If you’ve spent any time in revenue operations, you’ve probably seen the bowtie diagram.
On the left side: the classic sales funnel. Leads become opportunities become customers. Marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, discovery calls, proposals, negotiations, closed-won. This is where most Salesforce implementations focus their energy.
On the right side: everything that happens after the sale. Onboarding, adoption, value realization, renewal, expansion, advocacy. The customer journey that determines whether that hard-won deal becomes a long-term relationship or a churn statistic.
Here’s what I’ve noticed after 15+ years of Salesforce work: almost everyone over-invests in the left side and under-invests in the right.
The Funnel Obsession
It makes sense why the sales funnel gets all the attention. It’s where the dopamine hits are. New logos! Closed deals! Revenue! Growth!
Salesforce itself is architected around this motion. The Lead and Opportunity objects are mature, well-documented, and covered in every implementation guide. There are a thousand YouTube videos about building the perfect sales pipeline dashboard.
And so, predictably, that’s where most implementations focus:
- Lead scoring and routing
- Opportunity stage definitions
- Pipeline inspection dashboards
- Win/loss analysis
- Forecasting
All valuable. All necessary. All incomplete.
What’s Missing
For subscription and recurring revenue businesses, the math is brutal: acquiring a new customer costs 5-7x more than retaining an existing one. Expansion revenue from existing customers is the highest-margin revenue you’ll ever see.
And yet, when I ask companies about their post-sale operations in Salesforce, I usually hear:
- “Our CSMs track things in spreadsheets."
- "Renewals are handled in our billing system—Salesforce doesn’t really know about them."
- "We don’t have good visibility into which customers are at risk."
- "Expansion opportunities? We kind of just… notice them when they happen.”
This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a prioritization problem. The right side of the bowtie never got the same attention as the left.
What Good Looks Like
When post-sale operations are properly built into your CRM, you can answer questions like:
For retention:
- Which customers are at risk based on engagement, support tickets, or usage patterns?
- When are renewals coming due, and what’s the status of each?
- What’s our gross and net retention rate by segment, cohort, or product?
For expansion:
- Which customers are good candidates for upsell based on their usage and profile?
- What’s our expansion pipeline, and how does it compare to new business?
- Which CSMs are most effective at driving growth within their book?
For the business:
- What’s the true lifetime value of customers by acquisition channel?
- Where in the customer journey are we losing people?
- How do we forecast renewals and expansion revenue alongside new business?
If you can’t answer these questions from your CRM, you’re flying blind on the most profitable part of your business.
Why It’s Harder Than It Looks
Building the right side of the bowtie isn’t just a matter of adding a few fields. It requires rethinking some fundamentals:
1. What’s a “customer”? In B2B, this gets complicated fast. Is the customer the Account? The individual Contact who signed? The parent company or the subsidiary? The answer affects how you track renewals, measure retention, and calculate lifetime value.
2. How do you represent what they bought? The Opportunity record captures the sale, but it doesn’t capture the ongoing relationship. You need something—a Subscription object, a Service record, an Asset—that represents what the customer actually has and when it renews.
3. How do you track changes over time? Upgrades, downgrades, add-ons, cancellations. If these overwrite history instead of creating new records, you can’t analyze trends or calculate net retention.
4. How do you integrate with billing? Revenue data lives in your billing system. Customer relationship data lives in Salesforce. If these don’t talk to each other, someone’s doing manual reconciliation—or your numbers don’t match.
The Case for Investing Now
If you’re a growth-stage company, you might think this is a “later” problem. Get the new business engine humming first, then worry about retention.
But here’s the thing: the data model decisions you make now determine what’s possible later. If you wait until retention is a crisis, you’ll be retrofitting a system that wasn’t designed for the questions you need to answer. That’s expensive and slow.
The companies I work with who have the best retention metrics aren’t necessarily better at customer success. They just have better visibility earlier. They see warning signs months before renewal, not days. They spot expansion opportunities proactively, not reactively.
That’s not magic—it’s architecture.
Where to Start
If your right side of the bowtie is underdeveloped, you don’t need to rebuild everything at once. Start here:
1. Define your customer record of truth. Decide what object represents “what the customer has” and make sure it’s being maintained accurately. This might be Opportunities with a closed-won stage, a custom Subscription object, or Assets—whatever makes sense for your business.
2. Get renewal dates into the system. You can’t manage what you can’t see. Even if it’s a manual process today, get those dates visible.
3. Build one retention dashboard. What’s coming up for renewal in the next 90 days? What’s the value at risk? Start simple.
4. Track changes, don’t overwrite. When a customer upgrades or downgrades, create a record of that change. Your future self will thank you.
5. Connect renewal outcomes to acquisition channels. Which lead sources produce customers that stick around? This insight is gold for marketing prioritization.
The Payoff
Companies that take the right side of the bowtie seriously don’t just retain more customers—they grow more efficiently. They spend less on acquisition because their existing base is expanding. They forecast more accurately because they understand both sides of the revenue equation. They catch problems earlier and fix them before they become churn.
The sales funnel matters. But for subscription businesses, the post-sale journey is where compounding happens.
It deserves more than a spreadsheet.