What Is The HubSpot Flywheel? Is The Funnel Dead?

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? 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 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, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

Welcome back to the Hub Heroes Podcast. As always, I am Liz Murphy, official Hub Heroes nerd wrangler and the content strategist of this motley crew. And finally, we're not alone. George, Max, and Max and Devin are back.

We're back.

You guys are by yourself for what, one episode?

Come on.

Three.

You did three while we were gone?

Three.

You know what I love hearing, George? How much our fellow Hub heroes pay attention. Attention to all of the knowledge bombs we're dropping daily and nightly. And ever so rightly. Come on, guys.

Yeah, I guess they were really on vacation.

Like, really, really.

True story. I was completely logged out of everything that wasn't Netflix.

Yeah, Yeah. I was on vacation in a hotel with COVID It was literally and figuratively the best.

The best.

You were just too much of a goat man.

I know.

Meanwhile, George and I were like, everybody's gone. What do you want to do? Let's work.

Let's do it.

Yeah, it was super fun. Speaking of work. Kidding. That's a terrible segue, but I really want to get right into what we're talking about today. Guys, I'm going to be honest. I am bringing this topic up for me. I'd like to think that there are other people out there listening to this who may care about this topic, but I want to talk about the flywheel. Now. We've mentioned it on this podcast before. We'll say things like, oh, yeah, it's the attract phase or the engage phase or the delight phase. And I'm sitting here going, and, guys, I remember being in the audience in 2018 at Inbound when Brian Halligan stood up with that beautiful flywheel and went, look at it. The funnel is dead. Long live the flywheel. And I'm like, that's great. What is this? Yeah, what? I'm sorry, what? This seems like a great way to rethink what I'm already doing. But am I supposed to be changing what I'm doing? Am I supposed to be doing something wildly different here? And here's the thing. I know I'm not alone in thinking that. I have talked to so many people where it's like, flywheel, funnel, it's all basically the same thing. Or I don't know, the flywheel is just a new way to say the thing we've always done. Or I'll even hear people who are flywheel evangelists, and that includes you, George will say, we gotta do something more closer to the bottom of the funnel.

Yes.

And then there are people. Wait, I want to give you one more thing. One more thing. And then there are the people who are like, we gotta go all flywheel, funnel's dead. And then there are some people who say, flywheel isn't for everybody. So that's what I want to talk about today. I want us to have a focused discussion on WTF as the flywheel. George, do you have something to share with the class?

Yeah, like I. I'm super excited to have this conversation. I can't wait to see where it goes. And because the thing that I want everybody to also put into context. And again, we're going back to 2018. We're going back to Brian Halligan on stage. We're going back to that. They pull out a big flywheel onto the stage. But before they did that, Brian used a guy named Jeff Bezos as an example. Now I want everybody to think of the irony to that, because in 2018, HubSpot had not swam upstream and started to be for enterprise companies yet. It was a bunch of small to medium sized companies sitting in a large room looking at an example of a multi billion dollar company that now they're going to actually model their process around these five steps that were huge on a screen. With that, let's go and start the conversation.

Yes. And I'm just gonna put out a fair warning. Warning, warning. Max, can you hit me up with a warning reverb please?

Warning, warning, warning.

Fantastic. So I'm a cheater pumpkin eater and I already know that you ding dongs don't all agree with each other about everything about this topic. So if we're a little too chummy for too long. If everybody's like, oh, my God, you're so smart and so right, and it takes too long for you all to start disagreeing, I am going to start poking bears intentionally. The things like, George, I know you hate what he just said. Tell me about it. I want discourse. I want a real and meaningful conversation about this, because I think it's a great theoretical thing that people look at, and then they'll turn their backs and go, but the funnel.

We're all going to need therapy. We're all going to need therapy after this episode.

Yeah, I'll get it started. So, Liz, here's why you're wrong.

Okay.

Fantastic. Is it my beauty? Is it overwhelming the entire energy of the podcast? I knew it. All right, how about this? Max, take away from my beauty for a moment and tell me what the flywheel is. Without using buzzwords.

I always thought of it as the. It is the evolution, if you will, of the original inbound methodology. And I think as HubSpot, the product started to evolve out of being, like, just a marketing tool and really morphed into being, like, a CRM front and center, and then added in things like the service hub and that whole bit. I still think that the ultimate sort of, like, vision was to ensure that the strategy that we're building the product for, right, like, lines up with what the product actually is. And I think the original inbound methodology, it was the inbound marketing methodology, right? And it was very heavily focused as this, like, way of marketing, when in reality, it was a way of really running the entire business, because that little bit delight was always part of it. I know we talked about this a little bit before in past episodes, so I see it as, like, a simplified natural progression of what the inbound marketing methodology was. But it puts an even amount of emphasis across all the different areas of your business and gives them, like, a pretty simplified framework of how to actually drive the overall strategy. And it's officially realizing that this is not just a marketing thing anymore. And I think that's very important in the lens of, again, the HubSpot product, because, again, we're building a product that is meant to support a strategy. And so it's just good to see those things aligned and that we've come to that realization that it's more than just marketing.

That's so funny. And I'm going to get into this later. I don't want to be too fussy too right off the bat. I've already done that enough so far in this episode, but the idea that anybody ever looked at the original funnel and only saw marketing is a very big concern for me because that should have never been the case. I at least have never looked at it that way. But Devin, I saw you doing a lot of head nods. What do you got for me? What's your answer to what the flywheel is from your perspective?

I think Max hit it right on the head with the evolution statement. Like the thing is, you look at HubSpot is for solving for disparate systems. The flywheel is about solving for disparate teams and bringing everybody into the same revenue operations goals by focusing on the customer from presale to sale and beyond and just putting the entire org into a very clean ideology where the reason why people would think of the funnel as an only marketing thing is because marketers would think about the marketer as the funnel about as an only marketing thing because once you reach the bottom of the funnel, you are no longer my respons with salespeople. You have your sales funnels in HubSpot, we'll call them the pipeline. But it's still the same ideology that once you're giving to me and I perform my duty, you are no longer my problem. And the same can be said of service where the ticket comes in. I solve your problem, you are no longer my problem. With the flywheel, you have an understanding that this person doesn't cease to exist once you no longer interact with them. And then once you realize that it allows you to think about your role more holistically. That's when you start thinking about marketing and post sales action. That's when you think about selling to existing customers. That's when service is focused on creating advocates where you can go and have your community be on fire and be evangelists. They're paying you to be evangelists for you, that is. For me, the magic of the flywheel does Is the funnel going to work? Sure, it's a great analogy. Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. But the problem is that the funnel approach is very siloed as where the flywheel is about revenue operations in the organization, but most of all, the customer's journey as a whole.

George, I've been watching you pace around like a heavyweight ready to get in the ring. So I'm just gonna take a step.

Back in the red corner.

Yep.

Weighing in at an undisclosed weight. Anyway, so here's the thing, Devin. I love to kill silos. I love it like, let's eradicate them, let's break them. Down. By the way, when I heard you say multiple times, and Liz, I love watching your face. I'm probably gonna have to pull a clip of this out. When Devin kept saying, no longer my problem. You're no longer my problem. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have humans working at your organization with that, maybe you should have an inbound hiring methodology, because that is not a platform funnel, flywheel issue. That is a humans issue. It everybody is always your problem. You should have always been paying attention to the buyer's journey, the sales funnel, and the customer journey afterwards. By the way, in a little bit, I'll talk about how your business model should probably be more like Chutes and Ladders than anything that we're going to talk about today. But here's the thing. The inbound methodology, by the way, when it was launched, let's just talk about what it was. It was an educational tool to teach people a strategy. And it was positioned as an educational tool to teach people a strategy, a new way to do business. It was never positioned as a business model. When the flywheel came out, it was positioned as a new business model, a way that you should run your sales, marketing and service. It was not positioned as we've got a new way that we're going to teach your people how to use HubSpot. It literally went in and said, the funnel has some cracks. And by the way, let me just pause and just tell everybody how much I love Brian Halligan. Brian Halligan is a boss player. But the funnel isn't broken. And the funnel isn't for every business. The flywheel isn't for every business. There's a happy mix that we're going to talk about during this episode. But the big problem that I have here, inbound methodology tool to teach. Flywheel tool to teach the fact that we got off kilter somehow and said that it's a business model. Yeah. For Amazon, who's focused on sellers for more selections. Selections for better customer experience. Customer experience drives more traffic, which drives more sellers. Yeah, but if I clean apartments, huh? I just need people to buy my cleaning services.

So I'm so glad you said this because that the reason why I was making so many faces is that if you have people in your organization who are hands off, not my problem. There is no funnel, flywheel, wedge of cheese, octagon. It doesn't matter what you get a sphere. It doesn't matter what you do there. That is a people problem that you're trying to solve. And I am in 100% agreement with you. There I am watching Max and Devin. Did you notice, George, that they were like vigorously head nodding at each other? The hubspotters? Like, yes, my orange sprocket friends, yes. And they're looking at us like, oh, you children, you have no idea what I like that. No one can say that.

I'm not disagreeing with anything yet.

Stirring the pot.

I mean, I disagree with some a little bit with some things.

Well, I don't know if George, at the end you were trying to allude that the window washer or the whoever it was couldn't use the flywheel because 100% they do.

100%.

100%.

Hold on.

Here's the thing. There's a difference, Max, between using something and replacing something. We had been asked to place something that was broken, not add into addition some other things to help rev up the engine to get them to the place where they needed to go down the funnel or away an engine to pick them up from the bottom and like conveyor their ass back up to the top, I think.

But also too, there's like a lot of people that never quite understood what the funnel actually meant. Like what a funnel actually was. So if you think of the window washer, at the end of the day, the window washer needs to somehow make people aware that he has a window washing business. And then he somehow has to sell to them the window washing services, and then he has to deliver good service and hope that they tell other people about it. Even though that's a hyper simplified version. That's basically the flywheel. So when I think of the flywheel, it's more so like an overarching general, like, framework of simple physics that any sort of organization can follow. And some people will get a lot more specific in certain sections of it. Some people will spend more time or less time, but in order to really function, you have to do all three, even if it's in slightly different ways. And I think that's fine because what was that, Joe Dirt? They had that saying, homer, while you make it. Right, Flywheel while you make it. But as long as you're doing those three general things in some way, shape or form, you have to do that in order to grow or maintain a business, an organization or whatever. I'm going to but one more second here. I want to say, like, even a nonprofit, you have to get people aware of your nonprofit. You got to get people to build trust in your nonprofit and you have to engage with them in ways that makes them want to donate money to you. And then you have to go and actually do stuff with that money that's been donated to you and drive an impact and get people super stoked and excited about the work that you're doing. So they go out and tell other people so that other people can find you and eventually build trust with you and give you money. Almost any organization, whether it's school, a traditional business or whatever, can apply this framework. But again, you start at the very sort of general physics of what's happening and then you kind of hone in on which parts of it you pay more specific attention to or tackle in your own way. I'll shut up.

Yeah, I want to jump in on that really quick. The important thing that you have to understand with the Flywheel or any framework or business model is that you can't lose the forest for the trees. If you get bogged down in the minutia of all the different things that can happen within each of those individual sections, it's going to be nonsensical exercise for if you're a one person shop. But if you're just thinking of attracting Cage Delight and focusing on like for me, good example, I own a marketing company. My marketing company isn't even on LinkedIn. Nobody knows about my agency through advertising. You Google it, I doubt you'll find it. But I make money with it. And the reason why I'm making money is because I'm very hyper focused on the flywheel within my own organization where my business comes almost primarily word of mouth. But the thing is, all word of mouth is going to do is get them to the door. I still have to talk through them with solving the problems and then I have to help them solve their problems and delight them in such a way that I become a part of their social, social circles and I'm meeting other people who have similar problems. And so I, I am constantly applying force, using delight as well as just being awesome at what I do and getting people to engage and spend money with me using attract, engage, delight, repeat just that. That's the difference. So we can talk about how there's one person on the Revops team whose only job is to look at analytics. In an enterprise organization, you can't expect to have that level of minutiae and job distinction, responsibility, distinction on one person, you're going to lose your mind. But the thing about the both what HubSpot has and the Flywheel has, it's a foundation for scalability. And once you start generating revenue and you can start saying, okay, I'm going to spend money Here to reduce friction. I'm going to spend a little money here to apply force in this area of the flywheel and go from there. When Brian Halligan did his talk, one of the things he did is he start talking about flywheels within flywheels. And it got like really deep, especially for the audience. Like George said, SMBs, they, most of them aren't ready for that. But the things that foundation will help you scale up to being able to do that.

I wanted to throw, I wanted to throw one thing in before just to make sure I don't forget that Devin said word of mouth when I was onboarding people before they ever started using marketing technology, and I asked them, how have you been getting back then we were really into lead generation, right? So when I say, how are you getting leads so far? And they would always say, oh, it's just been word of mouth. Guess what, dude, You've been doing a flywheel this whole time then. Because in order for that word of mouth business to have been generated, right? Oh, yeah, here we go, George. Here we go. Get ready for it. Right? In order for that to have been generated. Hold a chill out. Right? In order for that to have been generated, that means that you sold to someone at one point, you did a good enough job taking care of them to the point that they told someone else to go to you. But before, that person had to find you somehow. So even if you were doing a crappy job about it, there was a flywheel happening there. Doesn't mean it was spitting fast, doesn't mean it wasn't wobbling all over the place when it was spitting like a wheel that's about to fall off a car. But it had to have been happening. The physics had to have taken place for them to find you in the first place. You sold to them, you did a good enough job, and then they told someone else about it. And that's where the word of mouth comes from.

A wobbly wheel as a flat tire to be number one, number two.

True, true.

Now hold on.

And the reason why, the reason why.

We were all laughing is because I went. We've joked about Max bringing out weaponry on calls before and like hammers and nerf guns. And George literally just turned around and started punching the air. So, George, cupcake, light of my life. Yeah, talk to me, bubby. What's going on?

Nah, I wasn't flywheeling. I wasn't flywheeling. I was doing business. I was doing the things that people do when they do business. And here's the thing I'm gonna tell you, I love word of mouth. Word of mouth is 100%. All of the things that I've closed in the first six months of owning my own company, word of mouth. People that knew me, heard of me, or I've done something for histor. So I love word of mouth. But I wasn't doing flywheeling. I was doing business. I was adding value. I was being a great human, educating and executing on things that needed. Now, sure, if you want to layer, you were delighting.

You're.

Of course, I always delight. That's how I roll. But here's the. But, right? Here's the thing. It's not like delight showed up when the flywheel showed up on the scene in 2018, if we remember back. And actually, let me tell you, here's where my brain goes, and it's a d dangerous place to try to pay attention to. Delight was here the original inbound methodology way to do business, potentially. But definitely a great educational tool was attract, convert, close, and delight. And even the word was born, delation, which you can hate it or you can love it, but it hit the scene in the inbound audience. Right. Now, here's the thing. If we go to the flywheel, we've got attract, engage, and delight. Now here's the thing. We went to a model that actually removes something. It removes something. There is no convert. It's just engage. We're not exactly sure what that means if they're engaging you or we're engaging them. But they're like all of marketers, especially demand gen, lead gen should have lost their damn mind because convert was ripped out of the model that we're all paying attention to.

It's the first chevron. I have takes on that. It's the first chevron. It's where attract meets engage is where convert happened at the end of engage, when going into delight, it's a gray area. It can have shade. Okay. It can. It could be more of a spectrum. That's fine. When it spins really fast, it gets blurry. I'm getting here for a second. Here's the point I want to make. George, George, you've been attracting and engaging for 10 years, my dude. You seriously. That's why you're delighting now. And all of a sudden it's starting to spin and you're doing really good.

But here's the thing. I couldn't be delighting right now if I didn't convert them.

Sure.

They have become customers. They were converted. So now I can delight.

Exactly you can delight people who you haven't closed yet. I absolutely love a good pre sale experience. And I have written. I'll call them out. 1, 800 accountants. Whoever that sales guy was that you assigned to me sucked. I hated. He tried to early close me. It was like that. I don't care how good your business is. That dude made me feel greasy afterwards. And I not going with them. He had the audacity to call me back because I have a whole thing with that company. But the biggest thing that I have was with the horrible pre sale experience.

Oh, the. To have the audacity of a tone deaf sales rep who can't read the room. Am I right, guys? But here's what I want to. I'm going to cut in here for a moment too, Max, because if we're literally acting as if delight and word of mouth wasn't represented in some way in this whole philosophy. Funnel, Octagon, Hexagon, Flywheel, whatever. Until the flywheel showed up. That is no. And I think this is where we lose a lot of people with the Flywheel, especially people who are new to Inbound. Now, a lot of these folks, they're not con. They are not interested in buzzwords. They are not interested in what shape it comes in. They have known for decades, years, that their number one source of revenue are the customers they already have in the door. That in order to win a sale, you can't suck the life out of the room and make them hate you before you even get there. Delight was already baked into it because it was simply referred to as customer service. Not good, not delicious. It's just that's how they defined customer service. And going back to what George said earlier, I think this is where it gets confusing. The message was, funnel is dead, long live Flywheel. As if we were radically changing how we did business when. I wish it had been introduced more as a teaching tool because often the way I teach it is, okay, first you have to understand this funnel. This is the linear progression. Even if it ping pongs around, even if it's crazy. We know the buyer's journey is completely berserk. But then it needs to keep spinning and feeding itself. And it's just a visual representation of how you take the model and keep it in motion. But these are things that everybody has already been doing. So in a way, I disagree with you, Max, but I also agree with both of you because this is. No, because this is something that we have been doing constantly, all the time. It is a process we've been doing constantly. But we can't literally act as if the flywheel invented stuff that already existed.

No, not at all. And I would never say that. What I think that they're doing is they're emphasizing that that's a really important thing to do because for so many years, people only dumped all their money and thought and strategy into marketing and sales and like, things like customer success, customer support, actually delivering on your promises and paying attention to what happens after people give you the money was a complete afterthought. There is a reason support people and customer success, folks. And anyone who works in customer service doesn't get PA commission because people think it's not important because they're not generating revenue. And that's the brain rot that I think they're trying to get rid of when they say, hey, delight is just as important as these other things. And here's the thing, companies that provided terrible customer service slowly killed themselves over time or survived because they were big enough, but still didn't have a great reputation. But like, also, there's lots of companies that built themselves on great customer service, right? And yeah, they were delighting this entire time. But again, there's still that stigma there. That, that. And that's why the funnel thing is so popular, because it's, oh, put all your money into marketing and sales and then you plop customers down at the end, but we don't really care what happens when they plop out of the end of the funnel. And I think what the. And because again, the old inbound methodology had delight in it too as well. I think that was always just a saying like, hey guys, this part's really important and you got to focus on it just as much as you focus on your marketing and your sales.

Max, here's the thing. I absolutely 100% agree with what you just said. I think that service teams customer success needed to be elevated.

It.

I think that they've been playing much more a massive part of the business game than we ever gave them. So don't disagree with that at all. Where I tend to have issue with this is that if you go back to the original video that I know Brian watched and you can Google it, by the way, Google Amazon Flywheel meeting. It is on YouTube and you watch the way that it was educated and taught about in that room. It doesn't apply to all businesses. And so not to beat a dead horse, I go to, I firmly stand behind if I'm educating sales, marketing and service teams how to eradicate all of their historical silos and pay attention to the inbound methodology across all departments. I'm cool with that, but I'm going to teach it in a way that then I'm going to talk about the original inbound methodology and how service can convert, how sales can convert, how marketing can convert, how service can delight, how sales can delight, how marketing can delight. Like all of them can do all of the original four things. So if I use it for that, that's amazing. But again, if you look at it as a, hey, it's a business model, that's when I start to have issue with some like, listen, I've had conversations where companies like, like their owner and marketers went off the rails because of the confusion of the flywheel. And Devin, I'm so glad you said this earlier. This whole mental. What the frick did they just say? Force and friction. Huh? When that came out, people were like, wait, what? What do you mean by that? We just added some more buzzwords that weren't. I thought we were just supposed to be authentic humans. Now we got to add force and friction.

Yeah, because the thing that, when you're talking about a flywheel, those are the two biggest things. Things that are slowing down your momentum and things that speed up your momentum. And you could be focused on trying to speed up your momentum all day, not realizing that you need to focus on what's stopping you from speeding up your momentum. And then the other thing to take into consideration is of all the things that we've mentioned, the one thing that we haven't mentioned is community. And that is a huge part of delight. Like you look at like the evolution of go to market. Right. Like in the 2000s, it was inside sales. You trust us and we'll help you. And then 2006, inbound methodology, go ahead, do your own research, kick the tires, trust yourself. And then you're gone to 2016, where it's like product led growth, where it's like trust, trust your teammates, trust the people who are working with you in doing this. And then now we're going into commute community led growth, where it's not just about trust us, it's not about trust yourself, it's trust your community, trust each other. And that is a major component of the flywheel. And when we talk about people dropping out of the bottom of the funnel, most Companies, like most SMBs, aren't really that focused on community outside of posting to Facebook. That's their idea of community. Now, not focusing on delight outside of maybe a referral program or not delight, but Applying force to the delight section of the flywheel, where then we're talking about what we're doing to drive word of mouth, what we're doing to drive these evangelists and empower them to go forth on our behalf and basically bring us back leads. That's one of the things that is an after the afterthought that usually comes after focusing on customer service. And speaking of customer service, I still have yet to see a company where the customer service has a better office or even as good of an office as the sales team. The sales team, they get the office, they get the expense accounts, they get to go. The service lives in a cubicle farm. And the thing is that that level of afterthought, like these are things, yes, they've been happening, but those the way the lens through which you've been perceiving these things is different prior to Flywheel, if you understand the Flywheel methodology. So it's more than just force and friction as buzzwords. It's really the core of the flywheel. You have to focus on what's grinding your customers gears, what's really making your revenue slow down, and then also focus on what's working for you. You really want to work on everything SEO, but damn, if your Facebook account isn't jumping right now, maybe you should be applying to that. And that flywheel is. Allows you to have that methodology and is really what leads to having an active and effective revenue operations person or team or just that mentality.

You bring up a really good point there, Devin, because one of the things that is really jumping out at me right now is that we have overall, we could take the flywheel, the funnel, all of the shapes out of the conversation. Right. One of the terms that we've heard a lot over the past day is sales, marketing, alignment. Everybody needs to realize they're on the same team. But the reality is that this is a theme that has been happening for decades. Pre Internet, sure, but the Internet absolutely accelerated it as information has become more democratized, as information has become more accessible. But thematically that has only become more true and it's gobbling up more teams. And so I think the on the right side of this, the part of me that does make me pro Flywheel. And to be fair, I'm not anti. I just like funnel and flywheel. But the thing that I do like about it is that in a way shape and I am, I accept all shapes.

What a fly triangle.

To be fair, the shape. I personally, from a physical perspective, I relate more to the flywheel and its roundness. But that's neither here nor there. But my point is that like overall we have been moving toward a business setup where everybody's responsible, we play different functions in growth, but we are all kind of sitting around the same table. More people need to be invited to the table. So I would really love to see us at a high level move a little bit more away from. It's just about sales and marketing alignment, IT guys, we all got to be aligned. This isn't just a two party system. Now, George, I have a question for you.

Hang on one second. Hold that question for one second because. Yeah. Anybody listening this podcast, do me a big favor and just own your ish and realize that you're on a rowing team, not a relay, not an individual race. You are on a rowing team and your entire company is trying to get to the finish line. Why? So they can make enough revenue that you don't get laid off and lose your job or they go out a bit business like, it's that simple. If you break it down to simplicity. Also before that question, Liz, Devin, thank you for that brief moment of fire that you laid out about service and the offices and the mindset. Because I totally agree with that. It is so important. If you're a CEO or C suite and you're listening to this episode, your one action item is to go look at where your sales team sits, look at where your service team sits, and then ponder what your next step should be. I'm just going to throw that out there.

Okay.

Okay, Liz, I'm ready for your question.

I cannot agree with you more, Devin. Honestly, I felt seen. I started my career as a cube farm customer service person and I cannot tell you how many times I actually even genuinely wanted to help people. But our technology didn't work. I would access your account, ma', am, but it's down again. I bet you sales systems weren't down. Bet your marketing was fine. Customer service, they're in a different building on a different planet. It we don't know who they are. We don't know their names. We've outsourced it. It's a thousand different things. But anyway, let's get to my question. George, I'm gonna guess your answer to the question is no. The flying wheel isn't. It's. No, it's not dead.

God, no, no. Like, that's the thing. I laugh when Devin was like shape agnostic. I think everything has a part that it plays. And again, there's the flywheel. I think that's the overarching thing that you know is just spinning and you're paying attention to it. And to go back to my chutes and ladders example, I really wish people could could see inside of that flywheel spinning. A couple other places that historically have been confusing. We talk about the buyer's journey and we never really went far enough to talk about how there's a buyer's journey and there's a customer's journey, because there are two different things. And the customer journey really aligns with this service conversation that we're having in onboarding and delation and conversion. On the service side of it, there's the buyer's journey, which is the marketing and sales side of this. Before they actually get to what the slide of the shoots and ladders, which is what our funnel, because we're actually letting them slide down the stages and the conversations that they have to have with humans to buy the product that solves the problem or helps them to their aspirational point. So if you think of all of this as the flywheel is the playground and all the pieces that you need to do business, now we're getting somewhere.

I think one of the things that we aren't talking enough about when it comes to the flywheel are force and friction. That's what makes the flywheel work, is having that mentality. Because it's just like for me, the funnel's not dead, it's just remodeled. But the problem is that from a physics standpoint, just at that point, it doesn't click in my mind. People going out of the bottom and then you run them around and come in minimum top or you just have a circle of funnels. Physics from a physics standpoint, that you're going to have a loss of energy. And not to say that is the perfect analogy to the company, but that's the whole reason why the flywheel exists, is because it's a much better analogy and a much better lens at which to look at your business process. We start talking about the flywheel. Its purpose is to generate and maintain a momentum. When a flywheel starts spinning, it doesn't want to slow down. The only thing that will slow down a flywheel is friction. And if we're talking about the two major friction points in a flywheel, the first one is air resistance. The second one is the hub itself. And at the hub of the flywheel model that Brian presented, at the center of that is your customers. Friction comes from bad things happening with customers when they are having a bad pre sale experience and make you feel greasy afterwards. That friction comes from when they're customers and something goes wrong, they can't fix it. Even pre sale, when they're just trying to find more information and kick the tires and it ain't there because your content sucks. That's all friction for your flywheel. So those are problems that you solve. What's generating churn, what's making you lose revenue, what's lowering your mrr. But then when you look at what you can spend money on, because at the end of the day that's usually what applying for is spending money. Where can you spend money to make it more effective? I overheard a conversation about a guy who sends a dude, wires him $100,000 a month for his Google Ads and he's mad because things aren't increasing for him. It's because you're focused on the wrong people Part of the flywheel, you're applying force in the wrong spot. And then in the same conversation you're talking about how you have a ton of opt in leads, but they're not all marketing qualified leads, they're not all sales qualified leads. Maybe if you have a ton of opt in leads and you're converting on your page, you should focus on refining that and spend money on a copywriter to come in. Spend money on someone whose UI and someone to analyze your copy and say, okay, here's why you're attracting tons of non qualified people. This is where you should be fixing it. This is where you should spend your energy, but you're dumping all your energy into this all top of the funnel stuff that you think you need. When you should be looking at the flywheel, having your numbers and say, okay, that conversion rate over there is too low. This conversion rate has potential. We can fix that. As opposed to just trying to apply more money to a fire that that's never going to go out.

I just want everybody to know the pure joy that goes into my heart when, when Devin starts to preach, I just start dancing. My head starts bob and I'm like.

Yo, we went to HubSpot church just now.

It was beautiful. Yo, he, he was spitting fire. I knew I might have needed a hanky for a hot minute. I was like, what is going on right now? But here's the thing, I want to be careful because there's two micro pieces that I want to pull out what you said. And then I'm going to shut up because I know Max has things to say. Going back to your center hub and it being the customers, the humans, when there's friction there.

Right.

I want people to think about other episodes we've talked about. People, process, and platform. That's probably what's creating the friction. That's three major places that you should.

Start to look at of.

Is that friction happening because of the people that we have in the seats, the platform we're using because it's a piece, or is it the process because we need to remodel that and rethink it? The other thing that I'm gonna say is probably a whole nother podcast episode is that we have to be very careful because in that entire pre teaching session, we talked about friction as a negative. Friction can be a positive because friction. Because friction, your tread of your tire is friction against the road, That's a positive. When you hit your brake pedal and you want to slow down, that's a positive. When you realize you've only got five salespeople and enough inbound leads for 50, you need some good friction or else there's going to be issues. So I want us to think about in the future. As has force and friction is not a positive and a negative, but it has positive and negatives on both sides.

Yep. Because if we go back to that metaphor that Max was thrown around earlier about tires and stuff and wheels, like a runaway train needs to stop, otherwise it's gonna crash into stuff and kill people. And that's real sad. I really painted a picture with my words there, folks. I hope we enjoy.

I mean, the other thing.

Did you actually have just something.

I think another way of putting it is that if you think about a gearbox that's literally just a series of flywheels, and sometimes you gotta downshift like some Tokyo Drift stuff, but, oh, yeah.

I need some Tokyo.

Yeah, definitely. I gotta say that that direct eye contact when you're preaching there was making my skeleton start to vibrate.

That was.

I know.

I needed a moment. I'm really glad George was able to, like, pick up right after that because I was just sitting here fanning myself a little bit. It was a lot.

I have to watch this back.

Yeah. It's gonna be a fun one.

George was dancing. George was literally dancing.

Yeah, man.

Yeah.

It was the inbound spirit, bro. I need. I was like, let's go.

I both found Jesus and need Jesus. It was wonderful, Max.

I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna brain dump here because I'm driving the ship as a. Nope. I'm flying. Nope. Building the plane as I fly it. When I try to say what I'm about to say right now, that's like, what I'm so like me, I try to, like, hyper simplify the ship out of the flywheel, which is like, why I feel like I can make the case that any organization can do it. And if you're surviving, you're probably doing it to some extent, even if you're not doing it very well. And what's tough here, too, is, like, when we talk about funnels. Dude, what is a funnel? Even now, I hate to be the definitions guy, but to me today, I don't know, like, funnels are what people call things when they're gurus trying to sell another marketing course to some poor small business owner. Like, there are good funnels, there are bad funnels. Sometimes even in marketing softwares, you have tools called funnels that are like workflows and HubSpot. Like, it's the same thing as a campaign. What does any of this mean? So that's why when I think about the flywheel, I like to think of it as these big general guiding north stars of things you should be focusing on. But exactly how you define it can be open to a little bit of interpretation. So when, George, you get on the convert and close thing, my man, convert and close can look very different depending on your business or your organization. You know what I mean? And I think when we look in the flywheel in these more general terms, it allows businesses to say, okay, here's kind of the three big motions that we have to make in order to make this thing work. What does it mean for us to attract? What does it mean for us to engage? Page. And sometimes that's convert and close, depending on how you define it. What does it mean? Okay, to delight. So I gotta chime in, but you. I listen. You told me to be a little more combative today, so I'm doing it.

No, I'm here for it. Wait, George, hold on.

Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

I'm chiming first and then you chime because you've been watching me hold my head for.

Yeah, George, shut the.

Are you telling me.

I love it? I love you.

Guys, guys, we're not fighting enough. I don't understand. I gave.

You told me to bring the heat, and I'm bringing it.

So let me. Let me get this straight, Max, because marketers have ruined a buzzword the way we ruin everything, like authenticity. You're telling me we can't use funnel anymore? I'm sorry. Authenticity is still authenticity. Even if marketers have ruined it, funnels is still a valid analogy. And teaching tool. Even if there are butt heads out there ruining it because they don't know what they're doing. It's like coaches right now. It's the new mlm. Every chick in a pink hat on Instagram is a coach who's going to teach coaches how to coach other coaches. And it's very confusing, but that doesn't mean there aren't actual certified coaches out there doing stuff. So I get what you're saying. I think there are people who just say the word funnel because they know how to spell it and good for them. But to completely disparage it as a teacher tool, to call it those, to put it aside and just say, we've ruined this. Now we're going to talk about flywheels. I don't love that. Now, George, feel free to chime before Max tells me how wrong I am. Oh, no, he's doing it anyway.

No, I'm not telling you you're wrong. I'm not telling you wrong. But what's a funnel?

It's something I pour sugar into in order to get into things where the.

Yeah, what's that? Time out.

Real quick.

What are you doing? You using a funnel to pour sugar into?

That was a really bad metaphor because I was actual answer is this. My actual answer is this. I talk to people a lot about the. All of the people you attract are not always going to be all of the people that you convert. And it gets a little bit smaller each and every time. It is not the entire process, but it is a great way to visualize a piece of it and explain. I understand we're going to have a ton of organic traffic coming along, but not all of those people are going to come along and be customers, and not all of those people are going to close. That's just the nature of the beast. It's why we have pipelines that we keep fat and healthy and happy. Because there is a percentage closed one rate, not a. We get 100% all the time.

And I love that definition. The only thing I'm saying is that you ask that to a bunch of other people, they're going to have a different, different answer. So all I'm saying is that when we talk about funnels, we need to define what we mean in the context of that conversation. Otherwise people are just going to get confused by it when they hear it. But I agree with you, Liz. 100. I'm just saying it's another one of those words that we just need to be careful with when we talk about it.

So people can just tell me I'm right again. Just say it.

Just say one more time, you're so right. I think you're so right.

Yes. Okay. First, George, go ahead.

I finally get to jump in on what Max said. I'm sorry, I want to. What I.

He told me it was my kind of child.

I wasn't holding my head. I wasn't holding my head the time that Max was talking. See, because what I was trying to do, Max, is I was trying to jump in, be your cane to big show, your Ricky Steamboat to your J Youngblood, your Ric Flair to your Batista, if you will. I was trying to jump in because, brother, you uncovered something that most organizations don't uncover, that they don't get to. Because most humans take thing out at face value. They see the stage, they see Brian Halligan, they see the flywheel, and they only see the colors and words that are on there and the fact that you went through and you make attract yours, you make engage yours, you make delight yours. I am forever preaching on almost every meeting I have. And this is how you wrap HubSpot around your business. This is how you customize your contact records. This is how you create your custom properties, because it is about your people, your process, and making HubSpot your platform that you can then implement the flywheel and funnel strategies with.

And you can wrap that flywheel around your shit, too. You know what I mean? Like, seriously, it's like it's a circle for a reason. You go in the middle of it.

While we're all feeling so agreeable and not shouting at each other anymore and wrapping things up in circles and bows and flywheels. We have talked a lot today about a lot of things. And we've shouted and we've hugged it out, but then we shouted again, and then we've chimed and then yelled again. And now we're rapping as we're wrapping things up for people, what's the one thing they should be walking away with from today? Because the goal of today was to get people's heads on straight about what the flywheel actually is and why it exists. So if nobody takes anything away from this conversation except one thing, they're like a drunk guinea pig waddling on the streets going, what? Like, what is the thing they need to remember?

First of all, sure. Why? It's a drunk guinea pig.

I don't know, George, you asked me to host, so you get a drunk guinea pig and you're gonna be happy about it.

I like geographic after 9pm that's what that is.

You've made choices, George. Live with them.

I love the choices that I've made. So here's the thing. I can't wait to hear what Devin, Max and Liz you say. I'm gonna go back to the. That this is probably the most appropriate time after you hit the Stop playing and you got your notepad out to actually sit and just take a moment to rethink everything. Rethink everything. Are we customizing everything to our processes around attract, engage, convert, delight? Any of the stages, any of the versions of the inbound methodology, any of the shapes? Have we put all of the shapes together in a way that makes sense for our business and our success. So to dumb it down right now, rethink everything.

Here I was thinking I was the don't be afraid to nuke everything at the end of episode guy, but this time it's George.

So what kind of guy are you, Devin?

Me? I enjoy sunsets, long walks on the beach and the flywheel. No, actually, I hate walking on the beach.

Me too.

I don't like outdoors. So, yeah, all of that. I guess you could say I enjoy making up autobiographical nonsense. But the big takeaway here. Here is the core things that you need to know about the flywheels, not just the stages that you need to know why we call it a flywheel and not the circle of stuff to do. The flywheel is all about friction and force and applying that understanding to your business and understanding that you might be applying force in the wrong place, understanding that you may be trying to apply force. When you should be focusing on overcoming friction, you should step out of the. We're a sales organization. We're a sales company. We're a marketing company. You should be focusing on. We're a revenue generating company. And that's where the flywheel comes into play.

I say two things. One, if you haven't done it in a while, it might be a good little mental exercise to just look at your business one day and say, how are we attracted acting? How are we delighting? Oops. How are we engaging? And how are we delighting? Just explore it. Maybe you might find some gaps to fill in. Last thing I'll just say is flywheel. Will you make flywheel? So will you make it so?

Hang on a second because, Max, I actually think that I may love your ups. Okay. And let me explain why, because I don't feel like there's anything wrong with attract delight. Attract delight. Engage, Attract delight. Attract delight. Attract delight. Light engage. It's almost A play off of Gary Vee's jab right hook right there. Like Devin said earlier, in this episode, you can delight people before you convert them. So I don't mind your oops.

Thank you for accepting me.

Always and forever.

We accept you in all of your.

Oopsie daisies, Maximus and Flywheel, where you.

May petition for Joe dirt to headline Inbound 2023.

Oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Call David Spade. All right, my one thing is very simple. And honestly, I would say it's probably a good synthesis of some of the things you guys have already said, but the reality is that whether you're talking about a flywheel or a funnel, these are just analogies. These are analogies that are forcing you to get out of your cubicles to start playing well with other children on different teams to understand that you all have one common goal and you all need to be moving together. Like where all of these teams now need to be moving together. We do not have the luxury anymore of service being over in service land and marketing being over in marketing land and sales being like, I do not understand why marketing keeps us keep saying brand awareness. That's something we give a damn about. We all actually need to come together, start listening to each other, start talking to each other. And to your point earlier, George, about what you said about friction being good, sometimes pumping the brakes a little when we need to make a change before we're a runaway train who put sugar down funnels for no reason because they're dumb.

The first place my mind went to was gas tanks. I thought that's what you were gonna say because I didn't know if you had crazy ex girlfriend energy, so.

Oh.

Oh, dang.

He said sugar and funnel. There's only one thing hurtful.

Oh, goodness, that hurts me.

Before we wound each other more deeply, watch your guest tank buddy. But on death note, everyone else listening. George, do you want to give a quick recap on an event we have coming up before we say goodbye?

Oh, absolutely. If you are focused and listening to what we usually talk about. I know we mentioned it on this one as well. Content. Doing content, right? If you're trying to rev up that flywheel, if you are trying to eradicate the silos and get found and all the things, things that you could say, then you need to make sure that you head over to hubheroes.com forward/SEO and check out that content SEO master class that we have coming up. Go ahead and sign up. Seats are limited, times limited. And with that, let's, I guess we're out of here.

Almost. There's a promo. Oh, yeah, you almost forgot.

Yeah, don't forget. Don't forget, use the promo code Hub Heroes or Hub Hero, and you'll get a 10 off of the master class.

Fantastic. And on that note, don't forget to leave a review if you haven't already. Let me know what's actually supposed to go into a funnel instead of sugar. And then also tell us how stinking smart we are. And with that, gentlemen, go away. It's Friday. I am retired. I'd like to take a nap.

Also, buy my hats. I don't have a promo code. I don't know how to do it yet.

Max, is that delishion?

I don't. I've never heard anyone say delician, but all I'll say is I'm a solutions engineer at HubSpot, not Shopify. So no promo codes for anyone.

Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out. In the next episode, make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag Hub Heroes Podcast on any of the stuff socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.