How to align your teams around the flywheel

As HubSpot’s Chief Customer Officer, my charter is to create a delightful customer experience.

Culture is the starting point. Once you have a strong customer-first culture in place, the next step is putting rigor behind your disciplines — the processes that make your business run and grow. The four disciplines that help drive delightful customer experiences are aligned teams, aligned strategy, aligned systems, and aligned incentives.

Let’s start with aligned teams, since teams are the foundation of everything.

Customer experience is all the touchpoints a customer has with your company and their perception of those touchpoints. Internally, dozens of teams build that experience. At HubSpot, our teams work across multiple time zones and languages too. But to our customers? We are just HubSpot. One company, one brand, one experience. Therefore, the first and most foundational discipline of customer experience is aligning your teams around the flywheel.

From funnel to flywheel

Before we get into aligned teams, a quick detour — what’s a flywheel?

Historically, companies have been organized around the customer funnel — prospects convert on a piece of marketing content, get passed to sales, the deal is won, and then the customer is passed off to customer support.

This is a familiar, but flawed, motion. When I began my career in on-premise B2B software, we had gongs and celebrations when big deals were closed. But winning the deal is where it ended — delighting the customer wasn’t a strategic focus, and customer experience suffered as a result.

The flywheel drives a very different mindset. In a flywheel model, winning the customer isn’t the end of the customer journey, it’s the beginning. The quality of the end-to-end experience — marketing, sales, and customer success/service — determines whether customers churn or become advocates for your brand. A delightful customer experience will transform more customers into advocates and open the door for cross-selling, spinning the flywheel faster. A friction-filled experience will bring the whole thing grinding to a halt. (This especially matters in SaaS, where our customers vote with their wallets every month or every year.)

Ultimately, this model works because it centers the customer in everything we do. To operationalize it, start with aligning teams around the flywheel.

Why alignment matters

There’s a common misconception that a good strategy guarantees good results. But, as my colleagues have heard me say countless times, alignment is more important than strategy.

Strategy is merely a series of choices about what you will and will not do as a company. Without alignment, that strategy does not have value or power.

Think of each team’s impact as a vector. A vector is a quantity that has both direction and magnitude. Each of your teams is working on projects of varying magnitude. The key to growth is to make sure those vectors are all pointing in the same direction.

Aligning teams is the first discipline of customer experience because it forces you to break down your silos. When companies are in hyper growth mode, it feels easier to have teams run independently than slowing them down with process. But without top-down alignment, they will end up running pretty far away from each other.

More importantly, customers will be able to feel the sharp edges in your organization. Every handoff and every cross-functional area of your customer experience is likely to suffer if you don’t have internal alignment.

Break silos to scale

Two things matter when aligning teams — the decision making group, and the decision making cadence.

1. The Group

Silos form when people who ought to be making decisions together, make decisions separately. Therefore, start by getting all your decision makers in the room. These should be the core leadership across the end-to-end customer experience:

• The go-to-market teams — Marketing, Sales, Customer Service/Success/Support
• The cross-functional teams that help power the flywheel — Product, HR/People Ops, Finance, Business Enablement

At HubSpot, this group is called the Flywheel team. Organizing under this model centralizes our decisions about the customer. Decisions are aligned from inception, faster to make, and take the end-to-end customer experience into account.

2. The Cadence

The cadence is the practice that keeps your decision making group aligned. Cadence needs to be determined at two levels:

Level 1 is the broad “rhythm of the business” which defines where the organization focuses during the year. Each of our quarters has a theme. Q1 is kickoff season to get the year started. During Q2, we “Think Big” about industry trends and long-term investments to make as a business. Q3 is about planning and what we will do in the next 1–3 years. Finally, Q4 is about setting goals and closing out the year.

If one department is Thinking Big while another is kicking off the year and a third is planning, the business will be a mess. Having a quarterly theme keeps our leadership team aligned on what we should be thinking about and when we should be thinking about it.

“Rhythm of the business” also includes regular checkpoints like QBRs, monthly KPI reviews, etc. These checkpoints are highly cross-functional and should be a balance of hindsight (what happened), insight (why it happened), and foresight (what is likely to happen next).

Level 2 is the day-to-day cadence which keeps us aligned as work actually gets done. Our Flywheel team meets biweekly with discussion-focused agendas — for example, roadblocks a team might be facing or opportunities for cross-functional work. This ensures we’re coming together to solve problems as a team day to day.

Aligning teams is a multiyear journey. Breaking silos will not happen overnight so you have to be prepared to invest the time and effort. But there’s a huge payoff.

For your customers, the benefit is clear — teams that are working in sync, in service of their needs, will create a better experience. Handoffs and transitions will be smooth. The customer experience will be fully integrated and therefore can be personalized and customized for each customer.

For your organization, breaking silos is the first step to scale. A siloed business has gaps that require more people, more project managers, and more meeting time to resolve.

Without breaking silos, you will always need more inputs — more project managers, more meetings, more time — to grow outputs. This is not only an expensive way to run a business, it makes you “big and slow.” By breaking silos, you lay the foundation to move faster and become more customer-centric.