When have you seen force or friction impact a company’s ability to grow?

[mbarba]

Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is integral to taking an inbound approach to business and speeding up your company’s flywheel.

Why are those important? Let’s define terms first:

• Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust.
• The flywheel is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience. Rather than thinking of your business as a funnel, with leads coming in at the top and customers coming out at the bottom, think about your business as a circle — as a flywheel.

When thinking about how to spin your company’s flywheel faster with RevOps, there are two important concepts to keep in mind:

1. Force is what allows your business to scale by spinning your flywheel faster and faster. This looks like when your customer has a great customer experience and tells their friends and colleagues about it.
2. Friction is what grinds your business to a halt, if not addressed. This is when your company provides your customers with a bad customer experience, and they also tell their friends and colleagues about it. In turn, this slows down your flywheel.

Here’s what I’d love to hear:

1. Share a time when you had an amazing customer experience and you saw a company grow faster and faster because of their wonderful customer care.
2. Share a time when you had a poor customer experience (please don’t name names or organizations) and how you saw that type of poor care affect their business.

[KNair4]

1) The time I had an amazing experience was while I was unable to book a cab for a long distance travel and dialed the customer care. They arranged a cab a cab within mintues for me It would take me according to the way I would tell them without any questions asked, with the fare being the same irrespective of a longer route taken. The customer care was super fun and efficient in delivering the service to me.

2) The time when I was unhappy or angry with a service of buisness was their cheating while filling up the petrol in the vehicle, and not admitting it. This lead to a negative image of the compay and loss of trust in their customer base too

[JCORTEZ95]

1) I wen to a hotel and a friend wanted to take a rose form the table. Since I was working for that hotel chain i told her to ask first and the staff said no. She was really upsset but understood. The next day before our checkout the staff took a huge buoque of roses to our rooms as a departure gift. It was one of the best hospitallity experiences we had.

2)I was expecting a package to be delivered and I never received it. I called the custumer success department and they told me they would get abck to me in 2-3 business days and no one did. I called back and got the same answer and even though I gave them a ticket number they mentioned they didnt had one and that I should start the proccess again. After talking hearing their script over and over again and talking with several supervisors that promissed to get back to me in a week and no one did I ended up doing  a charge back with the bank, that resulted in me having to wait 4 months in total to make sure the charge would not proceed on my card and I could purchase the product again from a different store. I will never buy from them again and have told this story several times.

[Arivasklein]

We created a deal review stage in the deal livecycle before sending the documentation to the Customer and we realize that slowing a bit, we are enforcing the Sales Rep to adjust the Opp information with the documentation, we will catch mismatch information before sending it to the Customer and we will avoid problems down the road.

A bad experience with a shoes brand customer service, they took too long to answer the questions that I had and then they wanted to charge some fees for returning the product because the person did not know the return policy.

[DRamirez87]

To me, the flywheel is a way to look at how a business grows by focusing on the customer experience. When marketing, sales, and service all work together to attract, engage, and delight customers, that momentum keeps spinning. Happy customers bring in new ones, and that energy fuels growth. In RevOps, the flywheel helps show where things are running smoothly and where there’s friction, so you can fix bottlenecks and keep the whole system moving.

[TerenceG]

The delivery app earlier insisted on a minimum amount to deliver making it good only for large orders however one company came up with an ad of delivering just one Gulab Jamun and it made everyone begin to order small things which increased the turnover and soon other business also had to follow.

However it became friction for some when they could not match or organize the orders and it became a blunt to their business. So just bringing something is not enough - you have to have a well sort of idea on all aspects including what if it fails.

[DrAditiSheth87]

Amazon- Returns take only two three minutes and build trust--> Force

Zomato- Excessive AI use, takes a lot of time to reach human customer care support person- AI keeps iniststing on answering and is not able to solve--> friction

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hey @DrAditiSheth87 👋 Welcome to our community! We're so glad you've joined us. 🙂

A great place to start is with our Community Learning Paths. They're awesome guides on content marketing, automation, and a lot more.

You are welcome to jump in, explore, and connect with everyone. We love helping each other grow, and we're excited to have you here. — Jaycee

[dyg]

1). I worked for an organization that had an incredible customer service team. Their response times were super quick whether you emailed, sent a DM, or even left a comment on social media, you always got a fast, helpful reply. That kind of responsiveness builds trust and really strengthens the relationship with the brand.

2). On the flip side, I’ve had a negative experience with a company that had terrible response times, even though their product itself was great. It took multiple follow-ups just to get a reply, and when support finally did respond, there was no real urgency to fix the issue. So even though the product was solid, the poor customer service made me want to take my business elsewhere.

[Ygorbuenobr]

I once had an amazing experience with an online store that always responded quickly and solved my problems with great attention. Over time, I noticed more people recommending and using their service, and the company kept growing.

I had a bad experience with another business where my issues were ignored, and communication was slow. Later, I saw they lost many clients and received negative reviews.

[SEmmett1]

I once worked in a different warehouse position, I saw the management offer classes for forklifting and all the employees whom signed up got certified, but only one did not. They decided to keep him where they wanted him to stay at for the rest of his life. No room for growth for him, all because he was so good at his job. The problem with this way of business planning. Is the fact they put the companies success on one man's shoulders. So when he left it put the company in an jam and now that company is no longer working at that location.

[aguerrau90]

When force and fricttion dont have sense

[PAnantharaman]

1. Inbound: The most preferred channel, with the best conversion. However, it isn't easy to generate content of value and inspire customers. 

2. Flywheel: The continuous process of driving for continual value delivery, b2b SaaS companies have 80% revenue from upsell/ crosssell. As we best understand the customer usage, context, we are best prepared for coming up with other services or offerings for customer segments.  

3. Force: The force for all customers is success; identifying ways to make their success simpler is the best way to automate

4. Friction: The complexity of the B2B environment brings in friction; some of the friction is useful, like security and personalization/customization 

[SNiston]

Friction - I have seen a company have ample internal friction by having a weak to onboarding/trianing process resulting in personnel not adequately trained even a year after their start date. This led to slow project progress, frustrated employees, frustrated clients, and a general reduction in morale and confidence. 

Force - Introducing an interactive vlog with existing/former/prospective clients on a highly relevant topic to the audience where it garnered much enthusiasm

[HLee8]

While I will not be naming this video editing software company, everybody who is a content creator or an aspiring content creator will know who it is.

Here's an example of how it used force - it has provided a professional-grade end-to-end video and audio editing suite end-to-end for free, for well over a decade and counting. This enables aspiring content creators and indie filmmakers to get onboarded to the software when they're just starting out and don't have much money. And as they grow more sophisticated,  they use more and more of its features and get entrenched. To help them with the considerable learning curve, this company provides detailed training courses and manuals, including sample footage to practice with, all for free.

But there is also friction in this experience because, as you can imagine with any software that does complex colour grading, video editing and animation, it is very demanding on hardware. A budget-strapped creator who has a low-end laptop may feel frustrated if their machine crashes after they stretched their system too far. To mitigate this, the company has published some system requirements to help people understand what hardware they need to invest in to make the software work well for them. And although there is this kind of friction for people who are budget-strapped beginners expecting "free software", it drives value because the beginners who want to get serious about video production will have to invest in a computer with bigger RAM and a better graphics card early in their journey. So, this software will provide value to the people who are investing in their growth as film or video makers, and it is better to give them a full-featured but resource-demanding product than to reduce the features but make the software less capable.

[Abdulk]

I had to purchase Loom video recording for my enterprise, and had some issues with the test account. The loom team immediately sent me a loom recording on how to fix that issue. This led me to refer them to my friends' orgs as well.  Any example of friction would be that once I bought a tool, and had an issue with it in the integration phase, despite sending the customer support several emails, I still did not hear back from them. I am sure would not recommend them to anyone. 

[LBrawner]

1. Share a time when you had an amazing customer experience and you saw a company grow faster and faster because of their wonderful customer care.   The moments that tend to stand out for me are the ones where the company I am working with genuinly seems to want to do right by the customer.  I can think of a number of examples, but a very recent one was at a restaurant.  My child has a food allergy,  and the restaurant acknowledged that they did not have many options he could have but worked with us to find something he could and made it afforable at the same time.  The restaurant did not have to go above and beyond but they chose to, which improved my experiance as the customer.
2. Share a time when you had a poor customer experience (please don’t name names or organizations) and how you saw that type of poor care affect their business.  We had a company sales person working door to door sales during covid times.  They insisted on coming into the house and would not take no for an answer.  It was extremely unprofessional and pushy.  This experiance created a bad interaction with the company to the point where I would not do business with them even if they had better prices etc.

[Paul-Ajose]

Let me reply to the first question:

I remember visiting a friend years ago when he got a call from a marketing agency, just checking in to see how his business was doing.

He immediately recognized the company and told the rep, “You don’t need to worry about me, because I have paid for the service of your CEO when he started this agency alone, and I’ve seen him grow this agency from a one-man team into many employees. He’s always delivered value and genuinely cared about my business.”

That conversation stuck with me because I wasn’t even the customer, yet I found myself impressed and curious about the company.

It showed me the power of genuine care, and that when customers feel valued, they naturally become advocates.

That kind of word-of-mouth marketing is priceless and often leads to the type of growth you can’t buy with ads.

[Atush_Sharma]

In my role as a Visa Filing Manager, I’ve seen firsthand how a positive customer experience creates momentum. For example, when we managed a client’s application with clear communication, accurate documentation, and timely updates, the client felt supported and stress-free. They later referred several of their friends and colleagues to us. That’s a direct example of force—a delighted customer becomes a promoter, which accelerates the business flywheel.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen how friction can slow everything down. There was a case where a client came to us after dealing with another provider who gave inconsistent information and delayed responses. Their frustration didn’t just stop them from continuing with that provider—it also spread to others in their circle, leading to negative word-of-mouth. That shows how friction in customer experience can grind the flywheel to a halt.

For me, these examples reinforce why RevOps is so important—it’s about aligning processes, data, and teams so every client gets a smooth and consistent experience that builds trust and fuels growth.

[MaciekG]

1. Returning product is a pain. This company often just tells you to keep the product. 

2. When calling customer service and they put you on hold without the option to have a call-back. 

[AStieglitz]

For me, one of the best customer experiences I’ve had was with a small outdoor gear company. I had an issue with sizing, and not only did they handle the exchange quickly, but they also followed up to make sure everything worked out. That kind of care made me recommend them to friends, and now I see their brand popping up everywhere. It felt like my positive experience turned me into part of their marketing engine.

On the flip side, I once dealt with a subscription service where billing issues kept happening and support was hard to reach. Each interaction left me more frustrated, and eventually, I canceled. I wasn’t the only one — I saw people sharing the same complaints online, which clearly slowed down their growth. It was a good reminder of how friction in the customer experience can spiral outward.