What is the HubSpot Flywheel? Is the funnel dead? (HubHeroes, Ep. 20)

[00:00:00] Liz Murphy:

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 Lou. Max and Devon

[00:00:14] Max Cohen:

are back. We're back.

[00:00:15] Devyn Bellamy:

You guys are by yourself for what? One episode. Come on.

[00:00:22] Liz Murphy:

three. You know what I love hearing George, how much our fellow hub heroes pay attention to all of the knowledge bombs we're dropping. Listen, daily and nightly and every so rightly come

[00:00:32] George B. Thomas:

on guys. Yeah, I guess they were really on vacation. Vacation. Like really?

[00:00:35] Devyn Bellamy:

Really on. I was completely logged out of everything. That wasn't Netflix. Yeah.

[00:00:40] Max Cohen:

Yeah. Yeah. I was on vacation in a hotel with Covid. It was. Literally, oh God. And figuratively. The best.

[00:00:48] George B. Thomas:

The best. You were just too much of a goat man.

[00:00:50] Liz Murphy:

I know. Meanwhile, George and I were like, everybody's gone. What do you wanna do?

[00:00:54] George B. Thomas:

work. Let's do it. Yeah, baby. It was super fun.

[00:00:57] Liz Murphy:

Speaking of work, kidding. That's a terrible segue, but I really wanna get right into what we're talking about today, guys, I'm gonna 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 won't 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 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. No, 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, who will say oh, we gotta do something more closer to the bottom of the funnel.

Yeah. So, And then there were people, wait, I want to gimme 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. Flywheel isn't for everybody. So that's what I wanna 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?

[00:02:28] George B. Thomas:

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 the, 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 a bee for enterprise companies. Yet it was a bunch of small to medium size 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.

Now, with that, let's go ahead and start the conversation. Yes,

[00:03:24] Liz Murphy:

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

[00:03:32] Liz Murphy:

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,

[00:04:10] Max Cohen:

after this episode. ? Yeah. I'll get it started. So Liz, here's why you're wrong. Okay? Fantastic. .

[00:04:16] Liz Murphy:

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?

[00:04:27] Max Cohen:

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've talked about this a little bit in 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's more than just marketing.

[00:05:40] Liz Murphy:

That's so funny. I, and I'm gonna get into this later. I don't wanna 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. Cuz 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 from me? What's your answer to what the flywheel is from your

[00:06:03] Devyn Bellamy:

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 pre-sale 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 responsibility with salespeople. You have your sales funnels. In HubSpot, we'll call 'em 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 set 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. 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 gonna 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

[00:08:09] Liz Murphy:

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.

[00:08:17] George B. Thomas:

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. I like, let's eradicate 'em. Let's break 'em 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, you're 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 that is not a platform funnel flywheel issue that is a humans. It everybody is always your problem.

You have 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 shoots and ladders than anything that we're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 Kleenex services.

[00:10:31] Liz Murphy:

So I, 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 a hundred percent 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 hubs hotters, 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 see. I'm not disagreeing with anything yet. Stirring the

[00:11:14] Devyn Bellamy:

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

[00:11:18] Max Cohen:

but 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.

[00:11:26] George B. Thomas:

100%. 100%. No. Hold on. Here's the thing, there's a difference max between using something and replacing something. We had been asked to replace something that was broken, not add into addition, some other things to help a, 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

[00:11:54] Max Cohen:

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 FLA 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 of 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 Home.

Home, 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 and organization or whatever. I'm gonna one more second here.

I wanna say like even a nonprofit, You have to get people aware of your nonprofit. You gotta get people to build trust in your nonprofit. And you have to engage with them in ways that makes them wanna 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.

[00:13:53] Devyn Bellamy:

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. You, if you get bogged down in the minutiae 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, a one person shop.

But if you are just thinking of attracting gauge 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. Yeah, if you Google it, I doubt she'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 gonna do is get 'em to the door. , I still have to talk through them with solving their 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 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 rev op team whose only job is to look at analytics in an enterprise organization.

You, you can't expect to have that level of minutiae and job distinction, responsibility, distinction on one person. You're gonna 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 seeing, okay, I'm gonna spend money here to reduce friction, I'm gonna 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 started talking about flywheel within Flywheel, and it got like really deep especially for the audience. Like George said, SMBs, they, most of 'em aren't ready for that. But the thing is that foundation will help you scale up to being able to

[00:16:15] Max Cohen:

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, 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 shill 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 the 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, 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 spinning 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.

[00:17:26] Liz Murphy:

So a wobbly wheel is a flat tire to be number one. Number two, true. True. Now hold on. And the reason why we two wheel though, the reason why we were all laughing is because iri, I, 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. Bu what's going on?

[00:17:54] George B. Thomas:

Nah, I wasn't fly wheeling. I wasn't fly wheeling, 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 historically. So I love word of mouth, but I wasn't doing fly wheeling. I was doing business. I was adding value. I was being a great human educating and executing on things that need to be now. Sure, if you wanna layer,

[00:18:32] Max Cohen:

you are delighting. You're you. Of course I always delight.

[00:18:36] Liz Murphy:

Baby. That's how I roll. Send the photos.

[00:18:37] George B. Thomas:

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 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 a track convert, close and delight. And even the word was born delight. 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 gotta attract, engage, and delight. Now, here's the thing. We went to a model that actually removed 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 Legion should have lost their damn mind because Convert was ripped out of the model that we're all paying attention to.

[00:19:42] Max Cohen:

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 gonna come in here for a second. Here's the point I wanna make. George, George, you've been attracting and engaging for 10 years. My dude. You seriously? Oh, I'm not too, 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

[00:20:15] George B. Thomas:

the thing, I couldn't be delighting right now if I didn't convert ' em. Sure. They have become customers. They were converted. So now I can delight. Exactly.

[00:20:24] Max Cohen:

Exactly. You can delight

[00:20:25] Devyn Bellamy:

people who you haven't closed yet. I absolutely love a good pre-sale experience. And I have written I'll call him out.

1-800-ACCOUNTANT. You, 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'm not going with them. He had the audacity to call me back cause it I have a whole thing with that company.

But the biggest thing that I have was with the horrible presale

[00:20:58] Liz Murphy:

experience. Oh, the au 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 wanna, I'm gonna 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, but 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 delight. 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-lived flywheel as if it, 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 have been doing constantly, but we can't literally act as if the flywheel invented stuff that already

[00:22:55] Max Cohen:

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 paid commission because people think it's not important cuz 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 And here's the. Companies that provided terrible customer service, slowly killed themselves over time or survived cuz 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, and that's why the funnel thing is so popular cuz 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 to lighten in it too as well.

I think that was always just us saying like, Hey guys, this part's really important and you gotta focus on it just as much as you focus on your marketing and your sales.

[00:24:18] George B. Thomas:

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. 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 watched 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 gonna teach it in a way that then I'm gonna 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 glisten. I've had conversations where companies 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 freak 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 were, I thought we were just supposed to be authentic humans.

Now we gotta add force and friction.

[00:26:19] Devyn Bellamy:

Yeah. Because the thing is 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 two thousands, it was inside sales, you trust us and will help you.

And then 2006 inbound methodology. Go ahead, do your own research, kick the tires, trust yourself. And then you're you've 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 and doing this. And then now we're going into 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 out outside of, posting to Facebook. That's their idea of community.

And 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. 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 the sales team, they get their 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 the way the lens through which you've been perceiving these things is different prior to flywheel, if you understand the flywheel method. . So it's more than just, force and friction is buzzwords.

It's really the core of the flywheel. You have to focus on what's grinding your customer's gears, what's really making your revenue slow down, and then also focus on what's working for you. You really wanna work on 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 act an active and effective revenue operations person or team or just

[00:29:24] Max Cohen:

 

that mentality.

[00:29:25] Liz Murphy: 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 let, 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've just like funnel and flywheel. But the thing that I do like about it is that in a way, shake agnostic shape, an I am, I accept all shapes

[00:30:18] Max Cohen:

to be honest. Wanna fly triangle to be fair, , fly angle.

[00:30:23] Liz Murphy:

 

The shape I personally, From a physical perspective, I relate more to the flywheel and it's roundness, but that's neither here nor air. 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 sit at a high level, move a little bit more away from, it's just about sales and marketing alignment. Guys, we all gotta be aligned. This isn't just a two-party system. Now, George, I have a question for you.

[00:30:58] George B. Thomas:

Hang on one second.

Hold that question for one second because Yeah. Pe, let anybody listening to 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 of 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 c e O, 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 gonna throw that out there. Okay. Liz, I'm ready for your

question.

[00:31:53] Liz Murphy:

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.

I bet you marketing was fine. Customer service, they're in a different building on a different planet. 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 flywheel isn't.

It's, no, it's not dead.

[00:32:29] George B. Thomas:

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 shoots and ladders example, I really wish people 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 Deion 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 'em 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.

[00:33:43] Devyn Bellamy:

I think one of the things that we aren't talking enough about when it comes to the fly, 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 'em around and come on 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 yet your business process. When we start talking about the flywheel, its purpose is to generate and maintain a momentum.

When a flywheel starts spinning, it doesn't wanna 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.

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 r but then when you look at what you can spend money on, because at the end of the day, that's usually what applying force 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 a hundred thousand dollars 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 part. Of the flywheel, you're applying force in the wrong spot and then you, 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 who's 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's never gonna go out.

[00:36:43] George B. Thomas:

I just want everybody to know the pure joy that goes into my heart when Yes, when Devon starts to preach, I just start dancing. My head starts bobbing. I'm like, yo, we went

[00:36:53] Liz Murphy:

to HubSpot church just now.

[00:36:55] George B. Thomas:

He was beautiful. . Yo, he, yo he was spitting fire. I knew I might have needed a hanky for a hot minute. Yeah. I was like, what is going on right now? But here's the thing. I wanna be careful because there's two micro pieces that I wanna pull out what you said, and then I'm gonna 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. And 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 piece earth?

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 preaching session we talked about friction as a negative. Friction can be a positive because t because friction, your tread of your tire is friction against the road.

That's a When you hit your brake pedal and you wanna 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 gonna be issues. So I want us to think about in the future as force and friction is not a positive and a negative, but it has positive and negatives on both sides.

[00:38:19] Liz Murphy:

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

I mean, the other thing, did you

[00:38:35] Max Cohen:

actually have to something, share with us? Uh, It's, I think another way of putting it is that if you think about a gearbox that's literally just a series of flywheel and sometimes you got a downshift, like some Tokyo drift stuff, but uh, oh, I love me some.

Tokyo drift. Yes. Devin. I gotta say that, that direct eye contact when you were preaching there was making my skeleton start to vibrate. That was, That was, I know . I,

[00:38:58] Liz Murphy:

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

It was a

[00:39:05] Max Cohen:

lot. Yeah. might

[00:39:06] Devyn Bellamy:

have to watch this back. .

[00:39:08] Max Cohen:

Yeah, it's gonna be a fun one.

[00:39:09] Liz Murphy:

George was dancing. George was literally dancing. Yeah, man. Yeah, it was the inbound spirit, bro. I need, I was like, let's go here. I both sound Jesus and need Jesus. It was wonderful.

[00:39:22] Max Cohen:

I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna brain dump here cause I'm trying 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 wor so like me, I try to like hyper simplify the shit 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.

It like, like what? 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 the 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? And sometimes that's convert and close, depending on how you define it. What does it mean? Okay. A delight, So

[00:41:09] Liz Murphy:

I'm here for, wait, George. Hold on. Yeah, go. Go ahead. Listen, go ahead. I'm chiming first and then you chime because you've been watching me hold my head for 20 seconds. Yeah, George, shut the . Are you telling me

[00:41:20] George B. Thomas:

I love it. I love you

[00:41:21] Liz Murphy:

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

[00:41:25] Max Cohen:

you a chance. Told me to bring the heat and I'm bringing it ,

[00:41:27] Liz Murphy:

So Libby, 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 headss out there ruining it because they don't know what they're doing. It's like coaches right now, it's the new M 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. And good for them, but to completely disparage it as a teaching tool to call it those, to put it aside and just say, we've ruined this.

Now we're gonna talk about flywheels. I don't love that. Now, George free. Feel free to chime before Max tells me how wrong I am. Oh no, he's doing

[00:42:30] Max Cohen:

it anyway. No. I'm not telling you're wrong. I'm not telling you're wrong, but what's

[00:42:34] Liz Murphy:

the funnel? It's something I pour sugar into in order to get into things where the Oh

[00:42:40] Devyn Bellamy:

Time out real quick. What are you using? A funnel to pour sugar into?

[00:42:44] Liz Murphy:

It was a really bad metaphor cuz 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 gonna 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 gonna have a ton of organic traffic coming along, but not all of those people are gonna come along and be customers and not all of those people are gonna 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 a hundred percent all the time.

[00:43:28] Max Cohen:

And I love that definition. The only thing I'm saying is that you ask that to a bunch of other people, they're gonna have a 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 gonna get confused by it when they hear it. But I agree with you, Liz. A hundred percent. 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

[00:43:52] Liz Murphy:

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

Just say one

[00:43:54] Max Cohen:

more time. You're so right. I think you're so

[00:43:56] George B. Thomas:

right. Yes. Okay. So first, George, go ahead. I finally get to jump in on what Max said. I'm sorry. I wa I hurt me. No, he told me it was my time to shine. That's fine. 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 Jay Youngblood, your rick 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 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 housebot your platform that you can then implement the flywheel and funnel strategies with.

[00:45:10] Max Cohen:

And you can wrap that flywheel around your shit too. You know what I mean?

Like seriously, it's like it's circle for a reason. You go in the middle of it.

[00:45:19] Liz Murphy:

While we're all feeling so agreeable and not shouting at each other anymore, and wrapping things up in circles and bows and flywheel, we have talked a lot today about a lot of things, and we've shouted and we've hugged it out, but then we've shouted again, and then we've chimed and then yelled again.

And now we're wrapping 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?

[00:45:59] George B. Thomas:

First of all I'm not sure why it's a drunk Guinea pig , where,

[00:46:04] Liz Murphy:

I don't know, George, you asked me to hurt. Where? Where did that? So you get a drunk Guinea pig and you're gonna be

[00:46:09] George B. Thomas:

happy about it. I'd

[00:46:10] Devyn Bellamy:

like geographic after 9:00 PM that's what that

[00:46:13] Liz Murphy:

Hey, you've made choices, George. Live with them.

[00:46:16] George B. Thomas:

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 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 make sense for our business and our success? So to dumb it down right now.

Rethink

[00:46:58] Devyn Bellamy:

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.

[00:47:05] Liz Murphy:

So what kind of guy are you, Devin?

[00:47:06] Devyn Bellamy:

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

And 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 is the core things that you need to know about the flywheel, not just the stages, not 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.

[00:48:07] Max Cohen:

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 attracting? 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 ?

[00:48:26] George B. Thomas:

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, engage. It's almost a play off of Gary V'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 my oops. And

[00:48:58] Liz Murphy:

forever. We accept you in all of your Oopsy. Maximus

[00:49:02] George B. Thomas:

and

[00:49:02] Max Cohen:

Flywheel

[00:49:02] George B. Thomas:

where you

[00:49:03] Liz Murphy:

petition for Joe Dirt to headline, inbound 2023.

[00:49:07] Max Cohen:

Oh wow.

[00:49:07] Liz Murphy:

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 we're 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 says, 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 puts sugar down funnels for no reason because they're dumb.

[00:50:08] Devyn Bellamy:

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 I, oh, . Oh dang. You said sugar and funnel. There's only one thing missing.

[00:50:21] George B. Thomas:

Hurtful.

[00:50:22] Liz Murphy:

Oh goodness. That hurts me. Before we wound each other more deeply.

watch your gas tank buddy, but I'm done now. Everyone else listening. George, do you wanna give a quick recap on an event we have coming up before we say goodbye? Oh,

[00:50:40] George B. Thomas:

absolutely. If you are focused and listening to what we usually talk about and 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 that you could say, then you need to make sure that you head over to hub heroes.com/seo and check out that content SEO masterclass that we have coming up. Go ahead and sign up. Seats are limited, times limited.

And with that, Liz, I guess we're out of here.

[00:51:15] Liz Murphy:

For almost there's a promo. Oh, you

[00:51:17] George B. Thomas:

almost forgot. Yeah. Don't forget, for our listeners, don't forget, use the promo code Hub Heroes or Hub Hero, and you'll get a 10% off of the masterclass.

[00:51:27] Liz Murphy:

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 stink and smart we are. And with that gentleman, go away. It's Friday. I am LA tired. I'd like to take a nap. Also

[00:51:41] Max Cohen:

buy my hats. I don't have a promo code.

I don't know how to do it yet.

[00:51:49] Liz Murphy:

Wait, max, is that

[00:51:50] Max Cohen:

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