How to Create a Customer Success Flywheel to Grow Your Business

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Introduction

Customer success is not just a buzzword or a department in your company. It is a mindset and a strategy that can help you grow your business and delight your customers. Customer success is about ensuring that your customers achieve their desired outcomes with your products or services and that they become loyal advocates for your brand.

But how do you achieve customer success? How do you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience? How do you turn your customers into promoters who refer new prospects and generate more revenue?

The answer is to create a customer-success flywheel.

What is a Customer Success Flywheel?

A customer success flywheel is a model that shows how customer success can drive business growth and profitability. It is adapted from the flywheel concept popularized by HubSpot2, which replaces the traditional funnel model of marketing and sales.

A flywheel is a wheel that stores and releases energy very efficiently. The amount of energy it contains depends on how fast it spins, how much friction it encounters, and how big it is. The faster it spins, the more momentum it has, and the harder it is to stop.

A customer success flywheel works in a similar way. It consists of three stages: attract, engage, and delight. Each stage represents a force that can speed up or slow down your flywheel.

- **Attract:** This is where you attract new prospects to your business by creating valuable content, offering free trials or demos, running paid ads, or getting referrals from existing customers.

- **Engage:** This is where you engage with your prospects and convert them into customers by providing helpful information, answering their questions, solving their problems, and showing them the value of your solution.

- **Delight:** This is where you delight your customers and turn them into promoters by delivering on your promises, providing ongoing support, educating them on best practices, and offering them opportunities to grow with you.

The goal of a customer success flywheel is to create a positive feedback loop where each stage feeds into the next one, creating more energy and momentum for your business. By attracting, engaging, and delighting your customers, you can reduce friction, increase retention, and generate more referrals and repeat sales.

Why is a Customer Success Flywheel Important?

A customer success flywheel is important because it helps you grow your business in a sustainable and scalable way. Here are some of the benefits of creating a customer success flywheel for your business:

- **It aligns your entire organization around customer success:**

A customer success flywheel requires collaboration and coordination across different teams and departments in your company. Everyone has a role to play in attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. By creating a customer success flywheel, you can foster a culture of customer-centricity and accountability in your organization.

- **It improves customer satisfaction and loyalty:**

A customer success flywheel focuses on delivering value and outcomes to your customers, not just features and functions. By understanding your customers' needs, goals, and challenges, you can provide them with solutions that help them succeed. By exceeding their expectations, you can increase their satisfaction and loyalty, which leads to higher retention and lifetime value.

- **It boosts customer advocacy and word-of-mouth:**

A customer success flywheel turns your customers into promoters who are willing to share their positive experiences with others. By providing them with incentives, rewards, or recognition, you can encourage them to refer new prospects to your business or leave positive reviews or testimonials. This can help you generate more organic traffic and leads, as well as lower your customer acquisition costs.

- **It drives business growth and profitability:**

A customer success flywheel creates a virtuous cycle of growth and profitability for your business. By attracting more prospects, engaging more customers, and delighting more promoters, you can increase your revenue and reduce your costs. You can also leverage the insights and feedback from your customers to improve your products or services, create new offerings, or enter new markets.

How to Create a Customer Success Flywheel for Your Business

Creating a customer success flywheel for your business is not a one-time project or a quick fix. It is an ongoing process that requires planning, execution, measurement, and optimization. Here are some steps you can take to create a customer success flywheel for your business:

- **Define your customer segments and personas:**

The first step is to identify who your ideal customers are, what their pain points are, what their goals are, and how they make buying decisions. You can use data from your CRM, surveys, interviews, or analytics to create customer segments and personas that represent your target audience.

- **Map out your customer journey:**

The next step is to map out the journey that your customers go through from the moment they become aware of your brand until they become loyal advocates. You can use tools like customer journey maps, touchpoint analysis, or empathy maps to visualize the different stages, interactions, and emotions that your customers experience along the way.

- **Identify the forces and friction points:**

The third step is to identify the forces and friction points that affect your customer success flywheel. Forces are the actions or strategies that you implement to speed up your flywheel, such as creating valuable content, providing helpful support, or offering upsells or cross-sells. Friction points are the obstacles or challenges that slow down your flywheel, such as poor communication, technical issues, or lack of trust. You can use tools like SWOT analysis, root cause analysis, or customer feedback to identify the forces and friction points in your customer journey.

- **Implement solutions and best practices:**

The fourth step is to implement solutions and best practices that can enhance the forces and reduce the friction points in your customer success flywheel. You can use tools like SMART goals, action plans, or project management software to prioritize and execute the tasks that can improve your customer experience. You can also use tools like customer success software, automation tools, or analytics tools to streamline and optimize your processes and workflows.

- **Measure and monitor your results:**

The final step is to measure and monitor the results of your customer success flywheel. You can use metrics like NPS, churn rate, retention rate, referral rate, or customer lifetime value to track and evaluate the performance of your customer success flywheel. You can also use tools like dashboards, reports, or surveys to collect and analyze the data and feedback from your customers.

Examples of Companies That Have Successfully Implemented a Customer Success Flywheel

There are many examples of companies that have successfully implemented a customer success flywheel and achieved remarkable results. Here are some of them:

- **Palantir:** Palantir is a software company that provides data analytics and intelligence solutions for various industries and sectors. Palantir has used customer success to build a strong and growing market position that extends well beyond the government intelligence community. Palantir's customer success team listens to customers, monitors and ensures their success, and turns their technology into a valuable solution. Palantir relies on word-of-mouth and referral selling rather than a sales force and grows and expands existing customers3.

- **Snowflake:** Snowflake is a cloud data platform that enables data-driven organizations to store, analyze, and share data. Snowflake has achieved a very high customer satisfaction and traction, with a NPS of 71, which is 3.5 times higher than the industry average for high-tech B2B companies. Snowflake's customer success team delivers onboarding, training, support, and guidance to help customers get the most out of their platform. Snowflake also showcases customers that use data-driven strategies to innovate, expand business value, and deliver enhanced customer experiences3.

- **Salesforce:** Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that provides CRM and other business solutions. Salesforce counts customer success as a critical driver of its growth and fortitude. Salesforce's customer success team provides proactive and personalized support, education, and advice to help customers achieve their goals. Salesforce also leverages its online community, events, and awards to engage and delight its customers and turn them into advocates3.

Customer success is not just a buzzword or a department in your company. It is a mindset and a strategy that can help you grow your business and delight your customers. By creating a customer success flywheel, you can align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, boost customer advocacy and word-of-mouth, and drive business growth and profitability.

If you want to learn more about how to create a customer success flywheel for your business, including getting your hands on the Customer Flywheel deck (detailed structure and presentation to implement in your company, fully editable for your use), then:

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(1) The Flywheel Model - HubSpot. https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel.

(2) Customer Success as the Flywheel of Corporate Growth and ... - Spiceworks. https://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/customer-experience/guest-article/customer-success-as-the-flywheel-of-corporate-growth-and-profitability/.

(3) Power Your Org With The Customer Success Flywheel | Catalyst. https://catalyst.io/blog/power-your-org-with-the-customer-success-flywheel.

(4) Customer Success Glossary: Customer Success Flywheel | Totango. https://www.totango.com/glossary/customer-success-flywheel.