In this episode of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast titled, Revenue and Retention: Why Customer Success Is Key to Sustainable Growth host Kerry Curran is joined by Roee Hartuv, Head of Revenue Architecture at Winning by Design, to unpack a mindset shift that B2B companies must embrace to grow sustainably: true revenue growth doesn’t end at the closed-won stage—it begins there.

Drawing from his experience advising recurring revenue businesses around the world, Roee breaks down how the traditional go-to-market model—focused almost entirely on new acquisition—is no longer enough. He introduces the “bowtie” framework, a more holistic approach to GTM that prioritizes retention, expansion, and customer lifetime value.

Throughout the conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why 70–90% of recurring revenue comes from existing customers—and why most companies are underinvesting in that opportunity
  
• How customer success can become a strategic growth engine—not just a support function
• Why expansion is more efficient than acquisition, and how to resource accordingly
• How to structure high-performing CS pods to support mid-market and enterprise clients
• Ways to equip account managers with the mindset and messaging to grow accounts without sounding “salesy”
• The critical role of marketing in supporting post-sale growth, from product updates to thought leadership
• And why companies should stop thinking of GTM as a funnel—and start treating it as a bowtie

This episode is a must-listen for marketing, sales, RevOps, and customer success leaders who are ready to drive sustainable revenue growth—not just this quarter, but long-term.

If you're serious about building a revenue engine that lasts, this one’s for you.

Podcast transcript

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:00.911)
So welcome, Roee. Please introduce yourself and share your background and expertise.

Roee Hartuv (00:06.49)
All right. First of all, thank you for having me. My name is Roee Hartuv, I work with B2B recurring revenue companies and help them build sustainable growth strategies and processes. I lead a team of consultants, and we work with our customers to design and implement what we believe are best practices to achieve sustainable growth.

I have a sales background, and I transferred to the “dark side” of consulting five years ago.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:45.213)
Excellent. We’re very excited to talk to you today. I’m a bit obsessed with the topic of go-to-market strategy because I love that it takes revenue beyond just sales  beyond just new business  and makes revenue growth part of the company’s core function.

I always think, you know, revenue growth should be the North Star of all businesses. Even if you’re a nonprofit, you’re still trying to fundraise. Yet, I’ve worked in big companies where I’d ask about the North Star, and they’d say, “It’s to make our customers happy.” And I’d think, “Well, can’t it be making our customers happy while growing company revenue?” So, I know you can relate to this.

I guess, share a bit about the broader definition of what we’re calling go-to-market today and your perspective on it.

Roee Hartuv (01:51.842)
Yes, so I think in the past, we talked about sales or maybe sales and marketing, and now we all talk about go-to-market. Go-to-market includes the entire revenue journey  from the awareness stage, which usually starts with marketing, to the sales team, maybe a BDR team, and somewhere in the middle lead nurturing, to the sales team that closes the business, and then the people who take those existing customers, onboard them, retain them, make them happy, sign them for another year, and then expand. We now call this entire process the go-to-market strategy. That is the scope, and I think it’s the right scope for a recurring revenue business.

Our expertise is recurring revenue. And when you’re talking about recurring revenue, you need to look at what’s happening after the post-sale because you only make money on your accounts if they come back to you  if they renew for the second and third year. We all know that, in most cases, we’re not profitable on a customer in the first contract period, so we need them to stick with us.

In a recurring revenue business, we understand that we need to look at the entire revenue journey  from marketing, sales, and customer success  which we call go-to-market.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:21.509)
Yes, I love that. It also ties to looking at the ICP or target customer that continues to drive net revenue growth year over year and feeding that back into your marketing and sales strategy. It’s so smart on so many levels.

One of the things we talked about previously was the challenges people face when they’re calling you and your team. What are the challenges they typically face that make them realize they need to bring in the experts?

Roee Hartuv (03:58.072)
Yes, “Our growth is stalling.” That’s the number one problem we hear left and right. Sometimes it’s even, “Costs are increasing,” but usually it’s, “Costs can increase as long as we continue to bring in more revenue,” but when revenue growth stalls, that’s the number one problem.

One of the things we like to analyze is where growth is coming from. When you look at your revenue  and again, we’re talking in the context of recurring revenue  there are three areas that growth can come from. Obviously, new business. That’s always been true in sales: you bring in more customers, your revenue increases. But in a recurring revenue business, there are two additional growth levers.

The first one is retention. When you look under the hood at where your revenue is coming from, anywhere between 70% to 90% is your existing customer base renewing with you. And the other  depending on your expansion strategy  is expansion: your existing customers buying more from you.

Traditionally, most companies only look at the first one: acquisition, new business. They don’t put enough resources into what’s happening on the customer success and expansion side, whoever is responsible for expansion.

We made a lot of progress up until the crash at the end of 2021 when SaaS came crashing down, and then many companies downsized, and customer success  the post-sale team  was hit the hardest. I think we’ve gone backward in some of the progress we made on post-sale activities. And now we’re starting to see the impact of that.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:12.099)
Yes, I definitely agree with you there. They always say it’s more expensive to win a new client than it is to retain an existing one. Do you have a cost estimate around that? Or do we just know it’s a lot more?

Roee Hartuv (06:29.806)
It’s a lot more, and it changes over time  the cost of acquiring new customers. We actually did an analysis where we looked at 72 public SaaS companies, including Databricks, Twilio, Salesforce  the best companies.

What we saw was that for new acquisition, costs increased dramatically. The best-performing companies, let's say, for example, Palantir, which is doing a fantastic job  every dollar they put in, they get a dollar back. So, sales and marketing spend compared to new revenue is one-to-one.

However, we see companies where that completely spun out of control. Dropbox, for example, spends $4 on every new dollar they generate. Most of those 72 companies we analyzed are somewhere in the middle, like two-to-one or three-to-one.

Of course, the cost to serve and retain customers comes at a fraction of that. I don’t have the exact numbers, but it’s somewhere between 20 cents to serve $1.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:58.755)
Yes, that’s a big difference.

It makes so much sense. I’ve spent a lot more time on the marketing and sales side than on customer success, but I know, to your point, how difficult it is to win a client  and to win the right client that’s going to continue to grow year over year.

That customer success pillar of go-to-market strategy is something that, as I mentioned earlier, makes so much sense. I agree with you: the more companies look at this as a key growth pillar, the better they’ll be long-term. But, as you know, it’s not always intuitive or part of best practices  which is where you come in.

So, talk about how you help your clients identify that customer success is an area they need to improve, and how you help them improve it.

Roee Hartuv (09:01.954)
When we look at retention, we look at retention rates, churn rates, GRR, and we benchmark those numbers. We’ll say, “Hey guys, you need to improve here,” or “You’re doing fantastic.”

For expansion, we look at NRR and take the expansion out to see if there’s room for growth. This is a combination of understanding exactly what they’re selling. If they’re selling just one product, say, a license for the entire company  then there’s no real expansion, maybe just selling more services, but nothing significant to grow there.

If it’s per seat, or by features, or additional products, that’s different. For example, I’m currently working with a ~$600 million ARR company. At this stage, they continue to grow not necessarily organically, but also through M&A. They bought another company in the same industry, selling to  I wouldn’t say the same buying centers, but the same organizations.

So, they now have two fantastic product families, and their biggest growth lever is combining them. These companies have been together for almost 12 months, and it still hasn’t been done.

We raised the flag and told them, “Hey guys, it’s great you bought this company. They have a great product. But nobody took their customer list and your list and combined them to see the white spaces  to see where you can sell each other’s products.”

That’s just one example of a project I recently worked on.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:59.235)
Yes, no, that’s a great example. Putting the resources behind customer success, especially when compared to net new business…

You shared with me earlier that you often do cost analyses comparing hiring an account manager or customer success role versus another salesperson. Talk a bit about that equation you bring into play.

Roee Hartuv (11:27.246)
Yes, this is a very cool model we like to present to our customers during planning sessions.

We look at: What’s the salary for another AE? What’s the cost and salary for an account manager or customer success manager? How much revenue does the person on the left generate? And if we want, let’s project it over five years. What's the revenue they’re generating on the right?

We then show them, “If you invest here, what’s your return on investment? If you invest here, what’s the return on investment?”

We pride ourselves on focusing on recommendations based on data. So, we do a lot of this kind of modeling to help answer: Where should we spend our resources?

By the way, the bigger the company, probably the more resources should go on the right side. You have a large existing install base, and you need to focus on expanding and, of course, retaining.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:47.045)
So you’re saying the larger the company, the more you should have on the customer success side versus the sales side?

Roee Hartuv (12:53.164)
Yes. When you think about it, companies start off, and the first team they build is the sales team. Then they bring in marketing. At some point, they bring in customer success.

But sales is usually always leading that charge and absorbing most of the company’s resources. At some point, that needs to shift toward customer success and marketing.

By the way, Kerry, I just realized that when I presented the customer journey, I talked about marketing at the beginning  and I know your audience is largely marketing people  so it’s important to note that when we’re talking about retention and expansion, marketing’s role in supporting customer success and account management is crucial.

In very mature companies, that might sound logical, but in many cases, it’s not happening. Marketing supports customer success, not only by generating pipeline  which is where the clear numbers and pressure often lie  but also by supporting the existing customer base.

That includes making sure they’re heard, ensuring there’s communication, and identifying or generating expansion opportunities.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:23.397)
Yes, I love that. I agree, because there are so many ways marketing can keep the current customer base informed of  to your point  new products and services, especially after there’s been an acquisition or merger:

“This is what’s happening, this is what’s available.”

But also just reminding existing customers that you are innovative, that you have new things coming, that you’re providing value in the industry.

You’re demonstrating the additional value customers get by being your customer, keeping them a little closer so they’re not distracted when a competitor comes by with a shinier object.

Without that communication, you end up in situations where they say, “We’re going to your competitor because they have XYZ feature,” and you’re like, “No, no, wait  we have that too! We just never told you about it.”

Roee Hartuv (15:36.982)
One of the trends I see right now is that we always talk about wanting to be thought leaders in our industry, right? But we’re always focused on that for lead generation.

That’s so important when you think about it for your existing customer base too.

I just had a client  they sell communication center solutions, telephone routing systems for, say, T-Mobile support centers. AI is, like in every industry, disrupting their space.

Their customers want to know from them: What are the new trends? What are the new features? Not just what they’re working on or what they can upsell or cross-sell, but where’s the market heading? What are they missing? What do they need to know?

Creating thought leadership webinars and that type of communication with the existing client base  I think that’s a best practice that often isn’t done.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:54.915)
Yes, I agree. Hopefully, everyone listening will start investing more thought into customer success.

Another aspect you talked about is building the right structure for the team. So, tell us about your customer success pod strategy that you roll out for clients.

Roee Hartuv (17:17.026)
Yes. So, the higher you go in ACVs  and let’s correlate that with segments: SMB, mid-market, enterprise  the more we’d recommend moving toward a pod structure.

A pod structure is where the same team works together to support the same book of business.

You might have an account manager, who in most cases leads that pod (though not necessarily), and then you have customer success, a renewal manager, a support manager, maybe a technical account manager or an implementation manager, someone technical to support the client.

They work together on a set of, depending on the situation, maybe 10, 20, 30 accounts.

Operating together, having the same communication day in and day out, knowing the customers intimately… If someone moves on, the pod retains that knowledge of the account.

So, there’s a lot of advantage, and I think in mid-market and enterprise segments, that’s probably the best approach all around.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:44.601)
Yes, I think that’s so smart because you have basically all the resources the customers are going to need to be successful, available to help.

And to your point, having that legacy knowledge of the customer and relationship is so important.

The other thing we talked about is a bit of a challenge I often hear: the excuse that account managers aren’t good at selling or aren’t comfortable with selling.

I hear people say, “We’re afraid to come across as salesy.” But as we’ve discussed, organic growth and upsell of other products are so important for growth strategies.

Talk about some of the strategies or recommendations you roll out to help your customers or teams upsell to existing customers.

Roee Hartuv (19:36.406)
Yes, so this is a mindset.

How do we turn customer success or account managers  who usually didn’t grow up as sellers, who are focused on impact and customer satisfaction, and who say, “I don’t want to sell anything; I just want to help”  into people who can upsell?

That’s actually a great approach! But if we change their mindset and help them see that they’re there to help their customers, and if we educate them (or they know already) that supporting a specific role has led to success selling additional features or products to 20 other accounts in their book of business, they can achieve the same success for the customer they’re currently talking with.

This is the mindset we want to install in customer success: You’re not upselling or cross-selling, even though sometimes it sounds like that. You’re coming from a genuine place of wanting to support, because you know that these additional features or products can help your customer succeed in their job.

When you come with that mindset, it’s not a sale  you’re actually coming to help.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:04.377)

I wholeheartedly agree with you. You’re being strategic when you bring in more solutions that will help them.

Especially if the client would genuinely benefit from something else you offer.

I love the idea of sharing examples from other personas or similar clients that align with theirs.

So, for all the account managers out there who are nervous about bringing in more ideas, I love this framing: you’re really just helping them with their impact plan and growing their business.

Excellent. Roee, this has been super valuable, and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

Before we let you go, what’s the first step you’d recommend to someone listening today who realizes, “Oh, I need to work on this right away”?

What’s the first thing they should do to strengthen retention and organic growth?

Roee Hartuv (22:05.356)
When we’re talking about retention and expansion, it’s about changing the mindset most organizations still have.

Most still follow the classical sales and marketing funnel, and the entire team is focused on that: How do we create more pipeline, top of funnel, bottom of funnel, convert to create more customers?

I would recommend they adopt what we call the bow tie.

If you think about it, it’s like taking the sales and marketing funnel, tilting it on its side, and adding another funnel facing the other way. That way, you look at the entire revenue journey.

Once you install that and have everybody looking not just at the endpoint of a signed contract, but at renewal and expansion, and get the entire organization looking at the full customer journey, I think that’s the first step organizations need to take.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:02.265)
Yes, I love the bow tie visual. It’s so smart, and it makes so much sense.

I’m nodding here in agreement because there’s so much potential  and many of the most successful companies are successful because they have clients they’ve kept for many, many years, helping them continue to iterate.

I’ve loved all your advice.

So, Roee, how can people find you?

Roee Hartuv (23:28.558)
If they want to reach me, LinkedIn is probably the best channel.

Winning by Design is the company, and we have a ton of information about our IP, frameworks, and models that we’ve developed along the way, all open source.

Come to our website; there are videos and one-pagers you can download.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:55.981)
Excellent. I’ll be sure to include links in the show notes as well.

Roee, thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you for sharing your expertise with us.

Roee Hartuv (24:06.668)
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:08.463)
Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast. If today's episode sparked an idea or gave you something actionable, do me a favor, follow, rate, and review the show, it helps us grow and bring even more expert strategies to marketers like you. I'm Kerry Curran reminding you that real growth happens when marketing leads with purpose and revenue in mind. For more actionable advice, go to revenuebasedmarketing.com.

Until next time, keep driving forward.