What is Revenue Architecture?

Revenue Architecture is a strategic framework designed to optimize and sustain growth in recurring revenue businesses, particularly SaaS companies. It emphasizes aligning sales, marketing, and customer success into a cohesive ‘revenue factory’ that reduces costs while driving growth and enhancing product quality.

Jacco van der Kooij, founder of the B2B revenue consultancy Winning by Design, is a recognized authority in this field. His book, Revenue Architecture, draws from his extensive experience with over 1,000 SaaS companies to serve as a foundational guide for coordinating GTM operations and structuring revenue growth.

Synonyms

Revenue Architecture Framework
Revenue Architecture Methodology

Understanding Revenue Architecture

For businesses with recurring revenue, Revenue Architecture provides a comprehensive framework, built upon six foundational models, each addressing a critical aspect of revenue generation and scalability.

The Revenue Model

This is where it all starts: how you make money. The Revenue Model delineates three primary monetization strategies for software companies:

Ownership (think upfront payments)
Subscription (predictable, recurring charges)
Consumption (pay-as-you-go or usage-based)

It operates on an arc between one extreme (outright ownership) and the other (full consumption-based), with subscription-based strategies occupying the middle ground.

Each has its own dynamics, risks, benefits, and implications for your GTM motion. The key is to choose the right mix for your business and align your pricing with the value customers receive.

The Data Model

Data isn’t just for dashboards. It’s the driving force behind all your business decisions. In van der Kooij’s Revenue Architecture, the Data Model for recurring revenue business models is shaped like a bowtie and extends across the entire customer lifecycle, not just the “acquisition” half of the funnel:

Acquisition on the left side (Awareness, Education, and Selection)
Mutual commitment in the center (i.e., the “knot” of the bowtie)
Retention and expansion on the right (Onboarding, Adoption, and Expansion)

The reason this is important is that, according to research from HockeyStack across 50+ B2B SaaS companies, the average sales cycle requires:

54 touchpoints and 723 impressions to reach an MQL,
87 touchpoints and 1,068 impressions to move to SQL,
81 touchpoints and 836 impressions to close.

And, post-sale, recurring payments make retention the most critical metric. That’s why this model emphasizes the importance of aligning all revenue capabilities around a consistent set of metrics that cover every touchpoint from initial acquisition through long-term engagement.

The Mathematical Model

SaaS recurring revenue behaves differently. Unlike one-time payments like those for physical products, it compounds. The Mathematical Model helps you understand those patterns and apply them.

It’s about engineering your growth engine with clarity:

Where does churn hit hardest?
Where does expansion create lift?

Since recurring revenue growth follows exponential rather than linear patterns, answering these questions with exponential arithmetic is how you scale intentionally.

The Operating Model

The Operating Model is scalability-focused — it underscores the necessity of standardized data models, a unified language, and a consistent methodology across the entire customer journey. Cohesion ensures all revenue functions across sales, marketing, and CS operate seamlessly together.

The Growth Model

SaaS growth follows an S-curve, with inflection points that can either stall or skyrocket your business. Early-stage companies tend to focus on rapid customer acquisition (hence the steep initial growth), followed by a more sustainable growth strategy as the product matures and customer retention becomes critical.

Revenue Architecture’s Growth Model helps you anticipate those breakpoints based on which growth stage you’re at. It tells you when to shift your org design, invest in new channels, and tighten or scale operations, and how to prepare for future transitions as you go from one stage to the next.

The Go-to-Market (GTM) Model

Your go-to-market (GTM) strategy defines how you show up to customers. The GTM Model aligns every team that touches the customer around one coordinated motion. Based on metrics like your number of deals per year and ACV (annual contract value), it helps you determine which GTM strategy is best to deliver an A-1 customer experience at the optimal cost-to-serve.

The Three Pillars of Revenue Architecture

Fundamentally, Revenue Architecture shares the same goals and purposes with revenue operations (RevOps) as a whole. It’s essentially a RevOps framework for aligning your sales, marketing, CS, and operations teams.

It goes deeper than strategy, though — it’s additional focus is on execution. That execution stands on three pillars: process, organization, and enablement. Get these right, and you turn your revenue engine into a high-performance machine.

Revenue process

Since customers stay with their software for a long time, recurring revenue evolves across a lifecycle. That’s where the Land, Expand, and Renew framework comes in.

Land: This is your initial customer acquisition. It requires a focused, value-driven sales motion to get new customers in the door, ideally with fast time to value and a low barrier to entry.
Expand: Once you’ve established the relationship, your goal shifts to increasing account value through upsells, cross-sells, or broader adoption across teams.
Renew: Finally, retention becomes the priority. Recurring revenue models depend on high renewal rates, and that only happens when customers continue seeing real, measurable value.

Each stage needs its own prescriptive sales process, with clearly defined steps, responsibilities, and handoffs. That includes qualification criteria, opportunity stage, buyer personas, and messaging frameworks.

But process alone isn’t enough. The execution has to be customer-centric. That means engaging buyers with the right context, empathy, and outcomes at each stage of their journey. And it means tying every interaction to value realization, even beyond Closed Won.

Revenue organization

In traditional models, sales, marketing, and customer success are siloed teams with disjointed processes. That doesn’t work in a subscription business because these functions are all directly tied to revenue retention and growth.

That’s the essence of Full-Funnel Accountability: everyone owns a part of the revenue number, from generating awareness to closing deals to ensuring renewal and expansion. Through a specialized, yet collaborative org design, each team contributes, with measurable impact at every stage:

Sales Development Reps (SDRs) focus on prospecting, outbound sales, and inbound qualification to fill the pipeline.
Account Executives (AEs) are responsible for managing deals and landing new customers.
Customer Success Managers (CSMs) focus on customer onboarding, product adoption, and long-term customer health.

Unlike traditional sales models (where one rep owns the full cycle), this approach allows each role to go deep in their area of expertise.

Revenue enablement

Revenue enablement is all about developing repeatable sales playbooks for each stage of the revenue lifecycle. This is where you define best practices, messaging, objection handling, qualification criteria, and more. The goal is to make your sales motion repeatable across reps, rather than being reliant on top performers.

From there, data and insights feed back into your playbooks and training, driving ongoing optimization:

What messaging converts best?
Where do deals stall?
Which reps are most efficient, and why?

Then, technology is your multiplier. Modern revenue teams rely on:

CRM platforms (like Salesforce or HubSpot) for visibility and pipeline management
CPQ (configure, price, quote) tools for speed and accuracy in quoting complex solutions
RevOps platforms for process automation, forecasting, and cross-functional alignment

Together, process, organization, and enablement form the backbone of a high-functioning, predictable revenue engine.

Revenue Acceleration: Driving Predictable Growth

Revenue acceleration — the process of coordinating sales, marketing, and customer success efforts to grow revenue faster — is a fundamental goal van der Kooij’s Revenue Architecture aims to achieve. It’s a byproduct of setting up your revenue system in a way that’s optimal for your business.

Growth is not a guessing game.

Too often, companies chase growth with intuition and reactive tactics. That might work in the early stages, but it breaks as you scale. Predictable growth comes from treating your revenue engine like a system—one that can be engineered, measured, and improved.

That means:

Measuring what matters: conversion rates, CAC, LTV, expansion revenue, churn, sales velocity.
Iterating on your sales and marketing motions based on real-world performance, not assumptions.
Optimizing everything from buyer journeys to compensation plans to onboarding sequences.

This scientific mindset gives you control. It allows you to identify what’s working, what’s not, and where your next big win might come from.

Specific levers accelerate growth.

Every business has levers it can pull to increase revenue. The key is knowing which levers to pull (and when).

Pricing is one of the most powerful. A small change in price structure, discounting strategy, or contract length can have an outsized impact on your revenue and margins. But pricing decisions should be driven by data, not gut feel.

Packaging is just as critical. How you bundle features, align them with buyer personas, and communicate value directly affects conversion and expansion. The right packaging helps customers self-select the option that best fits their needs while guiding them toward higher-value tiers.

Market segmentation sharpens your focus. Not all customers are created equal. When you clearly define your ICP and tailor your messaging, outreach, and support to that segment, you close more deals faster, then retain them longer. Trying to serve everyone dilutes your efforts. Focus wins.

Successful revenue leaders run controlled experiments with these levers. They test different pricing models. They compare expansion rates between packaging options. They track segment-level performance. That’s what it means to accelerate growth with intent.

Continuous learning is your hidden accelerator.

Technology and strategy clearly matter. But revenue acceleration is also a people game. The best-performing revenue teams are learning organizations. They constantly analyze performance data, turn it into coaching moments, and level up team capabilities.

Data-driven coaching goes beyond win/loss reviews. It helps managers:

Spot where reps are losing deals in the funnel
Identify top performers’ behaviors that can be replicated
Deliver targeted, real-time feedback instead of generic training

Over time, this creates a culture of continuous improvement. Every call, demo, and renewal becomes a chance to learn and improve, not just for the rep, but for the entire team.

How Revenue Architecture Improves Go-To-Market Efficiency

Since the goal isn’t a one-off growth spurt, Revenue Architecture provides a sustainable path to durable revenue growth. It streamlines and unifies all your GTM systems around a cohesive system that reduces friction, improves customer experiences, and increases the return on effort across your revenue teams.

Reducing friction in the buyer’s journey

Long sales cycles, inconsistent messaging, and unclear handoffs slow your funnel (and frustrate potential buyers in the process). Revenue Architecture solves this by creating structured, repeatable processes for every stage of the customer lifecycle. From first touch to final renewal, the buyer journey is intentional and guided.

From the buyer’s perspective, it’s a well-orchestrated sequence:

Marketing delivers qualified leads based on clear ICP criteria.
SDRs follow defined outreach cadences with aligned messaging.
AEs manage deals using stage-specific playbooks and qualification frameworks.
CSMs ensure smooth onboarding and early wins, which lay the groundwork for long-term retention.

The result? Fewer missed opportnities, shorter deal cycles, and a buying experience that feels (and actually is) seamless.

PLG, CLG, and SLG in Revenue Architecture

Your GTM motion should match your product and market. Revenue Architecture supports both product-led growth (PLG), customer-led growth (CLG), and sales-led growth (SLG), and even hybrid models.

PLG relies on the product to do the selling. Think self-serve signups, in-app upgrades, and virality loops. It’s efficient and scalable—ideal for low-complexity, high-velocity sales environments.
CLG leverages customer insights and feedback to drive growth. This method is ideal for companies with high-touch sales models, where sales teams work closely with customers to understand their needs and pain points.
SLG is a traditional approach where sales reps handhold throughout the selling process. It’s common in high-complexity, low-velocity sales environments (e.g., enterprise sales), where deals require more personalized attention.

These are complementary, not opposing, strategies. Most modern SaaS companies reel in and retain users using a combination of human-led sales, PLG strategies like freemium offers and proof-of-concepts, and customer-driven approaches like UGC and referrals for marketing and direct feedback for product improvements.

Revenue Architecture is there so that no matter what mix you use, you have the infrastructure to:

Track usage signals from the product
Trigger timely sales engagement
Align messaging across self-serve and sales-assist channels

RevOps’ role in GTM execution

RevOps aligns the systems, processes, and data across your revenue-generating sales, marketing, and customer success teams to support the full GTM motion.

Done well, it delivers:

Clean, consistent data across all stages of the funnel
Reliable forecasting and revenue performance metrics
Automation for your repetitive tasks to increase rep productivity
Cross-functional visibility to spot inefficiencies and opportunities

With your Revenue Architecture guiding them, you remove friction from the buyer journey. You adapt your strategy to match how customers want to buy. And you operationalize execution with precision.

Implementing Revenue Architecture in Your Business

Understanding Revenue Architecture is one thing. Implementing it is a whole other. But that’s where the impact actually happens.

Whether you’re scaling fast or trying to fix inefficiencies in your go-to-market engine, the path forward starts with clarity, alignment, and execution.

Evaluate your current revenue model to find the gaps

Start by asking: How do we actually make money today, and is that model truly optimized for recurring revenue growth?

Look at your monetization strategy:

Are you relying solely on subscriptions?
Are there untapped opportunities in usage-based or hybrid models?
Do your pricing and packaging align with how customers experience value?
Is expansion revenue a current priority, or are you too focused on net-new acquisition?

Then examine your customer lifecycle:

Where are you losing deals or customers?
Are handoffs between teams smooth, or do leads fall through the cracks?
Do you have visibility into the full funnel from lead to renewal?

Identify the biggest friction points in your pipeline, customer experience, or team alignment. That’s where you start.

Align sales, marketing, and CS around your GTM strategy

Next, bring your teams together. Not just physically, but strategically. Sales, marketing, and customer success should operate as one GTM engine.

That means:

Shared KPIs across the funnel (not just MQLs for marketing, or closed deals for sales).
A consistent, cross-functional definition of your ICP.
Seamless handoffs with context and accountability at each stage.
Clearly explained roles of PLG, CLG, and SLG in your growth model.

Hold a joint planning session. Map the customer journey from awareness to expansion. Identify where each team plays a role, and where alignment is missing.

Apply the Revenue Architecture tools and frameworks

Jacco van der Kooij’s Revenue Architecture gives you battle-tested tools to bring structure and precision to your growth efforts.

Use the Six Foundational Models to rebuild your revenue engine.
Adopt the Revenue Process Design principles of “Land, Expand, and Renew” and stage-specific playbooks for reps, managers, and success teams.
Leverage Revenue Enablement infrastructure to build a centralized knowledge base, automate repetitive tasks with RevOps tools, and implement data-driven coaching programs.

That way, you have a system that gets smarter, faster, and more predictable over time.

Revenue Architecture