Your Funnel is F*ck'd | How to Fix Your Go-To-Market Strategy

Outdated sales funnels create friction between internal teams, deliver the wrong outcomes, and stall revenue growth. We’ll explore a new paradigm, the bowtie funnel, that integrates 3 sets of Revenue Systems (Attraction Systems, Acceleration Systems, and Activation Systems) to create alignment across the organization, provide focus on the best GTM strategies, and ensure reliable revenue growth, helping leaders at B2B SaaS/SwaS and Professional Services firms break through revenue barriers.

Many sales funnels today are so convoluted and antiquated, it’s more like a Rube Goldberg device than an efficient strategy for growth. This would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. The traditional sales funnel is simply broken. For B2B SaaS/SwaS and even Professional Services firms in today’s era of recurring revenue models and hypergrowth expectations, this outdated framework is doing more harm than good. Instead of driving revenue, it’s creating silos, misalignment, and missed opportunities.

What’s the solution? A paradigm shift. Enter the “Bowtie” funnel—a framework designed for today’s modern businesses. This framework integrates systems for Attracting more of the right prospects, Accelerating your best opportunities through the sales pipeline and Activating your existing clients for faster renewals, larger upsells, and more referrals.

In this article, we’ll break down why the old funnel fails and how the new approach succeeds in creating the freedom to focus on what really matters: delighting your customers and driving scalable and sustainable growth.

Problem #1. The Old Funnel Stops at the First Sale

The traditional funnel focuses entirely on getting customers to the point of purchase, leaving everything that happens post-sale as an afterthought. This is a critical mistake in a world where exponential growth comes from retention and expansion revenue.? It was this short-sighted view that led to the B2B SaaS crash at the end of 2021 and the death of the “Growth at all Costs” approach.

Businesses that only focus on the first sale can only grow linearly, and the same volume of growth creates declining growth rates every year.

Exponential growth, the “right side hockey stick curve” everyone is chasing only comes when compounding Acquisition, Retention, and Expansion revenue streams. Growth from new customers becomes more expensive and eventually plateaus as new competitors appear and the market matures.? Customer retention, upsells, and cross-sells are the real drivers of hypergrowth. If your funnel doesn’t account for this, it’s setting you up to stall out.

Problem #2. The Old Funnel Distracts by Promoting Multiple GTM Motions

The traditional Sales Funnel assumes a simple relationship – leads go in, sales come out.? But it gets harder and harder to find increasing volume of qualified leads to match the desired growth via acquisition revenue.? So you add another channel or tactic, which is fine, because more leads means more sales, right?? Wrong!?

More leads means more sales, right?? Wrong!?

Not every lead is a good lead (see “Are Your Leads KILLING Your Business?”) and every time you add a new channel or Go-To-Market Motion, you dilute your focus and take resources from more successful strategies. Research shows that companies that focus on refining 1 GTM motion see greater revenue faster than those that distract themselves by dabbling in lots of different attempts.

Not only does experimenting with lots of different GTM motions create confusion, inefficiency and slower growth, it can get you fired.

The distraction that comes from playing around with multiple GTM motions throws your organization off track.? Successful companies double-down on a strategic bet and perfect one GTM motion that aligns with your ACV and target Volume of Deals. This focus gets everyone moving in the same direction, which accelerates speed and works through inefficiencies in the process, creating a deeper moat and higher wall against competitors.

Most GTM issues are caused by the number of different interconnections between different tactics and tools.? The complexity increases exponentially with each additional initiative escalating costs and tanking productivity.? There are only so many hours in the day, and only so much budget. Success comes from focus, not flailing.

Success comes from focus, not flailing.

Problem #3. The Old Funnel Disconnects your 3 Revenue Drivers -- Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success

When Marketing is chasing “leads” (most of which are unqualified and will never convert), and Sales is chasing “deals” (by misleading customers into buying something that will never renew) and Customer Success is scrambling to plug the holes in a leaky bucket, the organization can never achieve that hockey stick growth that only comes from adding retention and expansion onto acquisition revenues.

Furthermore, each team operates with its own metrics, creating silos that hinder collaboration and alignment. New team leaders come in with a new tactic / tool / initiative from their previous experience or the latest conference/webinar to try to fix their metrics, but that just destabilizes the organization further.

Disconnected teams aren’t just inefficient; they’re killing the customer experience. Customers care about the impact your solution makes on their business, not your vanity metrics. When your internal KPIs don’t align with what your customers care about, the whole thing falls apart.?

How the Bowtie Funnel and Data Model Creates Freedom

You probably all have scars from the shouting matches between misaligned marketing and sales teams, dashed hopes of quota attainment from poor forecasting on targets, or bleeding ears from listening to misled and fed-up clients. Fortunately, there’s an elegant solution.? A cohesive set of Revenue Systems, unified through the Bowtie funnel, aligns the organization and creates focus.? We call it the “bow-tie” funnel because it turns the traditional sales funnel on its side and visually emphasizes the importance of what happens after the first sale.

Benefit #1. The Bowtie Funnel Focuses on Impact

Revenue doesn’t magically appear; it flows from customer impact, and recurring revenue comes from recurring impact.? We all know a fast-talking salesperson only takes a company so far with new accounts.? Real growth comes from the post-sale experience delivering on the promise of impact. The Bowtie model extends beyond the first sale, centering on how recurring revenue comes from delivering recurring impact.

By shifting focus from transactions to outcomes, the Bowtie model ensures your business delights customers repeatedly. Happy customers become loyal advocates, and loyal advocates drive predictable growth and the market domination that comes from word of mouth and virality.

Recurring impact serves as the unifying principle that aligns your Attraction, Acceleration, and Activation Systems.? You focus your demand generation and lead capture initiatives on Attracting those prospects where you can make the biggest impact.? You build sales systems that Accelerate those opportunities most likely to turn into recurring revenue through the pipeline.? You incorporate tools to ensure you are Activating your existing clients for faster renewals, larger upsells, and more referrals.

Benefit #2. The Bowtie Funnel Prioritizes One GTM Motion

The Bowtie model simplifies your go-to-market approach by identifying and doubling down on the one motion that maximizes enterprise value. Whether it’s founder-led growth, account-based marketing, or direct sales, the most important thing is alignment.? Marketing and Sales is all about making bets. The secret to successful bets is stacking the deck by focusing on the strategies and tactics that are most likely to pay off.?

Marketing and Sales is all about making bets.

Instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, smart leaders make a thoughtful and deliberate choice based on data from previously successful companies.

Examining your ACV and volume of clients reveals the appropriate GTM motion for your business and delivers focus, accelerates growth, and increases the odds of success for maximizing revenue growth.? This guides the Attraction and Acceleration Systems you implement that drive acquisition revenue and fuel expansion and renewals through your Activation Systems.

Benefit #3. The Bowtie Model Unifies Teams with Shared Metrics

The Bowtie model unifies all 3 revenue systems (Attraction, Acceleration, and Activation) and different teams (Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success) creating alignment on the metrics that matter—like Enterprise Value and Forecasted Revenue – not siloed vanity metrics like site traffic, number of pitches made, or speed of support ticket resolution.

Aligned definitions of the stages, shared across the organization, with set criteria for moving between stages normalizes the data for clear insights into the volume, conversion rates, and time deltas throughout the journey.

This data model provides an actionable view of business performance that quickly and easily identifies problems and creates a framework for growth projections that are accurate and bankable.

These metrics easily diagnose where there are shortfalls and focuses revenue leaders on either Attraction, Acceleration, or Activation systems to quickly fix challenges. When every team uses the same framework for prioritization and optimization, it’s easier to identify what’s working and fix what’s not.

The old funnel is dead, and it may be taking your business with it.?

The old funnel is dead, and it may be taking your business with it.? Long live the bowtie funnel! The bowtie funnel integrates Attraction, Acceleration, and Activation revenue systems into a cohesive, framework for cross-functional alignment, ensuring customer-centric growth across all three revenue streams.

This new paradigm isn’t just a replacement—it’s an upgrade. It creates freedom from conflict by aligning teams across the organization, freedom from uncertainty on what to do next by focusing on client impact, and freedom from worry over hitting revenue forecasts by driving sustainable, predictable revenue growth.

How are you evolving your GTM to integrate Attraction, Acceleration, and Activation Systems?

#GTMStrategy #B2BMarketing #RecurringRevenue