Bowtie Model
An extension of the funnel that mirrors it after the sale — the narrow point is the purchase, with onboarding, adoption, retention and expansion forming the second half.
Why the shape matters
It makes explicit that post-sale stages have conversion rates too. An account can fail to onboard, fail to adopt, or fail to expand, and each is a measurable transition with an owner — exactly like a pipeline stage.
The practical benefit
How to operationalise it
Define post-sale stages with exit criteria, exactly as you would pre-sale. Onboarded, adopted and expanded need checkable definitions or the second half is decorative.
Measure conversion between post-sale stages. An account can fail to onboard, fail to adopt and fail to expand, and each is a distinct loss with a distinct cause.
Assign ownership per stage. The most common failure is that the second half of the bowtie has no owner with authority, so its stages never get enforced.
Instrument time in stage post-sale. Elapsed time to value predicts retention more reliably than any satisfaction survey.
Report both halves together. Reporting the pre-sale funnel weekly and the post-sale half quarterly tells the organisation which one matters.
Where it misleads
Symmetry is a visual convenience, not a claim about equivalence — the post-sale stages have different dynamics and different owners.
It can imply a linear post-sale journey when adoption and expansion frequently run in parallel and repeat.
Drawing the model is easy and instrumenting it is not; most bowtie diagrams describe an aspiration rather than a measured process.
For transactional or self-serve motions the second half dominates so heavily that the bowtie shape understates it.
RELATED TERMS
Expansion Revenue
Additional recurring revenue from existing customers: more seats, higher tiers, additional products or increased usage.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Revenue retained from an existing cohort over a period including expansion, expressed as a percentage of where that cohort started. The clearest single indicator of whether the base grows without new customers.
Onboarding
The structured process taking a new customer from signature to working use of the product.
Revenue Flywheel
A model that treats revenue as compounding rather than linear: satisfied customers generate expansion, referral and reputation that reduce the cost of the next acquisition.
Revenue Funnel
The staged model describing how prospects progress from first awareness to closed revenue, used to locate where volume is lost between stages.
Time-to-Value (TTV)
How long from purchase until a customer experiences the outcome they bought. The early metric that predicts retention.
COMMON QUESTIONS
- What is the bowtie model?
- An extension of the sales funnel that mirrors it after the purchase: the narrow point is the sale, with onboarding, adoption, retention and expansion forming the second half. It exists because in a subscription business most revenue arrives after the first sale, so a model ending at closed-won describes a minority of the value.
- How is the bowtie different from a funnel?
- A funnel ends at the purchase, which encodes the assumption that the customer relationship is an outcome. The bowtie treats it as an input, giving post-sale stages their own conversion rates — an account can fail to onboard, fail to adopt or fail to expand, and a funnel cannot represent any of those.
- What does the bowtie model change operationally?
- It gives customer success a stage model to operate rather than a health score to interpret. Post-sale stages get exit criteria, conversion rates and owners, which makes losses after the sale as visible and as diagnosable as losses before it — and that visibility is the entire point of the shape.
- Is the bowtie model worth adopting?
- If post-sale revenue is a meaningful share of the total and nobody currently measures conversion after the sale, yes. If you already have instrumented onboarding and expansion stages with owners, the diagram adds little. The value is in the instrumentation it prompts, not in the shape itself.
Learn how to apply this: RevOps 101: Revenue Operations Foundations
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