How to find hidden growth levers in any GTM strategy using the bowtie method for SaaS

The bowtie model is tailor-made for SaaS. In addition to tracking how you acquire customers, it maps how you retain and grow them. And because it’s structured around high-level stages rather than specific tactics, it’s flexible enough to adapt to any GTM motion of your choice.

In this third article in our series, we’ll show you how to adapt the bowtie model to fit three  common strategies with examples. You’ll see how the model helps you pinpoint where revenue is leaking, where your GTM teams are winning, and where to focus next.

The bowtie model: Quick recap

This is our third article in the bowtie model series. Our first article explains the "bowtie basics" and why smart SaaS leaders are using the bowtie model. In our second article, we show you how to build the bowtie data model to begin using it in your business.  In this guide, we explore how SaaS companies can adapt the bowtie framework for different go-to-market (GTM) motions.

If you’ve read our previous articles, you already know and how the bowtie model helps you measure and track the entire customer journey. It breaks your customers’ journey into distinct stages, which are high-level descriptors that remain consistent regardless of your GTM strategy.

The key to adapting it for different GTM strategies, lies in the conversion events that occur within or between these stages. These are the events that move prospects forward, turning awareness into acquisition, acquisition into onboarding, and eventually revenue and retention.

Each stage in the bowtie model might contain more than one conversion subsystem. For example, within a single stage like Awareness, a sales-led motion could involve gated content, qualification calls, and outbound sequences—same stage, different subsystems to move the prospect toward achieving the same conversion outcome.

In the following sections, we’ll walk through how the bowtie model applies across the following GTM strategies:

• Inbound (marketing-led)
• Outbound (sales-led)
• Account-based (sales-led)

Example bowtie model for an inbound GTM strategy

Let’s discuss a hypothetical B2B SaaS company that helps HR teams streamline employee onboarding.

Their primary GTM motion is inbound-led sales with organic traffic as the main driver. Most leads come from the website, driven by SEO, thought leadership, webinars, and social media. The company has an SDR team to follow up on high-intent leads, but they don’t run outbound campaigns at scale yet.

So let’s focus solely on the website. This model is part of a broader initiative to increase website traffic and improve conversion rates from visitor to lead.

Here’s what their marketing-led bowtie model looks like conceptually:

Now, let's take a closer look at how our example company defines each conversion subsystem:

Here's a snapshot of the company's pipeline performance:

Here’s what this performance report tells us:

• Strong top-of-funnel performance: The website has outperformed in its traffic-to-MQL conversions. A 1% CR1 beats the benchmark of 0.75% and tells us that inbound content and CTAs are doing a good job driving qualified traffic and encouraging engagement.
• MQL to SQL conversion is underperforming: Conversion from MQL to SQL (CR2) is at 50%, below the 60% benchmark. The likely reason is the loose MQL definition—it includes anyone who has visited the website multiple times, downloaded content, or registered for a webinar. That can inflate MQL numbers and drag down CR2. Tightening this definition could improve the conversion rate. For example, a MQL might be defined as people who request a demo.
• Sales acceptance and close rates are on target: The sales team accepts 80% of SQLs (CR3) and closes 25% (CR4). The sales team is qualifying effectively and focusing on the right opportunities.
• Onboarding is the weak link: Only 60% of closed-won customers reach First Value (CR5), well below the 85% benchmark. This is the biggest leak in the company’s bowtie. It’s also a red flag—it could mean customers are struggling with setup, not getting adequate support, or don’t know how to extract value from the product quickly. Fixing this stage is critical for the company to improve retention and expansion downstream.
• Healthy downstream performance: Retention and expansion metrics are excellent. The customers that do reach First Value tend to stick around and often upgrade. That’s a good reason to invest in onboarding as a leverage point to drive long-term revenue growth.

Example bowtie model for an outbound GTM strategy

Let’s look at another B2B company, one that sells collaboration software to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). This company uses a sales-led GTM strategy, building its pipeline through cold outreach, personalized sequences, and event follow-ups.

Its strength lies in a lean SDR team that identifies and qualifies prospects before passing them on to the AEs for closing. The sales development team scans leads for buying signals to ensure reps only spend time on the most promising opportunities.

As you read this and try to think of your own GTM structure, remember that one of the strengths of the bowtie model is that it’s modular. You can adapt it to reflect how your GTM team actually works. For example, the conversion structure would look different for this company if it didn’t have an SDR function and AEs were responsible for both prospecting and closing. In that case, the SQL and SAL stages would collapse into one, and the pre-sale stages would follow a simpler flow: Prospect > MQA > SAL > Commit.

In our example, they do have SDRs. Here’s what their sales-led bowtie model looks like:

And here's how our example company is defining the conversion subsystems in it bowtie funnel:

Now, let's look at some performance data to see what insights it might reveal:

Table showing the conversion subsystems across the entire bowtie funnel, CR1 through CR7, including the targets set for each and the actual conversion rates, both expressed as percentages.

Here’s what we can infer from this pipeline performance report:

• SDRs are hitting top-of-the-funnel goals: The SDR team is qualifying 2% of TAM-targeted prospects as SQLs. That’s right on benchmark. The sales team appears to be doing a good job, assuming they’re finding real interest from cold lists using firmographic, intent, or behavioral signals.
• Hand-off to sales is a bottleneck: The 70% of SQLs accepted by the sales team as real opportunities (CR2) falls short of the 75% benchmark. That’s not a massive gap, but it signals a disconnect between what the SDR team considers a “qualified” lead and what AEs are willing to invest time in. It may also indicate that reps are cherry-picking SQLs most likely to close, leaving high-effort or less obvious opportunities on the table. Either way, digging deeper makes sense here.
• Strong close rate once sales accepts a lead: The team closes 64% of leads that make it to SAL. That’s comfortably above the 60% benchmark, so sales execution isn’t the problem. The issue appears to be in how leads are qualified before they get there. However, if the sales team is cherry-picking that could be undermining growth. Taking a closer look at what is driving both results —CR2 and CR3—could reveal insights into CR2 the company can use to get more qualified leads into the hands of the sales team and leverage its success in CR3 to close more deals.    
• Onboarding completion is great, but activation is weak: The onboarding team is getting 89% of new customers through their initial setup, but only 67% of those are reaching First Value (CR5). This indicates that while implementation is technically complete, customers aren’t engaging meaningfully with the product. Maybe that’s because it’s too complex or lacks immediate value for smaller teams. In any case, when looking at the results for retention and growth, this is a costly problem for the company in terms of renewal revenue (CR6) and expansion (CR7).
• Retention and growth are both lagging: Only half of activated customers renew, and just a quarter of those expand. That’s a churn and product engagement problem. The implication? Unless the company improves time-to-value and works on improving engagement, a lot of its outbound efforts won’t translate into long-term revenue.

Example bowtie model for an account-based GTM strategy

Let’s now take the example of a company with a more targeted GTM motion, a B2B SaaS provider that offers compliance automation for SMBs.

This company uses an account-based GTM strategy, which like inbound, is a sales-led motion. However, they don’t rely on the spray-and-pray approach commonly used in outbound marketing, and they aren’t investing in a high-volume inbound approach. Instead, they’ve built a tightly curated TAM, marinated it in intent and engagement data, and are engaging each account through personalized multi-channel outreach.

The company’s dedicated SDR team qualifies MQAs before passing them to AEs. Six months ago, the company launched a major customer success initiative to improve onboarding, product adoption, and expansion and has invested a lot of resources in this initiative, including new tools, playbooks, and a CS team.

Let’s look at how the bowtie model applies this ABM motion:

Here's an example of how the bowtie model can be adapted with different conversion subsystems common to many account-based GTM strategies:

Here’s how the company’s ABM strategy has performed over the past year:

Based on this report, we may conclude that:

• Top-of-funnel performance needs attention: The company is converting 50% of TAM prospects into MQAs (CR1). That’s slightly below the 55% benchmark. And only 20% of those MQAs are converting to SQLs, which is below the 25% benchmark. This suggests two potential issues: The engagement scoring model could be overestimating interest and qualifying accounts too early, and/or the SDRs may be struggling to find genuine intent from those accounts. For example, the TAM list may include companies that look good on paper (they match your ICP) but aren’t showing actual intent or progressing through the funnel.
• Sales is highly effective once engaged: When accounts reach SQA status, the sales team takes over. They’re converting 90% of SQAs into SALs and closing 67% of those. Both of these results are above benchmarks. Together, they indicate  alignment between SDRs and AEs on what qualifies as a real opportunity and solid bottom-of-funnel execution.
• The new CS initiative is working: Despite ambitious goals, the CS team is nearly hitting their 100% implementation target (CR5) and outperforming benchmarks in every stage post-sale: 97% reach First Value (CR6), 75% of those are renewing their contracts (CR7), and 81% of them are increasing their spend (CR8) by upgrading and/or buying additional licenses. This shows the investment in onboarding, adoption, and account management is paying off. The downstream of the bowtie is healthy. CS is not the problem here.

Start by solving the data problem with Drivetrain

We’ve presented our examples as three companies, each adapting the bowtie model for a different GTM strategy to illustrate the adaptability of the bowtie model. In reality, most SaaS companies use more than one GTM motion.

To fully leverage the benefits of the bowtie model, SaaS companies should build one for every GTM strategy they’re using.  

No matter what your GTM strategies are or how many you’re using, using the bowtie model for each one will help you comprehensively diagnose conversion issues and analyze long-term revenue drivers like retention and expansion.

But modeling your entire GTM can be a pretty big lift. When your data is scattered across your CRM, CS tools, and spreadsheets, stitching it together manually is a nightmare. Get your data in order before implementing the bowtie model so you can model and track your pipeline accurately.

Drivetrain takes much of the trouble out of that process. It brings all your GTM data into one dashboard, where you can visualize performance across every stage, run what-if scenarios, and find root causes.

No data silos. No spreadsheets. Just one source of truth for your entire pipeline.

Book a demo and see how easy it can be to set up and track your bowtie models and find the hidden insights you can use to grow your business faster.