The Bow Tie Model – Rethinking the Revenue Journey Beyond Close/Won
- Louis Fernandes
- Dec 2, 2025
- 5 min read
It’s hard to overstate how much of B2B SaaS GTM strategy still revolves around a single focal point: acquisition. Sales processes are mapped around funnel stages. Tech stacks are optimised for pipeline coverage and conversion. Compensation plans reward net new bookings. Even Sales and Marketing alignment, when it exists, tends to orient around lead flow, qualification, and handoff.
This isn’t inherently wrong — new logos are vital, and acquisition is always going to be the front door. But if you’re building a recurring revenue business, and you structure your GTM engine only around the left side of the customer lifecycle, you’re solving for the wrong equation.
Enter the Bow Tie Model, developed by Jacco van der Kooij at Winning by Design. It reimagines the funnel by visualising the entire customer lifecycle — not just what happens before a deal is signed, but everything that follows.
It’s a deceptively simple visual — but one that reframes the revenue engine completely. Because in SaaS, the real commercial value isn’t captured at the point of sale — it’s created in the months and years that follow. That’s when adoption kicks in. That’s when impact is delivered. That’s when expansion becomes possible. And that’s where you earn the right to retain.
In other words: your revenue engine doesn’t stop at Close/Won — that’s where it begins.
Why Funnels Fail in a Recurring Revenue World
Funnels are optimised for acquisition. And in a traditional one-time purchase world, that makes perfect sense: awareness leads to interest, interest to consideration, and so on down the line until a deal is closed.
But SaaS isn’t won-and-done.
The economic value of a new customer is not realised at Close/Won. That’s the starting line — not the finish. From that point onward, the customer journey continues across onboarding, adoption, value realisation, renewal, and expansion. Each of those stages contributes exponentially more to customer lifetime value than the initial deal.
The bow tie model helps visualise this. The left side of the bow still captures the traditional pre-sale funnel — pipeline stages, deal progression, and commercial close. But the right side of the bow is where the real GTM sophistication begins. It reflects everything post-sale: onboarding, success planning, advocacy, and growth.
In other words: your revenue engine doesn’t stop at Close/Won — that’s where it begins.
And yet, for many SaaS businesses, this second half is left to chance. Or worse — it’s left to a CS team that is under-resourced, disconnected from Sales, and incentivised to manage churn rather than drive growth.
The Bow Tie Model in Practice
Developed by Winning by Design, the Bow Tie Model maps out the full customer lifecycle across two symmetrically important sides:
The left side: Awareness → Education → Selection → MUTUAL COMMIT
The right side: MUTUAL COMMIT → Onboarding → Adoption → Expansion (Advocacy)
It’s designed to counter the flawed mental model that sees revenue as a one-time event. Instead, it reframes it as a compounding lifecycle — one where customer value, commercial opportunity, and revenue maturity all increase over time, provided you structure your GTM function to enable it.
In practical terms, this means rearchitecting the post-sale engine with the same level of precision and intent as the pre-sale one. It also means measuring what matters after Close/Won — not just churn prevention, but health, value delivery, and revenue expansion.
Because let’s be clear: a £100k initial deal may look great on paper, but in a recurring model, its true value might be £300k–£500k over its lifetime. Conversely, failing to realise that value — whether due to onboarding delays, product misalignment, or poor engagement — can turn even the best acquisition into negative ROI.
Shifting GTM Focus to Renewal and Expansion
For most SaaS companies, the revenue model is disproportionately focused on acquisition metrics: SQLs, pipeline coverage, new bookings. But if you truly believe in lifetime value, renewal and expansion are the compounding engine that drives profitability.
This shift requires more than just a philosophical reframe. It requires structural change.
You can’t just track NRR and hope for the best. You need to build a GTM system that makes NRR predictable. That means aligning Customer Success, Account Management, Marketing, and even Product around revenue outcomes — not just activity or satisfaction scores.
And just as critically: you need to stop thinking of expansion as opportunistic. Expansion isn’t what happens when someone in CS has a bright idea at renewal time. Expansion should be a designed motion — structured, forecastable, and aligned to real, measured customer outcomes.
Challenging the Handoff: Should Sales Stay Involved Post-Sale?
One of the most significant — and often unexamined — assumptions in most GTM models is that at Close/Won, the AE steps away and Customer Success takes over.
There are reasons for this. It creates focus. It allows for specialisation. It mirrors the internal divisions we’ve historically used to scale.
But here’s the question: is it still the right model for Enterprise SaaS?
If the commercial relationship is only just beginning at Close/Won, does it really make sense to hand over ownership of that relationship to someone who hasn’t been involved in the buying process?
More provocatively: what if the AE retained ownership of the account for the first 6–12 months post-sale?
There are pros and cons.
The upside:
Continuity for the customer
More accountability for deal quality and expectations
Stronger relationship momentum moving into adoption and value delivery
The challenges:
Complexity in resource management
Risk of sales teams overextending
Potential overlap with CS roles and incentive conflicts
Still, the model is worth interrogating. Because if we’re serious about expansion and value realisation, it may no longer make sense to draw such hard lines between acquisition and retention. What if GTM orchestration looked more like a relay than a handoff — with overlapping ownership and joint accountability for post-sale success?
It’s not how most SaaS GTM models are designed today. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Making the Shift to Bow Tie GTM
To adopt the Bow Tie mindset, you don’t need to burn down your GTM org. But you do need to start asking some tough questions.
Where does your customer journey actually end — and why?
Is Customer Success structured to own outcomes or just “keep customers happy”?
Are AEs measured purely on bookings, or also on downstream impact?
Are your metrics focused only on pipeline and ACV, or are NRR and LTV embedded in your GTM KPIs?
Do your playbooks and processes guide your teams beyond Close/Won?
If the answer to most of those questions is “not yet” — you’re not alone. Most SaaS companies are still solving for the funnel. But the ones that scale profitably are solving for the bow tie.
Closing Thoughts
Funnels are for acquisition. Bow ties are for revenue.
If you’re still building GTM systems optimised only for what happens before Close/Won, you’re leaving the majority of your commercial potential on the table.
In next week’s blog, we’ll start unpacking some of the other Winning by Design concepts and models that Jacco and the team have been waxing lyrical about over the last several years. As an aside, if you're not already following The WbD YouTube Channel, where you can hear Jacco running through a lot of the concepts we're going to dive into, you should - he has a unique way of explaining it all.
Until then, I'd love to hear how much of your revenue engine is built for the right side of the bow tie?
