The Bow Tie Funnel Playbook: A Practical Guide to Growth

Most GTM teams still treat growth as a funnel. Pour leads in one end, get deals out the other. This visual isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. 

The traditional funnel hits acquisition, someone rings a gong, and…that’s it. But in B2B, the bulk of your revenue comes after the deal is signed. Adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy — these are where compounding growth actually happens. If you’re only tracking the traditional funnel, you’re managing half a business. 

The Bow Tie Funnel reframes growth as a closed system. 

On the left, marketing and sales work to acquire and convert. In the knot, customer onboarding determines whether a deal becomes a relationship. And on the right side, customer success and product drive retention, expansion, and advocacy.

Adopting the bow tie isn’t just about drawing a second triangle and calling it a day. It’s about changing how teams work together. When marketing, sales, and CS all define the same stages and track the same metrics, growth goes from being a handoff to a continuum. Instead of each team chasing their own scorecard, everyone’s working toward the same outcome: growing the business.

The Anatomy of the Bow Tie

Think of the bow tie in three parts:

Left Side — AcquisitionThis is the traditional marketing and sales funnel: awareness, engagement, pipeline, and closed won. It’s familiar ground — fill the top, qualify prospects, close deals. But when viewed in isolation, the funnel suggests the journey ends when sales rings the gong. In reality, that’s just halftime. The left side matters, but without what comes after, it’s a leaky growth engine.

The Knot — OnboardingThe knot in the middle is the tightest, and most fragile, part of the bow tie. It’s where the baton passes from sales to customer success. A poor handoff here means churn before value is realized. But when onboarding works, it turns a deal into a relationship. Customers see value quickly, adoption takes hold, and momentum builds.

Right Side — Retention & ExpansionThis is where the real compounding happens: renewals, expansions, cross-sells, and advocacy. It’s more than just generating potential case study subjects. The right side gives you a live feedback loop into what’s working in your product, what customers value in your brand, and how you can improve. 

Just as important, it can reveal whether you’re attracting the right customers in the first place. Short-term accounts that churn quickly are signals of poor fit. But the customers that buy quickly, stick around longest, and get the most out of your product? Those are your true ICP. Understanding who they are and how they moved through the bow tie doesn’t just guide CS and product. It’s valuable intel that can be looped back to optimize the left side of the model. 

Happy customers don’t just renew; they advocate on social, in communities, and on podcasts, becoming your most credible marketing channel. And when CS and marketing team up, advocacy can fuel targeted ABM campaigns that bring the bow tie full circle.

Together, the three parts turn growth from a series of handoffs into a continuous, self-reinforcing system.

Metrics That Matter 

The bow tie isn’t just a slightly prettier funnel graphic. Its real usefulness becomes apparent when it’s backed by the right metrics. Think of it less as a diagram and more as a scorecard: a cohesive view of how customers move through every stage of the journey, and where things break down.

That’s what makes the bow tie powerful. With the right metrics in place, you see how every stage connects: how awareness leads to customers, how adoption drives retention, and how advocacy feeds the next wave of awareness.

Awareness

• Metrics that matter: Reach, impressions, engagement rate, cost per engaged lead.

• Why they matter: If nothing’s going into the system, nothing’s coming out. Awareness is the spark that sets it all in motion.

• Where it breaks: Marketing treats awareness as an end in itself, chasing impressions or engagement without showing how those efforts contribute to pipeline. Sales tunes it out as noise.

• How the bow tie helps: Awareness connects forward, not sideways. By tying early-stage activity to pipeline contribution, both teams see whether attention is turning into customers.

Pipeline & Sales

• Metrics that matter: SQL conversion rates, win rates, sales velocity.

• Why they matter: These tell you whether opportunities are real and how efficiently they move.

• Where it breaks: Data is scattered across CRMs, spreadsheets, and ad hoc reports. Numbers don’t reconcile, so no one fully trusts them. Then the blame game starts: “marketing sends junk leads” vs. “sales can’t close.”

• How the bow tie helps: There will always be some level of finger-pointing, but when teams buy into bow tie metrics, they can at least argue from the same business scoreboard. That shifts the fight from “your leads vs. my deals” to “how do we actually grow pipeline?”

Onboarding (the Knot)

• Metrics that matter: Time to first value, onboarding completion, adoption rates.

• Why they matter: This is where customers either get hooked or drift away. Fast, clear value builds trust and momentum; slow starts kill deals quietly.

• Where it breaks: Sales hands off little more than a signed contract, CS has no context, and customers stall before they see value. Churn risk is baked in from day one.

• How the bow tie helps: By treating onboarding as the center of the funnel, not the epilogue, teams can line up what was promised with what’s delivered. CS starts with visibility, customers start with wins.

Retention & Expansion

• Metrics that matter: Logo retention, revenue retention, NRR, expansion pipeline.

• Why they matter: Renewals and expansions drive compounding revenue. This side of the bow tie turns “closed-won” into real business growth.

• Where it breaks: Renewal risks aren’t flagged until it’s too late, expansion opportunities stay buried, and CS ends up reactive. Marketing rarely sees the feedback signals that could shape messaging or ABM campaigns.

• How the bow tie helps: The right side is where insights flow back. CS doesn’t just fight churn; it generates market intelligence and advocacy that fuel the next cycle of awareness. Customers who succeed become your loudest marketers, closing the loop and powering new growth.

When everyone sees the same bow tie view, the conversation shifts from defending silos to deciding how to fix what’s breaking down.

Want something you can reference quickly? Grab our Funnel Clarity Checklist — the key bow tie metrics and where they usually break down.

Putting the Bow Tie Funnel Into Play

This is where the bow tie stops being a diagram and becomes something teams can actually run. Think of it as a playbook: simple, structured, and practiced until it becomes second nature.

Define your stages

First, you need agreement. Marketing, sales, and CS need to sit down and define the actual customer journey together. Not some idealized deck funnel version of it, either. The messy, real-world stages your buyers go through. Without this foundation, every team will keep running their own version of the game.

Map your metrics

For each stage, choose 2–3 metrics per stage that really matter. That means agreeing on which signals prove progress. It’s tempting to track everything, but focusing on a few key metrics trims  the noise and gives leadership a scoreboard everyone can trust.

Connect your systems

Metrics don’t matter if they live in silos. Your CRM, marketing automation, CS platform, and product analytics all need to feed the same view. Otherwise you’re back to stitching spreadsheets and arguing over whose data is “right.”

Build visibility

Once the data is connected, put it in one clear view. One dashboard, not 20 reports. That way, when things break down, it’s obvious, and you’re better positioned to fix them fast.

Run feedback loops

This is where the bow tie becomes a living system. Post-sale data informs new campaigns. Churn analysis feeds product roadmaps. Expansion signals give sales a head start. Instead of each team working in isolation, they’re running plays that build on each other.

The power of a playbook is that it isn’t complicated. Complexity kills adoption. A good playbook is straightforward enough that teams learn it, practice it, and can run it without hesitation. The bow tie works the same way: it aligns goals across functions and makes the path clear, so teams can spend less time arguing and more time executing.

All of this is easier said than done if your data lives in silos. TrueFunnel pulls it all into a single bow tie view so you can actually run the playbook, not just sketch it.

Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

The bow tie is a better framework, but that doesn’t mean it’s a silver bullet. Humans are gonna human, and even the best system can get derailed. That’s why it helps to know where things usually go off the rails.

• Treating the right side as an afterthought. Out of sight, out of mind. The traditional funnel is deeply ingrained, especially for sales and marketing leaders who’ve spent careers being judged on leads and deals. Left unchecked, they’ll drift back to optimizing the left side and treating retention and expansion as “somebody else’s job.” If the right side doesn’t push its own metrics into the spotlight, it can get ignored.

• Overcomplicating metrics. This doesn’t happen because people love complexity, it happens because teams want to prove their value. Marketing wants to show every campaign touch, CS wants to highlight every nuance of retention, and everyone fears leaving something out. Anxiety drives bloat. The problem is, when everything’s a KPI, nothing is.

• Living in spreadsheets. This one’s a symptom, not a root cause. Teams default to spreadsheets because they don’t have a single trusted view. Data lives in silos, so everyone builds their own reports to fill the gaps. The result: stale numbers, wasted hours, and debates over which version of the truth to believe.

• Lack of executive buy-in. If only one or two teams are carrying the torch, the bow tie collapses fast. Without top-level commitment, adoption becomes optional. Sales runs one playbook, CS another, marketing another, and alignment never materializes.

• Choosing poor metrics. If the connective tissue is weak, trust evaporates. Teams see misaligned metrics, decide the bow tie is just another dashboard exercise, and retreat to their own numbers. Getting the metric choices wrong at the outset is one of the fastest ways to kill adoption.

The Final Wave

Ultimately, the bow tie is just a helpful framing device. What you’re really trying to do is break the pattern of teams optimizing their own slice, making their silo look great while the bigger picture suffers.

When the bow tie is operationalized, growth stops being chopped into pieces. Marketing, sales, and CS can see how their parts connect, and how wins on one side of the bow tie ripple through the rest of the system. Awareness fuels acquisition, adoption drives retention, advocacy feeds back into demand.

It doesn’t erase egos or politics, but it does give everyone the same playing field. The arguments shift from “whose numbers are right” to “where is the system breaking down, and how do we fix it?”

If your funnel only shows you half the story, it’s time to close the loop.