The Marketing Funnel is Failing You: Growth is a Flywheel
The marketing funnel is pervasive. This framework—the dominant mindset among marketing professionals, whether B2B or B2C—is built on a series of assumptions:
First, we need to make people aware.
Then, a subset of those people become familiar with what we offer and consider purchasing.
Even fewer purchase.
If we’re lucky, we have a small sliver of buyers who advocate on our behalf.
We lose people at every stage. It seems like an unavoidable reality.
But what if this mindset is all wrong?
This innocent enough triangle forces us to accept systemic loss. There’s no momentum. There’s no feedback loop. There’s no priority on reducing friction. There’s no relationship between advocacy and awareness.
As a result, we pour money into the top and hope that what comes out on the bottom is enough to meet our business objectives.
This framework isn't just inefficient—it's increasingly out of step with how modern businesses, especially purpose-driven ones, create sustainable growth. The funnel's emphasis on volume over value, and transactions over relationships, limits its effectiveness in today's market where trust and authenticity fuel business success. We burn bridges spamming thousands of people with ads and emails they don’t want, not considering the cost to our brand.
Enter the growth flywheel.
The flywheel concept was originally conceived by Jim Collins. This iteration of the growth flywheel originated in the B2B tech world, and surprisingly has not permeated the rest of business. Applying this tool represents a huge opportunity for any business (even non-profits) to accelerate growth.
The growth flywheel can and should forever replace the marketing funnel.
Understanding your flywheel isn’t just about mapping the customer journey—it’s about identifying what’s holding back your momentum at each stage. Just as friction points limit a physical flywheel's speed, specific constraints at each phase limit your business growth. Identifying and addressing these constraints is critical to accelerating growth.
I’ve made a few modifications to the common tech flywheels so that it’s broadly applicable to all businesses. Let's examine each phase, considering both our goals and the typical constraints that might be limiting progress. (Note: I’m starting at the top, but you can start anywhere on the flywheel.)
Ideal Customer
At the center of the flywheel is the ideal customer. Your flywheel strategy must target customers where you have a clear right to win and who have sufficient market potential to achieve your business goals.
Customers → Delight
Our goal is to ensure customers fully appreciate the value of our product or service. I intentionally put delighting customers on top, rather than building awareness. We first must ensure a quality product before we invest behind building awareness. While one enter the flywheel from any point, focusing on delighting customers as the first step toward awareness building is an important mindset shift.
At this stage, limiting constraints often center on product quality, experience or service delivery. Even great products can be undermined by poor onboarding, insufficient customer support, or unrealistic expectations of performance. If you’re not delighting your customers, you have no hope of a sustainable business.
Advocates → Enable
Our goal is to make it easy and natural for delighted customers to spread the word, creating a virtuous cycle that attracts new strangers to your business.
The limiting constraint here is almost always a lack of infrastructure that makes advocacy easy and rewarding. Traditional tech growth flywheels often lack and explicit “enable” strategy. Brands can delight without creating advocates, so you need an intentional strategy to turn happy customers into brand promoters.
Strangers → Attract
Our goal is not just to build awareness, but to attract the right people to our business. We need to reach the right people where they’re naturally receptive to our value proposition.
The common limiting constraint here? Often it’s not how many people have heard of our brand, but whether we have identified, reached, and resonated with the right audience, especially given increasingly crowded channels and categories saturated with options.
Prospects → Engage
Our goal is to turn interest into action by engaging prospects meaningfully. This requires understanding their needs and making our offering and information clear, relevant, and helpful.
The limiting factor is often the capacity and capability to engage prospects effectively—whether that’s sales expertise or systems and content for nurturing relationships.
In a recent interview, Sean Ellis, author of Hacking Growth, says that he never puts significant resources into building awareness until he fully optimizes the flywheel. That is, he makes sure he reduces loss and friction as much as possible before investing to build awareness to scale. I see so many companies focus on awareness, customer acquisition or lead generation before they have solid engagement, product performance or advocacy strategies in place.
For example, Zoom didn’t enter the video-conferencing market with massive marketing campaigns. In fact they had no marketing team for two years. Instead, they recognized that their key limiting constraint was product experience. As such, leaders focused relentlessly on creating a solution that would delight users and spark natural advocacy. Their “freemium” model led to fast adoption and word of mouth advocacy that spread organically.
Four Ways the Flywheel Transforms Growth
1) It expects continuity over loss.
A funnel expects drop-off from one stage to the next. A flywheel is only operating efficiently when there is minimal loss. While traditional marketing accepts waste as inevitable, the flywheel pushes us to address the limiting constraints at each stage. This creates a more efficient and sustainable system that prioritizes genuine value creation over volume-based marketing tactics.
2) You can activate the flywheel from any starting point.
If you have a killer product, begin with enabling more advocates. If the flywheel is already humming, put more effort into building awareness to attract potential customers. If sales is your growth engine, optimize your sales process to close any leaky buckets, converting more prospects into customers. Unlike traditional push marketing, this flexibility allows you to lead with your strongest value proposition.
3) It integrates and values each of the core growth functions.
Marketing, sales, product/service, and customer success are the core growth engines of a business. The flywheel shows the unique and essential role each plays in delivering growth. Just like any athletic team, each function must play their position with excellence, otherwise everyone loses. The flywheel promotes building lasting customer relationships rather than just driving transactions.
4) It turns customers into awareness generators.
A funnel considers advocates “nice to have,” not core awareness generators for the business. And yet, most people prefer and trust word-of-mouth recommendations over ads or content coming from the business itself. This is especially true for purpose-driven brands, where authentic customer advocacy carries both the product value proposition and the brand's broader mission. When we enable our customers to advocate on behalf of our business, we activate a powerful engine for trusted (and low cost!) awareness building.
A Case Study: Allbirds
When Allbirds entered the footwear market, they chose an unconventional path to growth. They attracted attention through material innovation (notably wool) that connected to their point of difference on comfort, combined with an extensive focus on sustainability, including carbon footprint labeling.
• Delight: Since inception, Allbirds has delighted customers with a focus on comfort, supported by their choice of sustainable materials. Their retail staff, customer service, and impact initiatives like "ReRun" resale program keep customers engaged beyond the first purchase.
• Enable: A sophisticated advocacy program combines micro-influencers, user-generated content (#weareallbirds), and shareable sustainability metrics, making it easy for both casual fans and committed environmentalists to spread the word and attract new customers.
• Attract: Allbirds builds awareness through a powerful mix of word of mouth referrals who are activated through their ambassador program, social advertising, sustainability leadership (carbon labeling), and selective retail locations that let customers experience their materials firsthand.
• Engage: They convert interest through simplified shopping experiences (limited styles, clear pricing), risk-free trials, and targeted messaging that spans both lifestyle benefits (comfort, design) and environmental impact ("Flight Status" scores).
How to Measure Flywheel Effectiveness
The following relevant metrics will prove your growth flywheel is working.
1) Conversion rates from one stage to the next: These should increase over time, including the percentage of customers who advocate.
2) Increasing word-of-mouth attribution: As advocates build awareness, higher volumes of new customers will materialize.
3) Customer acquisition costs decline: If the flywheel is operating efficiently (all else being equal), the cost to acquire new customers should go down.
The Future of Growth is Circular, Not Linear
The funnel served its purpose to help brands understand how business and marketing objectives change throughout the customer journey. However, this model is not helpful to deliver real value to customers. Exclusively relying on paid mass awareness building is inefficient, expensive and increasingly ineffective. The flywheel model doesn’t just drive more efficient growth; it creates the conditions for long term sustainability by aligning business objectives with customer value. When we shift from thinking about marketing as a linear process of loss to a circular system of momentum, we unlock the potential for both profit and positive impact.
What limiting constraints will you address first to get your flywheel spinning?
