Customer-Centric FLYWHEEL — the Business Growth Model
Forget the Sales Funnel, concentrate on state-of-the-art tools to maximize your success.
In our introduction article on Customer Centricity Transformation we outlined the importance of understanding the difference between customer orientation and customer centricity.
Now, the first thing to kick off your business transformation process, is to set up a concrete Customer-Centric Experience Strategy. This is not a generic strategy, but a very individually defined approach based on your specific customers.
Let’s start with the strategic business growth model used by large companies like Amazon, the so-called Flywheel Model. It is seen as the counterpart to the traditional Sales Funnel. The big difference is, that with the Sales Funnel, the customer just comes as an afterthought, whereas the Flywheel puts the customers right in the center, using them as important drivers and even strong influencers of your business strategy.
As this visualization shows perfectly, the whole business growth process rotates around the customer, using the inside-out perspective of the people buying and using your products and services. Aiming for the goal of transforming a prospect (evaluator) into a consumer, a consumer into a customer and a customer into an ambassador will automatically result in specific actions that your business will have to undertake to also transform itself.
1 | Attract the Evaluator.
Before you can start thinking about how you convert your prospects into consumers, you need to be aware of the problems your users have and what they really need. Create products and services that are valuable for your desired target groups and use special offers that fit to their individual needs at the right time and in the right place. Communicate and advertise with the right message at the right time to receive a maximum of attention.
2 | Convert the Consumer.
Once you were able to solve a problem of your consumer, you need to start learning as much as possible about his/her/its behavior and needs. Make the consumers spend as much time as possible with your product, use every chance of getting and staying in contact — without being disturbing or annoying! Convince them, that your products and services are really what they have been looking for.
3 | Engage the Customer.
Don’t stop your efforts as soon as your consumers have returned to become a customer. Keep on collecting information about their individual desires, track and analyze data in order to enhance and improve your products and services for them. Use reward programs or similar value-adding services to engage and interact with your customers on a regular basis. All these improvements and added values will not only satisfy your current customers, but will also attract new prospects. ;)
4 | Delight the Ambassador.
Congratulations — if you managed to transform your customers into ambassadors, you managed to set up an emotional relationship between them and your brand. They experience your product or service as an “improvement of their life”. Ambassadors are your most worthy customers, since they will do the work for you from now on. Keep them delighted by rewarding them with special programs and help them spread the word about your awesome products — they will generate lots of new prospects for you.
During the whole process, for every action or measure you should follow an agile mindset and working process of “failing fast, learning fast”:
Envision → Plan → Build → Test → Optimize → Track → Analyze → Learn.
Always base your decisions and actions on analyzed real user data. This is not only about collecting data, this is much more about setting up the right algorithms and getting the right insights out of your analysis to identify the most relevant strategic points of action.
Stay tuned to our small series on Customer Centricity Transformation to learn more about our tools and methods — e.g. the Situative Relevance Index (SRI) — for becoming really customer-centric.
If you want to get a deeper insight on Flywheel Business Model or Customer Centricity Transformation, please contact us. We’ll be happy to help you develop an individual strategy for your specific customers.
Get in contact:
Eve Cecon | Business Innovation Strategist @ Sensory-Minds
e.cecon@sensory-minds.com
