Beyond the Funnel: Rethinking GTM for Sustainable Growth

GTM teams spend a lot of time thinking about how to acquire customers. But too often, that focus comes at the expense of how to keep and grow those customers for the long term.

In a recent session with Cervin Venture’s portfolio, Graeme Pitches explored the Revenue Architecture Framework, not as a trendy label, but as a way to step back and evaluate go-to-market systems to make sure they are scaling efficiently across the entire customer journey. 

Here is a recap of some of the key concepts – and common pitfalls – Graema shared with the Cervin portfolio companies.

Revenue Architecture: A Mental Model for GTM

Many teams are still anchored to the traditional, linear sales and marketing funnel, a model where sales and marketing’s roles are done when the deal is signed. That may still work in 'one-and-done' transactional sales, but it breaks down in recurring revenue businesses where the bulk of lifetime value happens after the contract.

Revenue Architecture replaces the funnel with the bowtie (credit to Winning By Design for popularizing this design): a customer journey model that includes what happens post-sale –  onboarding, adoption, expansion, and renewal.

In addition to taking the entire customer journey into account, the model asks a few simple but powerful questions:

• What impact/outcomes are customers expecting to achieve at each stage in the journey?

• Is every GTM function: marketing, sales, CS, aligned on that impact?

• Are you measuring progress across both sides of the bowtie?

Growth Doesn’t = Acquisition

For companies with a renewal revenue stream, acquisition powers growth in the early days, but once you cross a certain ARR threshold: retention and expansion become the dominant drivers for sustained growth.

It makes sense given that it’s usually more cost effective and “easier” to keep a customer who already knows about you and your solution, but GTM teams often overlook this simple concept.

The growth impact retained revenue plays in long-term growth can be seen across private and public companies. According to their most recent earnings, even large companies like Salesforce, UiPath, and Informatica all generate ~70% of new ARR from existing customers. Leveraging the power of retained revenue doesn’t happen by accident, it requires an intentional GTM design.

Net Revenue Retention: A Leading Indicator of Future Value

Investors like Cervin love Net Revenue Retention (NRR), but often founders internalize how sensitive their long-term growth is to this metric. A quick reminder:

• NRR of 90% (dollars from existing customers shrinks by 10%): You lose half your ARR from a cohort within 6 years.

• NRR of 120%: That same cohort is nearly 6x's in value.

A 10–15% shift in NRR completely changes your trajectory. And yet many companies:

• Don’t cohort NRR by customer type, vintage or acquisition channel

• Can’t link expansion efforts to specific product usage or onboarding milestones

• Have no clear pipeline for upsell or cross-sell opportunities

As Graeme repeatedly highlighted:  NRR doesn’t improve by accident. It improves when you build intentional systems that support it.

Common Revenue Pitfalls (And Yes, They Are Fixable)

We all know that retention and expansion revenue is important, yet GTM teams often have a hard time aligning and focusing on delivering it.  Here are the common pitfalls Graeme has seen startups run into:

1. No Shared Definition of "Impact"

Each functional team within a company’s GTM org is speaking a slightly different language about what customers are buying. Marketing leads with features, sales pushes pain points, CS talks about usage metrics. Without a customer-centric, unified definition of customer impact, messaging and measurement becomes diluted and execution misaligned.

Fix: Build a shared “impact library” with the top 3–5 outcomes customers expect to achieve. Marketing, Sales Reps, your Onboarding Team, and CSMs should all speak the same language and be able to identify how their efforts map to this impact.

2. No Structured Growth Loops

With recurring revenue, there is not a singular transaction.  Rather, you have an ongoing relationship where your solution needs to consistently show value.  Each interaction with the customer can deliver data and insights about how you can add more value and expand your relationship.  In many orgs, this interaction data is stuck in silos and never added to a growth loop. Post-sale learnings never make it back to the top of the funnel. Your best customer insights are stuck in Gong recordings, CS call notes, or the brains of a few AEs.

Fix: Create recurring touchpoints between onboarding, CS, marketing, and sales to share what's working, and use that to refine content, talk tracks, and qualification.

3. Over-Indexing on Acquisition Revenue

Activities and success in revenue acquisition is easier to measure, and new logos give the organization a real dopamine hit. Expansion efforts are more complex, harder to forecast, but often deliver greater LTV and better margins. Post-transaction teams are often under-resourced and receive less executive attention than the acquisition side of the bowtie.

Fix: Track the unit economics of expansion vs. acquisition. Rebalance accordingly.

4. Sales Compensation Ignores Retention

If reps are paid only to close, they'll close anyone – even bad-fit customers who churn early and drag down margins.  You need to incent sellers to close customers that will generate longer-term value.

Fix: Add clawbacks or retention-based comp tied to churn windows. At minimum, track churn by rep to identify patterns.

5. Layering GTM Motions Without Mastering One

Launching partnerships, PLG, or field sales before nailing your core motion spreads your team and systems too thin. That’s because what works in a high-touch enterprise motion won’t necessarily work for a lower-touch SMB motion.  You need to match the right process and systems for your ACV and segment – and make sure you master that motion before you start launching new ones.

Fix: Instrument your first GTM motion. Measure CAC payback, conversion rates, and NRR. Then add new motions deliberately and intentionally.

What You Can Do This Quarter

If any of this hits close to home, here are a few places to start:

• Audit your Bowtie: Define your stages across marketing, sales, and CS. Make sure each has clear entry/exit criteria and measurable conversion rates.

• Cohort your NRR: Track which segments expand and retain, and which ones don’t.

• Build Growth Loops: Get the right-side bowtie teams (Onboarding, Support and CS) talking to the left side bowtie teams (Marketing and Sales) as part of a structured cadence. Extract customer language and outcomes. Feed it back into top-of-funnel messaging.

• Revisit GTM Resourcing: Ask yourself honestly, are you spending just as intentionally on expansion as you are on acquisition?

None of this is easy. But it’s the kind of operational discipline that separates companies that stall from those that scale. As a concept, revenue architecture isn’t about chasing the latest tactic, it’s about aligning your entire GTM engine around customer impact, and compounding that over time.