attract and engage, right? What does that like look like from like a technology and experience standpoint? Well, a lot of the times people are giving you their information, there's a lot of things that can go wrong there, right? It can get to a salesperson too quickly and that salesperson can jump down their throat and create a bad experience, right? It could, you know, get to a place where like high intent leads are wanting to get in touch with salespeople. And it's not quite getting there because you don't have like a good lead routing process or like you're, you're, you know, however you're like assigning folks to, you know, go work with these, these potential customers, like isn't functioning properly, right? Like a lot of problems can happen there because they get super stoked because they built all this trust and you, you did the right thing, whether it was through community or content or demand generation or like whatever, right? To the point where they're like, yeah, I'm super pumped, I want to talk to someone. And then sales drops the ball or marketing just spams the living shit out of with too much content, right? So a lot can happen that can go wrong there, right? You look at the, the, the passage between engage and delight, right? What happens when you fumble the handoff to customer service, right? What happens when someone buys and they all of a sudden don't know how to get started? They don't know what resources are available to them. They don't know how to get in touch with something when something goes wrong, right. They get confused of who they should be talking to or your product sucks.

Sucks, right?

Things can go wrong there, right? On top of that, like if you fumble the delight process, guess what? Instead of people leaving that positive review and helping with your attract phase, those people are going and flaring you on review sites and speaking ill of your name to everybody that they know. Because when people have bad experiences and you're really screwed to light up, those people are, I don't know what the. I, I don't know what the actual number is, but way more likely to go share a bad experience that they had rather than a good one, right? Because they expect a good experience, right? Or maybe they do, maybe. But again, you're more likely to go tell someone about a shit experience you had, right? So again, thinking of like these inflection points or these, these transfer points between the different stages here of the inbound methodology can really help you think, like, okay, are we doing everything we can to kind of mitigate problems at each one of these stages? Don't be wrong. There's plenty of stuff that can go wrong, you know, away from the margins, like inside of each one of these stages.

Right.

But again, like, typically what's happening here is you're transferring the responsibility, the majority of the responsibility of folks between different departments, right? They're out of the beautiful story that marketing is creating to them. And now they're going through a new experience with sales, right? And then once sales is done with them, they're going through a new experience with, with support. And if those teams are all siloed and not working together, right. And it's one experience here and a bad experience there, that's not fun for everybody. And you're going to create, you know, a lot of friction, right? So that's the other kind of thing. But to get on to like the phase stuff, right? I know, I like talk. I think it's important to understand sort of the bigger picture of each one of those stages first, but then like to help yourself go, okay, I get the bigger picture. But like within each one of these phases, like what's actually happening for. For it to happen. And I think you can, you can break each one of these bigger attract engagement light stages into two phases each, right? So when we think about something like attract, the physics behind that generally is someone has to like, find your content, find your community, be looking for your stuff.

Yes, right.

To, to find it in the first place. Because if they don't find it, they can't consume it, right? Like if they don't find your content, they don't find your community, they don't find the stuff you're using to generate them and what. They can't consume it, right? So a lot of this comes down to like, are you creating what people are actually looking for?

Right?

We go on the Internet to find things that we don't have right in front of us, Whether it's knowledge or an experience, a goal that we have or that we're trying to achieve, a challenge that's getting in the way. Whatever is, we go on the Internet to go find, find that stuff, right? Or we express that to other people and other people tell us, hey, have you heard about X, Y, Z, right? Be the piece of content, be the company that sells a product to fix that issue, like whatever, right? We have to find it somehow, right? So make your stuff easy. For people to find. And that's not. Get super technical about SEO. That's not what that is. That's create what people are looking for in the first place. Because if people aren't looking for it, you can polish that SEO turd as much as you want. It's still a turd. And when people find it, if they don't consume that content and it doesn't get them closer to, like, learning something that's actually valuable to them, overcoming a certain challenge, achieving a certain goal or whatever, if it doesn't move them in that direction, you're wasting their time, you're breaking their trust, and you're not building any trust.

Right.

So that second phase is like, once people have found the content, the community though, whatever it is, right, as they consume it, it begins to kind of build trust. And people don't buy from people they like, they buy from people they trust. That's like a, a real weird, like, misnomer. If I don't trust you, I'm less likely to buy from you.

Right?

Yeah, I could really like a salesperson if I think. And I'm probably not going to like them if I don't trust them. Right? Because I think they're doing something sketchy.

Right.

But again, I think building trust is like a huge important part of this. I think you could, you could, you could probably redefine trust in a bunch of different ways. But the whole idea is your content is having, or your community is having some kind of effect on these people enough to the point where you're kind of helping them figure out what their problem is, figuring out what they need, figuring out different ways to solve that problem.

Right.

And eventually you kind of get to some sort of place where I want to engage with you further.

Right.

Like, I think you've helped me figure, like. And again, we're not talking about the buyer's journey here, even though it's on this. Right? Like, yeah, that's a whole different episode.

Right.

But eventually it gets to a point where it's like, okay, here's my info. Whether that's for a piece of content at the top of the funnel, or I want to talk to a salesperson, whatever it may be. You go into that engage phase.

Okay, yeah, don't go in the engage phase yet. Don't go in there yet. Because I literally can feel my inner Devon coming out. Because I have to say, attract phase one and attract phase two. If Devin was here, he'd be like, listen, and spamming me in my LinkedIn DMs. And stop doing every single day.

Right. Yeah.

Because here's the thing. The opposite of trust is the erosion of that. And there is, if we're talking about inbound physics, let's just talk about life principles.

Yep.

It is way easier to lose my trust than to gain my trust. And so if you start to do any of these radical, fanatical, add whatever words you want in their tactics that start to erode trust, guess what happens? We got a wobbly tire here. So, like what I'm saying, it's very important in this attract phase to be very happy, helpful, humble, humanish.

Yep.

And, and really the focus beyond how can we show up and do the best we can do. Okay, now we can go into engage. I had to get my inner Devin and slightly George out there to, to that phase.

Yeah.

So, so when we think about engage here, right back when I made this, I would kind of call the first half of this is what people would commonly consider lead nurturing.

Right.

They've given you their info and then what are you doing? You're, you're, you're, you're engaging with them on social media, you're sending them some kind of newsletter, you're emailing them content, you're getting them to watch your YouTube videos. You know, you have their information, right. And you're communicating with somebody. Now for those of you that are in the camp of gate, nothing, all the contents free, you're still doing this, right? Like, it's just you've passed into this phase without collecting someone's information. But at some point you're going to have to get some information from them. That's generally, that might be happening in phase two for you.

Right.

But like, for those of you that are engaging in lead nurturing here, let's say someone does give you their information a little earlier on. Not ready to talk to sales yet, but maybe they want to get a piece of content you have and you're kind of following that more traditional, you know, create content gated behind a landing page type thing, which I still think there's room for.

Right.

The thing that you're, you got to think about with lead nurturing is like, this is also a time where you should be thinking about how do I continue to build trust.

Right.

And that's by, you know, saying, if you're going to put content in front of them, make sure it's relevant, make sure it's not interrupting them, make sure it's not just noisy bullshit that doesn't matter to them.

Right.

Because at that Point, what you're doing is you're not using their information, you're abusing their information.

Right.

No spam.

Right.

This is this. A lot of this would be don't stick your sales reps on them too early.

Right.

This would also be, don't, don't send them stuff that's not relevant to them.

Right.

You know, which again, you can, you can kind of categorize all that kind of stuff. It's spam. But you know, make sure you're providing relative information for these folks. And when it makes sense for them to talk to sales, you can kind of move into phase two of engage, which I think the sales process kind of sits firmly in. Right. And at least a general sense, again, this blends into delight a little bit, you know, because you want to have a delightful sales process. Sure.

Right.

And again, this is a general framework. This is a general set of physics. This is not, you know, it has to be this way.

Right.

Yeah, but this is kind of like, I think the way you should think about Engage.

Right.

Is your sales process sits in here.

Right.

Because it's what happens generally before someone becomes a customer.

Yes.

Or the equivalent of. So, you know, think about it. Lead nurturing. First, continue to build trust. Don't abuse their information. Nurture that trust.

Right.

Get them what they need, educate them, and then you can kind of move them onto the sales process when it makes sense.

Right.

And the reason you want to do that too fast is because you get them to sales too quickly, you're breaking that trust. You get them to sales too quickly, you're wasting your sales reps time on people that don't need to be talking to them.

Right.

So part of this is like thinking thoughtfully about how you're using your resources in sales.

Right.

And then we can kind of move on from there.

Yeah.

You have a hard. Do you have a heart out?

I don't. I don't have a heart. Stop. We're gonna keep going. Noah's gonna hate status because it means more editing, but hey, suck it up, buttercup. So here, here's the deal. I'm gonna go real quick though on this because I just want people to realize. Engage. Phase one, lead nurturing. It's a very valuable piece of information in those two words. Lead nurturing. First of all, leads are humans. They are. They are humans.

Oh, there it is.

So here's the deal. Nurture, care for and encourage the growth or development of an example. Jarrett was nurtured by his parents in a close knit family. Similar words would Be, cherish, a hope, belief, ambition, lead nurturing. The nurturing part of this is not force feeding. The definition of force feeding is to force a person or animal to eat. You should not be forcing a human to eat your content. You should be using your content to nurture, to cherish, to give them hope, to educate, direct them to their ambition through education.

It's, it's lead nurturing, it's not lead dominating, it's not lead spamming, it's not lead abusing, it's nurturing.

Sure, right, like, because that like, fundamentally, again, I know I mentioned the humanness in attract, right? But fundamentally, if you are a cyborg sales rep that is all about the process. The process, the process. And if you're a marketing team that is getting pounded to like publish, publish, publish, publish, email, email, email, email. Oh, like we, yeah, I'll, I'll do a dance with some you. But it's no, it's, it's wrong. Like I really need you in this part to get into that nourish brain empathy, brain loving brain in this part of, of the stage. Okay, let's move on.

Cool. All right, so you've got the end of the engage phase there. We kind of move on to delight. I kind of think of delight in, in two different sort of sections. The first phase is combating buyer's remorse. Every, every time you buy something, you almost immediately have buyer's remorse. You're like, oh shit, why I spend money on that, right? Like, is that too the right thing? And you immediately regret your decision. Combating buyer's remorse is, is, is really important. And like that could be just something as simple as, again, having a good product. It could be making sure you're, you're putting the resources and the avenues of help in front of someone immediately without them asking for it. So they go, oh, okay, good, I've got a good product. Okay, the product is good, great. I'm having a good first experience with it, right? Like, I don't regret this. This was a good choice, right? I got what I was. I wasn't sold, sold a bill of goods. I was sold what I got. And what I got is what I was promised, right? Like that's table stakes for combating, you know, buyer's remorse. If you buy something and it's immediately trash, garbage. It's not what they said it was. They sold you on the dream. You're, you're in, you're in piss land, right? So think about combating buyers. What's the simple stuff you can do that what's the blanket of love? You can ensure that they are surrounded in if something goes wrong. Something doesn't necessarily, necessarily have to go wrong here. You just need to be able to like say, hey, here's our number for our support team, Here's a number for customer service. Maybe give them a call and follow up and see how things are going, making sure that they feel good with what they just bought. The second piece fast. That, that, that phase two is that customer needs to be. A lot of times people say, oh, make them happy. Happy customers.

Right.

I think happy is, should be a byproduct of a successful customer, you know, and they're successful because, hey, it did what you wanted to do. They were able to achieve their goal or overcome their challenge by buying that thing. Maybe something went wrong and you were able to intervene and help fix the problem. So they continued on to be successful with it, whether it's buying a pair of pants and I was able to successfully go to work in my pants and people liked my pants all the way to like a complex enterprise like, you know, software solution.

Right.

When things went wrong, you were there to ensure their trajectory to success continued. If you don't do these two things, you can't expect any of this stuff in the delight phase to have any sort of positive impact on the attract phase. Because if you, if you, you, you, you know, you, you blow that first phase and someone buys something that's not what they expected, they're not going to tell someone, yeah, go get it. It's great. If you, you know, don't help them when something goes wrong and you're not there for them when they need you the most.

Right.

They're not going to go tell people how great you are. So again, you can think of delight as kind of the first things. What are you doing to immediately ensure you're combating that buyer's remorse? And then what are you doing to ensure that that customer is long term successful? I say long term in quotations because again, these parts of the flywheel might be really short or really long if you're a lemonade stand. Maybe your delight phase.

First sip, baby.

Yeah, it's that first sip and it's handing them a napkin when they didn't ask for it.

Right?

Yes. Knowing what they needed with before they knew they needed it.

Exactly right. You know, it could be something as simple as that or it could be something as complex as a, you know, a long, complex implementation plan, whatever it may be.

Right.

Again, the basic physics are always there.

Right.

If Your lemonade tastes like shit. That person walking down the street is not going to talk to the person that's passing by and say, oh, it's lemonade. Don't go get that lemonade. It tastes terrible. They're going to say, avoid that, kids. Lemonade. It tastes like gasoline.

Right.

Like, you know, so again, it's all just like, it's all physics. It's all physics. It's all just like the basic things that are happening. Right. So hopefully, like this kind of helps, like when you, when you look at this stuff, George, maybe we can have another conversation around, like where the, the, the. What is it called? The life cycle stage stuff is like a bit more amorphous now because when I originally made this, HubSpot had its eight life cycle stages in the CRM and they were locked in there.

Yeah.

And so I had a healthy understanding.

Of like, many people still use those and some people have customized it. So.

Yeah.

What does that mean?

You can customize it now? I think there is an ideal way to use them.

Right.

That can apply to most ish situations. Right. If you're following this inbound methodology.

Right.

Yeah.

And you're doing the whole content creation thing. But again, that, this, that, that's all up for debate now. I think too.

I think a future conversation on the flywheel, the life cycle stages in the buyer's journey could be a complete episode in itself. How those kind of interact with each other. Here's what I want to kind of say real quick, and then we'll end this bad boy. I'm really interested in how my brain has started to work during this episode. Because before when I mentioned delight, I mentioned John Jantz and the referral engine.

Right.

But then, Max, you even said earlier the onboarding process and customer delight and combating buyers remorse, and my brain immediately flew to Joey Coleman and never lose a customer again. And actually, like, there's a eight phase. I think they all start with a process that maybe you can put on for the onboarding portion of when they go from customer, you know, or SQL or opportunity to customer and go into that delight phase. So again, maybe it's like you start to pair a couple methodologies in these. So delight would literally be never lose a customer again and referral engine. And so then also my brain, I mentioned Ian Altman and same side selling in engaged. But then I was reminded of the Challenger sale. And so maybe like, there's two things. Or to sell as human. Right. By Simon Sinek. Shoot. Or is that Daniel Pink crap? Anyway, doesn't matter, you guys know what I mean? But the idea is, are there two or three mini books that create your business bible around this whole thing? That is inbound physics that Max has been talking about today. Max, here's the thing. I'm going to keep it simple as far as closing this bad boy up. I'm curious for you. What do you wish for the people who have just watched or listened to this, and what do you hope they take action on? So what do you wish for them and what do you hope they take action on?

Well, I mean, first of all, I. I wish you the best, obviously. I think if, if there's anything I want you to take action on is I want you to, like, look at this. And maybe, you know what? I'll do it. I'll do a simpler, simplified versions we can post with the show notes.

Right.

So you can go grab it in a much less crazy overlay than this.

Right.

I want you to, like, look at, like these different phases and the, in the overall three phases as well as, like, where we see those, those exclamation points. And I want you to kind of just think about your business and go, how are we doing all these things? And are there certain problems that we've observed or symptoms of problems that we've observed that might be because there are fail points or cracks in the way we try to accomplish this? And what I think this does, I actually did this with someone a while ago who was like, just starting a rev ops role where they were kind of overseeing like all of the marketing, sales and service stuff and just trying to break the silos and get it all to work together better. And I gave them this framework and they're like, this is literally my checklist. All the places I should go check, right? And see and uncover problems that maybe I don't know about yet. So just take this, overlay this over to the understanding of your business. Make it your own also get your own. But, you know, try to, try to use this as a way to gut check yourself in terms of like, how are things operating? Could we improve stuff anywhere? Are there any things that could be causing our flywheel to wobble?

Right.

And use this as a, as sort of a North Star to try to find those fault points.

Right?

Yeah, Just look at it and use it. That's what I would say.

I love it.

Please do it.

I love it. Well, ladies and gentlemen, no poems, no limericks, no extra shenanigans. Just literally head over to the show notes and check out the graphic. Check out the links to the resources that we'll have over there. If listening is good enough, then we bid you a fair day. But if you do want to watch this again, remember to head over to community hubheroes.com and of course, Max, the rest of us will be in there waiting for you to help you if you have any questions inside of the Community. Max, I am so glad we had this episode.

I love you, too.