The Bowtie Model: Revenue Architecture Beyond the Funnel
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The bowtie model is a revenue framework from Winning by Design that replaces the one-way funnel with a two-sided view of the customer. The left side covers winning the customer. The right side covers onboarding, proving impact and expanding the account. The closed deal sits at the knot in the middle, shared by both sides.
The funnel taught most revenue teams to stare at one number: new deals. The bowtie asks a harder question. What happens in the months after the signature, and who is accountable for it?
What the bowtie model actually is
Winning by Design describes the Bowtie as the data model for recurring revenue, one part of its wider Revenue Architecture system. It is designed to replace the funnel and line up acquisition, retention and expansion in a single system.
Picture the classic funnel, then add a mirror image on the other side of the sale. The funnel narrows as buyers drop out. The right half widens again as customers grow, buy more and renew. Put together, the shape looks like a bowtie.
Key Facts
- The bowtie model is Winning by Design's data model for recurring revenue, covering acquisition, retention and expansion in one view.
- Winning by Design lays it out as seven stages: Awareness, Education, Selection, Commit, Onboard, Impact and Expansion, with Commit shared by both sides.
- Marketing and sales own the left side. Customer success owns the right side.
- It is built for businesses where revenue depends on customers staying, using and buying more, not just signing once.
That last point is the whole argument. If you sell a subscription, the first contract is the beginning of the revenue, not the end of the sales process.
The bowtie vs other revenue models
You've probably seen at least one of these on a slide deck. They aren't interchangeable, and picking the wrong one hides the part of the journey you most need to see.
| Model | Shape | Where it stops | Best for | Main weakness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional funnel | Narrowing cone | Closed-won | Transactional, one-time sales | Ignores everything after the deal |
| Demand waterfall | Stepped stages from inquiry to closed | Closed-won | Measuring marketing and sales handoffs | Same blind spot after the sale. See the demand waterfall |
| Flywheel | Circle | None (loop) | Explaining how happy customers feed growth | Hard to measure stage by stage |
| Customer lifecycle | Linear timeline | Renewal or churn | Customer success planning | Often disconnected from pipeline data |
| Bowtie | Two funnels joined at the deal | None (customers keep growing) | Subscription and recurring revenue | Needs shared definitions across three teams |
The funnel and waterfall are good at showing where prospects fall away. The flywheel is good at selling a philosophy. The bowtie is the one that puts a number and an owner on each step of the customer's journey, on both sides of the sale.
The bowtie stages
According to Winning by Design's own description, the model runs like this.
Left side: winning the customer
- Awareness. Potential customers recognize a problem or opportunity and learn that your solution exists.
- Education. Buyers learn about the problem, explore options and clarify what they need.
- Selection. Buyers compare options, validate fit and decide what to buy.
- Commit. The prospect becomes a customer, the deal is won and delivery begins. This stage belongs to both sides.
Right side: growing the customer
- Onboard. New customers are activated, trained and guided toward their first meaningful outcome.
- Impact. Customers see measurable value and results from what they bought.
- Expansion. Satisfied customers grow through more usage, additional products or renewals.
Notice the language. Winning by Design says marketing and sales work together to create, progress and win opportunities on the left, while customer success handles adoption, proves impact and pursues renewal and expansion on the right. Commit is the handoff point, so it's where most of the damage happens when definitions are loose.
If your team already uses the stage names in Revenue Funnel Stages, the bowtie won't throw them out. It adds the right side and asks you to treat it as seriously as the left.
Metrics at each stage
Winning by Design publishes the stage names. The thresholds are yours to set, because a $500-a-month self-serve product and a six-figure enterprise contract don't convert or onboard at the same pace. Here's what to measure at each stage, with no benchmarks assumed.
| Stage | Conversion metric | Time metric | Volume or health metric |
|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Visitor or signal to known lead | Time from first touch to first conversation | Leads by source and segment |
| Education | Lead to qualified opportunity | Days in stage | Engagement per account |
| Selection | Opportunity to closed-won | Sales cycle length | Pipeline coverage |
| Commit | Closed-won with complete handoff | Days from signature to kickoff | Share of deals with success criteria recorded |
| Onboard | Customers reaching activation | Time to first value | Onboarding tasks overdue |
| Impact | Customers hitting their stated outcome | Time to outcome | Product usage, health score |
| Expansion | Renewal rate, expansion rate | Days from trigger to expansion deal | Expansion pipeline, net revenue retention |
Two of these deserve a closer look.
Time to first value is the right-side equivalent of sales cycle length. It tells you how long a new customer waits before the product pays them back. If it's growing, expansion will suffer later, even if every renewal call sounds friendly.
Net revenue retention is the right-side equivalent of win rate. It combines churn, downgrades and upsell into one number for the existing base. If you don't track it, the right side of the bowtie is decoration.
For the left-side conversion math across the whole journey, see Full-Funnel Conversion Rates.
How to implement the bowtie model
Don't redraw your whole GTM motion in one quarter. Roll it out in layers.
Step 1: Map your current stages to the seven. List the lifecycle stages in your CRM and customer success tool. Place each one against the bowtie. You'll usually find the left side is detailed and the right side is a single field called "customer."
Step 2: Name an owner for every stage. One person or team, not a committee. Marketing and sales on the left, customer success on the right, and a named owner for Commit. A simple RACI table is a useful way to record who decides what.
Step 3: Write entry and exit criteria. A stage without evidence is just a label. Define what must be true to enter Onboard (signed contract, named customer owner, success criteria) and what must be true to exit it (first outcome reached). The funnel governance article covers how to keep these definitions enforced.
Step 4: Fix the Commit handoff first. This is the most fragile point. Require the deal record to carry the buyer's goals, key contacts, promised timeline and any custom commitments before it can be marked closed-won.
Step 5: Add the right-side data. Create fields and reports for activation date, time to first value, outcome achieved, health score, renewal date and expansion trigger. The Customer to Expansion Process lays out how these records move once a customer is live.
Step 6: Set handoff SLAs. Agree on response times between teams, such as how quickly customer success must contact a new customer after Commit. The Full-Funnel SLA Model gives a starting structure.
Step 7: Review it on a cadence. Run a monthly review of both sides together. If marketing, sales and customer success review separate dashboards, you've built three funnels, not one bowtie.
Ready-to-copy bowtie template
Copy this into a spreadsheet, wiki page or CRM planning doc and fill in the blanks.
| Stage | Owner | Entry criteria | Exit criteria | Key metric | Target | Review cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | ||||||
| Education | ||||||
| Selection | ||||||
| Commit | ||||||
| Onboard | ||||||
| Impact | ||||||
| Expansion |
A filled-in row might read like this for Onboard: owner is the onboarding lead; entry is signed contract plus a named customer champion; exit is the customer completing the first agreed outcome; key metric is time to first value; target is whatever your best cohort achieved last year; review is weekly for active onboardings.
Leave the target column empty until you have two or three months of real data. A made-up target teaches the team to ignore the template.
Bowtie examples by business function
The model doesn't belong to one department. Here's how it changes the work in each.
| Function | Left-side job | Right-side job | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | Create awareness and education, qualify demand | Feed customer stories and usage insights back to campaigns | Success is measured on pipeline quality and retained revenue from each source, not leads alone |
| Sales | Run selection, win the commit | Join the handoff, stay involved in the first 30 days if the deal was complex | Quota conversations include handoff quality, not just closed-won |
| Customer success | Join late-stage deals to hear what was promised | Own onboarding, impact and expansion | Gets a seat in forecasting and planning |
| Finance | Forecast new bookings | Forecast renewals and expansion | Plans revenue from the installed base, not only new logos |
| RevOps | Define stages and routing | Define health, renewal and expansion data | Builds one report that spans both sides. See RevOps and Customer Success |
A small example makes it concrete. A B2B software company notices that enterprise deals close fine but take months to launch. The funnel says sales is healthy. The bowtie shows Commit-to-Onboard is the problem: the buyer's goals weren't recorded, so customer success starts every account with discovery calls the buyer thought were already done. The fix isn't a new sales tactic. It's a required handoff form.
Do's and don'ts
Do:
- Treat Commit as a shared stage with a shared definition.
- Give customer success a seat in revenue planning.
- Track one set of customer IDs from lead to renewal so the data connects.
- Start with the stages causing the most arguments.
- Use the Revenue Operations Framework to place the bowtie inside your wider operating model.
Don't:
- Don't copy another company's thresholds or conversion targets. Build them from your own cohorts.
- Don't stop reporting at closed-won because the dashboard was built that way.
- Don't give the right side to customer success without giving them access to deal context.
- Don't assume the bowtie fits a one-time sale. If customers rarely return, the classic funnel may be enough.
- Don't add stages until the seven are working.
When the bowtie is the wrong tool
It fits recurring-revenue businesses best. If you sell one-time projects or low-price transactional products, the right side may be thin, and the extra structure might not repay the effort. The same goes for very early companies without a customer success function. In that case, run a simple funnel and name one person who owns post-sale outcomes.
And remember that a framework is a map, not the terrain. The bowtie won't fix poor onboarding by itself. It makes poor onboarding visible and gives someone the job of fixing it.
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Principal Solution Architect