Here’s something worth thinking about: the system most B2B companies use to manage revenue was designed over a hundred years ago for one-time transactions.
The marketing and sales funnel takes a prospect from awareness to interest to decision to purchase. Lead comes in, gets qualified, moves through stages, deal closes. CRM gets updated. Everyone moves on to the next deal.
That’s the whole system.
For a company selling one-time equipment orders, this made sense. The seller’s job was to close the deal. What happened after was the buyer’s problem.
But if any part of your revenue is recurring — renewals, service contracts, expansion, upsells — that’s where the actual revenue relationship begins. And your funnel has nothing to say about it.
The funnel was built for ownership, not subscriptions
The classic marketing and sales funnel was designed for a world where the buyer pays once, gets the product, and figures out how to get value from it on their own. The seller’s job ends at delivery.
In my previous post, I wrote about how recurring revenue shifts risk from the buyer to the seller. If the buyer can walk away at renewal, then everything between “closed won” and the next contract decision is where revenue is actually made or lost.
Your funnel doesn’t cover that period. Your CRM probably doesn’t track it. Your sales team definitely doesn’t get paid for it. And in most organizations, there’s no real process for it. There’s a person, or a small team, doing their best. But there’s no system.
What a full revenue system looks like
Revenue architecture thinking replaces the funnel with something called the Bowtie model, from Jacco van der Kooij’s work at Winning by Design. The idea is simple. Take your marketing and sales funnel and extend it past the point of sale.
The left side of the bowtie is acquisition. Awareness, education, selection. This is familiar. It’s where most companies spend their energy and money.
The middle is what van der Kooij calls “mutual commit.” Not just “deal closed.” Both sides commit: the seller commits to delivering results, the buyer commits to actually using the product or service. A signed contract isn’t the end of a sale. It’s the start of a relationship that needs to deliver.
The right side is retention and expansion. Onboarding, adoption, renewal, upsell, cross-sell. This is where recurring revenue actually lives. And in most B2B companies, this side is either not built at all or held together with spreadsheets and good intentions.
The point of the bowtie shape: acquisition and retention aren’t separate things that happen to share a CRM. They’re two halves of the same system, and they need to be designed together.
What I actually see in companies
I’ve spent the last ten years working with B2B companies on CRM and revenue operations. The pattern is always the same.
On the left side of the bowtie, there’s usually something. Marketing automation, lead scoring, pipeline stages, dashboards, forecast meetings. It might not be perfect, but there’s a structure.
On the right side, there’s almost nothing. A renewal date somewhere in a calendar. Maybe a customer success manager who inherited a list of accounts with no context about how or why those deals were sold. No standard onboarding. No proactive renewal process. No plan for expansion.
In manufacturing, where I do most of my work, this is especially visible. A company sells a piece of equipment for hundreds of thousands of euros. There’s a detailed, well-managed sales process to get there. Then the service contract that comes with it — worth tens of thousands per year in recurring revenue — gets handled as an afterthought. Renewal is a PDF emailed 30 days before expiry. Nobody tracks whether the customer is actually getting value from the equipment.
But this isn’t just a manufacturing problem. I see it in SaaS, in professional services, in industrial suppliers. The acquisition side gets the process, the tools, and the attention. The retention side gets whatever’s left over.
The cost of only building half the system
When you only manage the left side, a few things happen.
Renewals become reactive. Instead of engaging customers 90 days before their contract ends, the first conversation about renewal happens when someone notices the expiry date. By then, the customer has already decided.
Context disappears at handoff. The sales team knows why a customer bought, what their priorities were, what they were promised. None of this transfers to whoever manages the account after the sale. Customer success starts from scratch every renewal.
Expansion revenue stays invisible. Nobody is tracking whether the customer is getting value, so nobody knows when they’re ready for more. The upsell conversation never happens. Or a sales rep treats every existing customer like a new prospect, which burns trust and inflates cost to serve.
Feedback loops don’t close. In a well-designed system, data from existing customers feeds back into how you acquire new ones. Which customers renew most reliably? Which deal sizes lead to the best retention? Which onboarding patterns predict expansion? Without the right side built, this data doesn’t exist.
From selling value to delivering impact
The fundamental shift here is moving from promising value to delivering impact. In a one-time sale model, the seller promises value: “this product will solve your problem.” The buyer pays for the promise.
In a recurring revenue model, the seller has to deliver actual, measurable results — repeatedly. If the customer doesn’t experience that, they leave. No contract language changes that over time.
This means the right side of your bowtie isn’t optional. It’s the part of the system that determines whether your recurring revenue actually recurs.
When I’m scoping a CRM or quoting project, one of the first questions I ask is: what happens after the order is created? If the answer is “it goes to operations” or silence, that tells me the system is incomplete. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the acquisition side is. If the post-sale experience has no process, the revenue engine is running on one cylinder.
Closed loops make the whole thing work
An open-loop system takes in leads, runs a sales process, and produces revenue — and never feeds results back in. That’s a funnel. Leads go in, deals come out, repeat.
A closed-loop system uses what it learns to improve itself. Customer outcomes inform which leads to pursue. Renewal patterns shape how you price. Churn reasons feed back into product and onboarding. Happy customers generate new leads at a fraction of the cost of paid acquisition.
These loops exist in every recurring revenue business whether you design them or not. The difference is whether you’re capturing and acting on them — or just letting them happen by accident.
The companies that grow efficiently aren’t just good at acquiring new customers. They’ve built systems where existing customers naturally contribute to future growth. That only works when you treat the right side of the bowtie with the same seriousness as the left.
Where to start
If you recognize your company in any of this, here’s what I’d suggest.
Map your current customer journey past the point of sale. Where does the handoff happen? What information transfers with it? Who owns the customer after the deal closes?
Look at your CRM. Does it track anything beyond the opportunity? Can you trace a customer from first contact through renewal and expansion — or does the trail go cold at closed won?
Ask whoever handles your accounts after the sale what they wish they knew about each account when they take it over. The gap between what they need and what they get tells you exactly where the system breaks.
Then build the right side of the bowtie with the same intentionality you put into the left. Standard onboarding. Proactive renewal workflow. Expansion signals tied to usage data. And feedback loops that connect customer outcomes back to how you acquire the next customer.
The funnel got you this far. But if you want your revenue to actually recur, you need to build the other half.