In short: what is flywheel marketing?

Updated on October 19, 2026: reviewed and updated figures.

In short: what is flywheel marketing?

The basic idea behind flywheel marketing is that your customers are your company’s best salespeople. If you keep them happy, they tell their friends. And if you make it easy for prospects to learn about your product and buy it, those prospects will buy. So beyond those two ideas, what other characteristics does flywheel marketing have? Let’s go through them with Adtek in the article below.

The context behind flywheel marketing

Whether you are a startup trying hard to scale up or an established company looking for a more efficient way to approach the market, the flywheel model is one of the best ways to grow a business. The best part about a flywheel is that once it starts moving forward, you do not need to push very hard to keep it spinning and building momentum. The right flywheel helps a business attract and reach new users 24 hours a day.

Spend some time talking with a business owner or CEO, ask how their industry has changed over the past few years, and they will very likely bring up their customers. Customers today are more skeptical, better informed and more demanding than ever before. One of those expectations is that a business should care about more than transactions.

When companies make short-term decisions and neglect long-term relationships in ways that damage the value they deliver and mislead people, customers take that information and use it to spread the bad news, quickly and widely.

To grow better, your organization needs to deliver a great customer experience, and this is where the flywheel comes in.

The marketing funnel and its problems

The funnel model rests on the idea that prospects enter the buying process at the awareness stage, move on to the consideration stage, then to the decision stage, and make the purchase right at that point. This linear strategy does not account for the major changes in how customers learn about brands and buy products in the digital age we live in now.

These days, prospects can enter the funnel at any of several different stages of the sales cycle. The internet, social media and other modern technologies let buyers do their own research. They can skip the awareness stage and essentially complete the purchase on their own without ever talking to a sales rep.

One weakness of the linear funnel is that it treats customers as an afterthought. Marketers spend months nurturing prospects through each stage of the buyer’s journey until they make a decision. Once the purchase is complete, the customer drops out of the bottom of the funnel and never comes back.

Then the marketer starts the whole process over again with a new prospect. All the time and effort that went into building relationships with customers who only buy once involves a great deal of work, yet the only thing it aims at is getting that customer through the door right away.

What you need to know about the flywheel

The flywheel is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a great customer experience. A flywheel is remarkable for how it stores and releases energy, which matters a lot when you think about business strategy. A flywheel is a wheel that stores energy very efficiently. The principle dates back to the Neolithic period (spindle whorls, potter’s wheels), and James Watt helped develop the flywheel in the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution. The amount of energy a flywheel stores depends on how fast it spins, how much friction it faces and how big it is. You can also picture a flywheel as being like the wheels on a train or a car.

That stored energy is especially useful when you think about the ways customers can help your business grow. Other models treat customers as an outcome, a result to be reached at the end of the process. Once that result is reached, everything you put into winning those customers is effectively wasted.

With a flywheel, you use the momentum of happy customers to drive referrals and repeat sales. In essence, your business keeps moving forward. When you start thinking of your business as a flywheel, you make different decisions and you have a clear basis for adjusting your strategy.

What is the flywheel model?

A typical flywheel model has 3 main stages:

• Attract: Draw in prospects with useful content.
• Engage: Once you have made a good first impression, make it easy for prospects to learn about your product on their own terms and timeline, so they can decide to buy.
• Delight: Design your product to be as intuitive as possible. You can provide documentation and knowledge that helps customers get more value out of it.

Reducing friction is the key to keeping the flywheel turning and growing your business. In the same way, marketing tactics such as SEO, a “freemium” option or a better user experience can add energy to the flywheel. Before you adopt this marketing strategy, consider the 6 points below:

Let customers come to you

A good product will draw plenty of people who come looking for it. All you really need to do is avoid getting in customers’ way or bothering them too much, which in practice means optimizing the ways customers can serve themselves. Remove the barriers in front of your product content. Publish your prices openly online and offer a buying process that is simple and familiar, just like the way people already order from Amazon.

Pricing and consistency

Every customer should get the same price. Price your product competitively and sustainably. Discounts spare customers from spending too much time comparing list prices on your website. Negotiating special deals also takes up a kind of repetitive work your team does not need to be doing.

Treat human interaction as a bug

Every time a customer needs to interact with one of your staff, ask what the specific reason was. What information did they need that was not provided? What transaction could they not complete by themselves? Every question a customer has to ask is evidence of some friction that you need to find and remove.

Make as many friends as you can

By building a global network of channel partners who know their specific locations well, you can avoid having to establish your own footprint in every region. On top of that, partners can supply the kind of industry-specific expertise you need in order to expand efficiently into markets that are hard to break into. To get customers involved, give them an online forum where they can ask questions and talk to one another, which also keeps costs down.

Apply many forces to scale

The more energy you put into your flywheel, the more customers it will attract. A consumer-focused company might use spin-off products, loyalty programs or influencer marketing. New products or new editions of existing ones also suit business-focused companies well, as do technical services and an ecosystem of add-ons.

Do not put too much faith in the enterprise roadmap

When early-stage B2B companies start selling to large customers, they often prioritize big deals, sometimes to the point of letting those large customers dictate licensing terms and the product roadmap. This is both understandable and tempting, but it also hides a trap. Stick closely to your model, and be ready to walk away from customers who do not respect it, so that you avoid running into trouble later on.

How the flywheel works in marketing

As mentioned above, the energy in a flywheel, or the forces acting on it, depends on three factors:

• How fast the flywheel spins
• How much friction the flywheel faces
• How big the flywheel is

The most successful companies shape their business strategy so that it addresses all three of these at once. The flywheel speeds up when you add force in the places where it has the greatest marketing impact. The forces in your marketing strategy are the programs and tactics you use to speed up your flywheel. Inbound marketing, a freemium model, frictionless selling, customer referral programs, paid ads and investment in your customer service team, for example, all have an effect on marketing. When you focus on how you can make your customers succeed, they become more likely to turn from ordinary customers into promoters.

Since you are applying force to the flywheel, you also have to make sure nothing is working against it, which means removing friction from your business strategy. Friction is anything that slows the flywheel down: poor internal processes, a lack of communication between teams, or misalignment between customers and staff, for example. You can reduce friction by looking at your team structure, at why customers leave, and at what prospects struggle with in the buyer’s journey. Are all your teams aligned, or is each one working in its own silo? Is your pricing simple, or is it cluttered with confusing fees? Do you let prospects connect with you however, whenever and wherever they want, or do they have to follow a rigid process?

The more you increase speed and reduce friction, the more points you create that push your business forward, and together these points become the force that keeps the flywheel spinning.

The benefits a flywheel brings to a business

The flywheel puts the focus on one essential factor that has changed modern marketing: the ability of customers to become active promoters of a brand.

A flywheel works like any other wheel. The more energy you put into it, the faster and faster it starts to spin. Applied to marketing, the satisfaction of your customers is the energy that keeps the wheel turning and builds momentum. Customers are also the driving force that makes the business grow.

How do you make sure customers stay with you and keep the flywheel moving? The answer is to focus on delighting customers through every stage of the buying experience, even after they have completed their purchase. That way, you can inspire customers to share their experience, and as a result bring more business your way.

The funnel structure encourages you to concentrate all of your resources on generating revenue and nothing else. With the flywheel model, you get the chance to build brand awareness and to think about your authority within the industry, which lets you work smarter and more effectively toward long-term goals.

Flywheel vs. funnel: the key differences

Why was the funnel retired?

Why do we no longer use CDs, VHS tapes or DVDs, or even standalone digital cameras? The reason is simply that times have changed. Technology keeps advancing, and it affects every part of our daily lives. One of the most important changes is how we, as customers, perceive brands. Businesses need to be aware of how customers find product information and how easily they can share their opinions about products with the world.

Over the past decade, readily available online reviews have appeared and spread quickly. Alongside those reviews, more and more people have lost their trust in marketers and salespeople. Taken together, these two shifts seem to make the funnel approach a poor fit for today’s online environment.

The old efforts poured into “widening the funnel” no longer work. People learn about products through word of mouth and online recommendations. The consideration stage has changed too. Customers are more likely to do independent research before they talk to a salesperson. Marketers have neither control over nor visibility into every touchpoint that shapes a buyer’s awareness, consideration or purchase decision.

The actions taken by each team in a company all have an effect on one another. Marketing inputs, for example, affect how quickly prospects move through the sales process. How the sale goes affects whether a prospect becomes a happy customer and helps the business succeed. And of course, support and service shape how customers become promoters, the people who recommend the business to their peers or warn others away from the company.

Today, 57% of the B2B buying process is complete before the buyer contacts a vendor. Buyers do not turn to a company’s marketing materials to make their decision: third-party review sites, peer-to-peer recommendations and word of mouth play a big part in purchase decisions. At the same time, overall trust in businesses is falling sharply: 81% of buyers trust recommendations from family and friends more than recommendations from companies, and 55% say they trust the businesses they buy from less than they used to.

Conversations about brands now happen in more places, and among more people, than ever before. The funnel is a good representation of how buyers once worked: they learned about products they found or marketing materials they were sent, talked to a salesperson to learn more, and then became customers.

But that is no longer how people actually make decisions today. They ask their own network for advice, look up mentions of the company on social media, and, as you should know, they read third-party review sites.

The traditional funnel does not account for any of these factors. Because it is linear, the funnel does not reveal the momentum you build through a great product and a great customer experience, nor the drag you run into when the processes behind your growth gradually slow it down.

Flywheel marketing opens up opportunities for businesses

The flywheel is a model that connects otherwise separate parts of the business to one another. Removing friction from your internal processes means you can get the flywheel spinning and grow faster. Most importantly, when combined with the inbound methodology, the flywheel shows how much customer experience matters. The “Delight” stage powers the “Attract” stage, because how you treat your customers naturally affects what prospects hear about you.

Put simply, the flywheel gives you a fuller view of where your business is growing fastest and reveals the areas with the biggest opportunities. Although the flywheel is a better metaphor for how organizations grow today, you will still have funnel-shaped charts and graphs showing how well various processes in the company perform. You can use funnel charts to improve a specific aspect of business performance. Just remember that even though a process can easily be pictured as a funnel, it is really part of a larger flywheel.

The flywheel and the funnel are designed in very different ways. Below, we discuss some of the main differences between the two concepts, factor by factor:

Customers as input versus output

In a funnel, customers are the output, and then they gradually drift away. Many people go in at the top, many are filtered out along the way, and only a few come out at the bottom. The few customers who did take action play no part in the process of acquiring new customers. The customer support team handles interactions with customers after they buy. That is not the marketing team’s concern.

In a flywheel, customers are the most important input. They are the energy stored up for future growth. Customers are very much the marketing team’s concern; you could even call them the marketing team’s secret weapon. What customers contribute is what makes more people know and love the brand. Through it, the business can sustain the customer lifecycle by keeping customers engaged and delighted.

This ties in well with the ideas behind inbound and outbound marketing. Selling through flywheel marketing is an approach based on attraction, and it uses less energy than pushing prospects through a funnel. The buying journey is led by the customer. The inbound marketing methodology stresses that customer relationships and brand identity are key, because they are the core principles that make the flywheel work.

An end point versus something ongoing

With the funnel process, at the end of every quarter the marketing team feels it has made no lasting impact and has to start from scratch the next quarter. In other words, success in winning new business last quarter does nothing to help hit this quarter’s lead targets.

With a flywheel, marketers realize they already have resources in place from their inbound marketing, their SEO, their engagement on social media and their loyal customers. These assets are the stored energy that keeps growth going.

Awareness versus delight

With a funnel, marketers need to focus on widening the top. That means spending large sums to make more people aware of the product and reach customers. The flywheel, by contrast, puts the emphasis on the Delight stage. Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot, argues that delighted customers are the biggest new growth engine today (Harvard Business Review, November 2018). Delight covers great customer support, quality policies, enjoyable advertising and everything else that makes customers happy. Delight brings customers back to buy again and again and gets them talking about the brand.

How do you turn a sales funnel into a flywheel?

Switching to a flywheel model can seem overwhelming at first. The good news is that most companies already have what they need to build a flywheel, because the existing funnel can serve as the foundation for the flywheel you build in the future.

A typical funnel already comes with a set of metrics that your company is tracking. Companies can carry those metrics over into the stages of the flywheel. While you are changing your metrics, take the time to consider whether you could apply more force to your company’s Delight stage.

You can also ask yourself which resources you could move from the top of the traditional funnel to the Delight stage. For example, instead of writing 2 articles on industry trends each month, could you write 2 articles that help (or simply delight) your current customers? Instead of looking for outside validation, make customers feel like insiders.

Once your metrics are mapped to the flywheel, identify the points of friction. These could be places where your customers and staff run into misinformation. Internal friction, such as infighting and disorganization, can also affect the customer experience. So build a plan to reduce friction as much as possible.

With flywheel marketing, you can align your marketing, sales and customer support teams around a single goal, then scale and develop a strategy of forces around that goal. When your whole organization works together toward delighting customers, you build a more effective flywheel that helps the company grow successfully in the future.

Moving to a flywheel strategy takes time, and it requires major adjustments. To align your teams and streamline efforts toward a shared goal, you will first want to remove any friction that could slow the flywheel down. The key here is to identify any areas of communication and organization that could be improved.

A smooth transition also depends on how you evaluate the key performance indicators that matter for your goals. You will want to work out where these metrics sit and how they relate to the flywheel goals you have set.

3 steps to turn your funnel into flywheel marketing

Step 1: Define your flywheel

There is a good chance you already have processes and programs in place that can move to the flywheel without any extra work. Your first step is to bring together your old sales funnel and your inbound marketing strategy to answer these questions:

• What core KPIs do you track, and can they be applied to the flywheel stages?
• Which elements (strategies, platforms and content types) have you used to win buyers over, and how will you apply them to the Attract, Engage and Delight stages?
• Where are the friction points where buyers drop off, whether they come from content, the handoff between stages or internal conflict?

As you review your current processes, stop and ask yourself:

• Does this process serve the convenience of the business or the needs of the customer?
• Does it apply to the Attract, Engage and Delight stages?
• How can this process be updated to fit the stages of the flywheel?

Keep whatever is working, and adapt it carefully so it meets the needs of the business. At the same time, do not be afraid to remove the elements that do not fit the flywheel (or to move them to a place where they fit better).

Step 2: Find touchpoints that create delight

Now it is time to create enjoyable experiences that spread, by delighting buyers so the flywheel runs well. Inbound marketing puts the customer at its core, and what better way to keep the flywheel growing than by delivering outstanding experiences?

You can adjust late-stage touchpoints to match what customers expect and open up bigger opportunities. For example, (almost) every business has a support process for existing customers. Could you create more delight for customers by adding live chat support? If you already offer chat support but your staff only work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., why not add a chatbot so help is available 24/7?

Step 3: Remove the friction

Finally, go through the whole process carefully, from the very beginning to the very end, and look for any sign of friction.

You can start by:

• Building an inbound strategy around value-based content delivered at the right buyer stage and at the ideal moment
• Getting your onboarding team to deliver a smooth handoff at the point of sale
• Narrowing customer communication down to one contact (or one contact team)
• Giving customers a choice of paths instead of only one way to opt in to a purchase, such as sending an email, booking a meeting, calling the agency directly or filling in a form

It is best to leave this part until last, because a lot can change while you swap out your current processes and add new touchpoints to create a better experience. Any change can create friction if it is not 100% right, so looking for sources of friction at the end helps the business catch everything.

Adtek: flywheel marketing for your business

Flywheel marketing promises to replace the funnel, yet not many businesses today are paying attention to this newer form of marketing. Adtek takes a customer-centered approach, using high-quality, premium content to create value for buyers. As a result, customers find it easier to trust the brand and connect with it.

Adtek will roll out and tailor a flywheel marketing strategy for each stage, Attract, Engage and Delight, to fit the customer journey. We help you hold buyers’ attention until they are ready to buy. Tracking customers, knowing what they are experiencing and minimizing friction points are what get the flywheel moving. In other words, when you delight your current customers, reaching prospects takes far less effort.

This article was compiled by Adtek based on original content from HubSpot (2018) and Atlassian (2021), and updated on October 19, 2026.