I've been in and around sales / partner GTM programs and revenue operations since my oldest, who now is a college graduate, was chasing bugs around our backyard as a youngster. With an education in Finance and Accounting + 10 years in banking and as a credit analyst, I love numbers and statistics.
This combination played well in my most recent role as CRO of invisory.co, a Cloud GTM platform provider serving ISVs that want to accomplish more when selling with AWS, Microsoft, Google and others through the respective #cloudmarketplaces.
In that role, I re-designed our Sales and CS teams into a single "Cloud Growth" organization, serving customers as one unit, with our Sales team focused on the funnel and our CS team focused on successful 🚀 and active execution through Marketplaces with the new capability of the Invisory platform.
My partner in designing this organizational construct, @jessica, and I believe that the world of SaaS is served differently from previous licensing models, where ISV success in retention and growth is entirely centered around platform utilization by our customers. Since we're dealing with new work flows and processes in the Cloud GTM motion, it was imperative that our teams remain engaged continuously so help our customers ensure they achieve their goals with our platform.
This program made sense to use as it provided a more clarity in expectations across our organization and we made aligned compensation and incentives around areas of expertise.
This summer, I had the opportunity to delve deeper into this idea by setting aside a good chunk of time to improve my skills in all things GTM while also exploring how new (and super-hyped) capabilities introduced by GenAI could help us do our work even more efficiently and effectively.
This led me to an outstanding program offered by Winning by Design, but also available to Pavilion members as part of the membership (a huuuuuggggge benefit, btw) called "Revenue Architecture". As a student of GTM and RevOps frameworks, I was intrigued the minute I learned of this program.
The minute we kicked off the 6-week program, I knew I was in for an education that aligned perfectly with my pov on succeeding in a SaaS market. Enter the "bowtie model". This framework takes the traditional sales funnel and shifts it from a top-down sequence to a left-right sequence. The middle is the "commit" and then the right side of the bowtie is, you guessed it, the engagement, impact and growth side of the equation. Hence, the bowtie.
If you search this term, you'll find plenty of discussion around it's merits. For me, now as a student of this model for 3+ months, I've yet to find a reference that challenges it's efficacy and value. One post on LinkedIn I found particularly insightful was https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/implications-bow-tie-sales-model-jan-bultinck/.
So, sharing one of my key learnings for this summer, and hoping my network finds value in this modern view on customer and ISV success. In the end, when our customers win, we (as ISVs) win. #WinningbyDesign has provided us with this model to structure around success.
Look for more of insights like these as I continue to explore ways of making ISVs and their channel partners more success in selling and delivering customer value.
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