Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

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Cultural Sell-through and Organizational Sign-off

Flip the Funnel isn’t a fleeting experiment or a fad. It’s not the next shiny bright object or must-have of the new marketing season. Rather, it’s a seismic and irreversible shift in terms of how companies conduct business, relate to their customers, and balance the mission-critical objectives of keeping the cash registers ringing and customers singing (their praises).

As simple and profound as this may sound, the very sad truth is that the entire marketplace is built around an acquisition-centric methodology.

But it’s changing. When I visited Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum in 2009, I couldn’t help but think about another event taking place concurrently almost halfway around the world—the Cannes Advertising Festival. With a 40 percent drop in attendees and a 20 percent decrease in entries,⁵⁰ 2009’s Cannes Festival seemed more like a wake. What made this navel-gazing spectacle even more intriguing was not even the fact that the coveted film category was won by a digital agency and a web video (as opposed to a television commercial) but rather that the real, big winner in the Titanium and Integrated categories, “Obama”—was a prime example of what happens with a flipped funnel.

At the time, I reflected on my decision to be at a customer-experience forum and writing a book about retention as the new acquisition, instead of getting a tan on the French Riviera, basking in the validation or affirmation of how right I was ...