Identifying Flywheel Insights
The flywheel reframes the funnel as a loop: attract, engage, delight, with momentum created by happy customers who drive referrals and repeat revenue. This domain tests whether you can measure conversion and retention, not just lead volume.
Three phases and their metrics
- Attract: sessions, new contacts, cost per lead.
- Engage: lifecycle conversion (lead to MQL to SQL to opportunity), deal stage conversion, sales-cycle length.
- Delight: customer retention, revenue retention and expansion, ticket resolution, satisfaction.
Momentum
Momentum is conversion rate multiplied by volume. Two teams with identical lead counts but different stage conversion rates have very different momentum. Compare stage-to-stage conversion, not just the final count, so you can see where the loop leaks.
Funnel and retention reports
Lifecycle funnel reports show how many contacts reached each stage; deal funnel reports show stage conversion and time in stage. Retention reports compare a starting customer cohort with those still customers later. Revenue retention adds expansion and subtracts churn.
Worked example
A quarter shows 10,000 visitors, 500 leads (5%), 100 MQLs (20%), 20 SQLs (20%), and 10 customers (50%). The overall visitor-to-customer rate is 0.1%. The largest absolute loss is visitors to leads (9,500), and the weakest ratio is also visitor-to-lead at 5%. Reasoning: fix the top of the loop only if lead quality holds; otherwise a higher lead rate simply feeds a leaky middle.
Traps
- Celebrating top-of-funnel growth while retention falls.
- Using current lifecycle stage as if it were a historical cohort.
- Comparing funnel totals built over different date ranges.
- Ignoring time in stage: a slow loop loses momentum even with good conversion.