--- title: "SaaS bowtie funnel: measuring the half after the sale | Skene" description: "Winning by Design's SaaS bowtie extends the funnel past the close into onboarding, adoption and expansion, which is where most teams' tracking is at its thinnest." url: https://www.skene.ai/resources/frameworks/saas-bowtie doc_version: "51e269c7d116" last_updated: 2026-10-30 --- Resources / Frameworks # The SaaS bowtie: the half of the journey after closed-won SaaS bowtie. Credit: Winning by Design. By [Teemu Kinos](https://www.skene.ai/about), co-founder of Skene. The SaaS bowtie, from Winning by Design, draws the customer journey as two funnels joined at the sale. The left side narrows from awareness to a signed deal. The right side widens again through onboarding, adoption and expansion, because in recurring revenue most of a customer's value arrives after they sign. Teams that adopt it usually find they measure the left side carefully and the right side barely at all. ## How it works Every stage on the bowtie has a conversion rate to the next. On the right side those stages are product behaviour, not sales activity: did the customer onboard, did usage spread beyond the first team, did they expand. Pipeline stages live in the CRM, where a salesperson updates them by hand. Adoption stages live in event data, where nobody updates anything by hand, and a break goes unnoticed until the numbers disagree with billing. Dave Boyce's _Freemium_ uses a variant he calls the PLG Bowtie, with activation and First Impact placed before payment rather than after it (Ch 3). In a product-led company the right-hand behaviours happen first. The events under them become the foundation for the whole shape instead of an after-sale report. ## What it assumes your events already do | Event | What the framework uses it for | What it reports when the event breaks | | --- | --- | --- | | Activation or First Impact event `first_report_shared` | Onboarding: the first stage after the knot. | An onboarding redesign that changes the event makes every new customer look stuck, or makes stuck ones look onboarded. | | Core value action `report_viewed` | Adoption. | Adoption reported from one platform's events misses customers who moved to another. | | Invite sent and accepted `invite_sent, invite_accepted` | Spread inside the account. | Seats added through an admin bulk import never fire the invite event, so spread looks stalled. | | User-to-account join `account_id on every event` | Ties adoption to the account the CRM and billing know. | Sub-workspaces with their own IDs split one customer into several small ones. | | Plan change `plan_changed` | Expansion and renewal. | Expansion bought outside the tracked flow appears in billing and nowhere else. | Event names are illustrative; yours will differ. The [dependency map](https://www.skene.ai/resources/frameworks#dependency-map) shows which other frameworks share each event. ## The expansion finance saw first _Illustrative example. The company and the figures are invented to show the mechanism._ A customer success team reports adoption from a usage event per workspace. A product change lets enterprise customers create sub-workspaces, and events from them carry the child ID instead of the parent account. Adoption for the largest customers appears to halve. Finance, meanwhile, sees those same accounts expanding. For a quarter the two teams bring contradicting bowties to the board, and both are reading their own data correctly. ## Checks before you trust it - Map each right-hand stage to a named event before drawing the bowtie, and mark stages with no event as unmeasured. - Check that adoption and expansion events roll up to the account ID the CRM uses. - Compare product-reported expansion with billing every month; a widening gap is a tracking question. - Give the right side an owner as clear as the sales leader who owns the left. ## Check the events under it Before SaaS bowtie goes into a plan, find out whether the events it needs exist and still fire the way it assumes. The [free audit](https://www.skene.ai/signup) maps what your product collects today: sign in, connect a GitHub repository or Supabase, and Skene returns one audit, with no card. On Pro, Skene Cloud reviews every pull request on a linked GitHub repository for removed or broken tracking, so a pull request that removes or renames one of these events is flagged before it merges. ## Related - [AARRR pirate metrics: five stages, each one event deep](https://www.skene.ai/resources/frameworks/aarrr-pirate-metrics) - [Net revenue retention: the investor number, and the product events that explain it](https://www.skene.ai/resources/frameworks/net-revenue-retention) - [Product-qualified accounts: fit, readiness, and a guard before the sales call](https://www.skene.ai/resources/frameworks/product-qualified-account) - Glossary: [Funnel](https://www.skene.ai/resources/glossary/funnel) - Glossary: [Event taxonomy](https://www.skene.ai/resources/glossary/event-taxonomy) - Glossary: [Cohort](https://www.skene.ai/resources/glossary/cohort) - Glossary: [Event name](https://www.skene.ai/resources/glossary/event-name) ## Sitemap - [Markdown sitemap](https://www.skene.ai/sitemap.md): every page on this site, with its markdown counterpart. - [Index for language models](https://www.skene.ai/llms.txt): the same set as a link-dense index. - [Full corpus](https://www.skene.ai/llms-full.txt): reference content concatenated as plain text.