What is Revenue Architecture?

Revenue architecture is a framework from Winning by Design, set out in Jacco van der Kooij’s 2023 book of the same name, that treats recurring revenue as one designed system across marketing, sales and customer success, measured with shared models.

At a glance

• Source: Revenue Architecture by Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design, published October 10, 2023 (556 pages, more than 250 diagrams and blueprints).
• Core idea: recurring revenue is a system with inputs, processes and outputs, not a set of departments that hand work to each other.
• It builds on Winning by Design’s bowtie model, which puts the post-sale side (onboarding, retention and expansion) next to the acquisition funnel.
• Its audience is CEOs, CROs, CFOs and RevOps teams aligning go-to-market teams around shared metrics.
• The book argues that process design has to come before automation and AI.

What the framework says

The starting point is a complaint most revenue leaders recognize. Marketing reports leads, sales reports bookings, customer success reports renewals, and nobody can show how one feeds the next. Winning by Design’s summary puts most go-to-market failures down to disjointed teams, metrics that don’t line up and ad hoc execution.

The answer it proposes is to model the whole thing as one flow. Every stage, from first contact to renewal and expansion, gets a definition, a conversion rate and a time between stages. Once those are measured the same way across teams, you can see which stage is limiting growth and fix that one first. The book calls the result a “recurring revenue factory”.

Example (illustrative): a company with strong new bookings and flat revenue maps every stage from first contact to renewal and finds that most of the loss happens between signature and first value, in onboarding. The fix isn’t more pipeline. It’s an onboarding stage with an owner, a target and a weekly number, the same as any sales stage.

Common mistakes with revenue architecture

• Treating it as a diagram project. A map of the stages only helps if each stage has an owner and a number someone reviews weekly.
• Stopping at the sale. The point of the bowtie is that retention and net revenue retention are part of the same model.
• Automating before the process works. The book itself makes this point: design the process, then automate it.
• Using different definitions in each team. If marketing and sales count a qualified lead differently, the model breaks at the handoff.

How revenue architecture shows up in a revenue system

The framework describes work that usually lands with RevOps: agreed stage definitions, one set of numbers and reports that follow a buyer from first touch to renewal. That’s the RevOps work we run inside partners’ own CRMs. See how we run RevOps.

Terms that sit next to revenue architecture

It’s one of several ways to describe how revenue gets built. The funnel covers acquisition only, the flywheel describes growth that feeds itself, and a revenue operating system covers the rules and routines a company runs on. All of them sit inside a wider go-to-market plan.