How to Achieve a 360° Overview of the Customer Journey

Coined by HubSpot, the Flywheel method, can help businesses rethink their business approach to reach and satisfy more customers.

A few months back, Or Tsimbler and I visited HubSpot’s offices in Dublin. There, we discussed the Flywheel method, which can help customers rethink their business approach.

What is the Flywheel method?

The Flywheel method is a metric you can use to gauge the growth of your business:

Satisfied Customers = Promoters → New Business

The cycle goes around and around, fueling itself, and therefore your business, with more customers.

The standard ‘funnel’ approach to business is in the past. If your leads convert to customers but those customers have a disappointing experience and turn over quickly, that’s not at all a success. Instead, it is important to work on your inbound strategy to:

Attract → Engage → Delight!

Let’s walk through these stages:

1. In the attract stage, you bring in potential customers using content that will catch their attention. You can do this through social media, SEO, ads, and more.

2. In the engage stage, you make it simple for customers to engage with your business. You can do this through automation, nurturing, and personalization.

3. In the delight stage, you help your customers reach success. If they are successful, they’ll be delighted and spread the word about you!

Understanding the Customer Journey

Today, customers do a lot of research before making a decision. So, making sure one customer’s journey goes smoothly can make or break another customer's decision to embark on a journey with your business. You not only want loyal customers, you want delighted customers who come back, spread the word, and bring in new leads.

It is crucial that you understand the customer journey, in order to see what works. Ask yourself:

• What do my customers respond well to?

• What don’t they like?

• What can we do better?

This way, more of those who you engage with will be delighted and become promoters. Knowing which paths your happy customer took on their customer journey is the key to this. It helps you know where to invest and what to improve in your processes.

Building Your Customer Journey in Practice

Understanding the customer journey will allow you to build one that works for you. HubSpot is built for a full-funnel approach, meaning all the hubs exist in one system. This means following a few crucial steps.

1. Map Your Flow

When mapping your flow, you have to decide when marketing will hand leads over to sales, and when sales will pass leads on to CS. This is incredibly important to plan out, as they are critical steps in the customer journey. The transition must be seamless and all information must be organized properly so that the next team has everything they need to continue with a great customer experience.

2. Implement Your Flow into HubSpot

Once you decide on your flow, the next step is to implement it in HubSpot.

• Identify what data you need to qualify leads

• Identify at what points you wish to collect this data

• Set up lifecycle stage automation in HubSpot

• Integrate any third-party software you need to ensure data is logged on your contact records – you want a single source of truth

If you do all this, you’ll be left with a unified workflow and aligned departments. This comes with clear KPIs and data management protocols. Overall you will find that your efficiency will increase by 30%, if not more.

It’s clear that Revenue Operations boosts your flywheel. RevOps is all about aligning the goals of Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. The Flywheel method gives the departments a common KPI to measure this alignment: Customer satisfaction.

Want to build this into your system?

The combination of a full-funnel strategy, technology, and technical implementation can be difficult. While the Flywheel is super important, it can also be hard to implement at the start. It’s not always easy to know which journey you should send your customers on, and not everyone always responds well to the same things.

Feel free to book a call with our experts who have been through this process countless times, so you can see how we can build this in your system for you.