The ARISE Revenue Engine Operating System™: Turn Tactics into a Growth Flywheel

Imagine your marketing, sales, and customer success teams each doing their own thing – random acts of go-to-market with no central coordination. Leads slip through cracks, sales blames marketing for “bad leads,” customer success fights fires to retain unhappy clients.

Sound familiar? This is the reality for too many B2B SaaS CMOs and CROs. Siloed tactics don’t just add friction; they stall growth and waste budget. The truth is, even great individual efforts don’t compound when they’re not connected. They cancel each other out.

Now imagine flipping the script. What if you had a unified revenue engine where every tactic, team, and tool spun the same flywheel? Instead of siloed spurts, you’d build unstoppable momentum. More pipeline, faster sales cycles, higher net retention, happier customers, all feeding into each other.

That’s exactly what the ARISE Revenue Engine Operating System™ promises: turning disjointed initiatives into a compounding growth machine powered by cross-functional alignment and data-driven iteration.

ARISE Revenue Engine OS

ARISE Revenue Engine OS is a proprietary five-stage framework (Assess, Research, Ideate, Strategise, Execute) that operationalises your entire go-to-market motion. It acts as an overarching GTM methodology, think of it as the central brain uniting marketing, sales, RevOps and customer success.

Instead of tackling demand generation, ABM strategy, sales enablement, and retention in silos, ARISE OS aligns every function around one coordinated plan.

Why Siloed Tactics Fail: Siloed teams often hit a ceiling because they’re optimising in isolation. Marketing might hit MQL targets while sales struggles to close, or sales sells deals that success can’t retain.

This misalignment is costly, an estimated $1 trillion is lost per year due to poor sales-marketing coordination. ARISE OS tackles this by creating shared visibility and goals across all revenue teams from day one.

The ARISE OS Flywheel

The five stages of ARISE form a continuous flywheel. You start by assessing current gaps and performance. Insights from assessment drive fresh research into your market and customers. Research then fuels ideation of innovative plays. Those ideas crystalise into a cohesive strategy, which you execute rapidly. Execution yields new data and wins, which feed back into the next assessment – and the cycle continues.

Over time, this flywheel effect means each quarter’s efforts build upon the last, compounding results rather than restarting from scratch.

Five Pillars Overview

In the Assess stage, you’ll audit your full revenue funnel and team capabilities to find what’s holding you back.

In Research, you’ll deep-dive into market, competitors, and customer feedback, uncovering opportunities for differentiation.

The Ideate stage then uses those insights to brainstorm bold, cross-functional initiatives (no idea is off-limits).

Strategise takes the best ideas and turns them into a practical roadmap aligning every play, resource, and metric under one unified GTM strategy.

Finally, Execute is where the rubber meets the road: launch campaigns, enable the salesforce, tweak processes, and quickly iterate based on real results.

Each pillar section of this guide provides: new insights into why that stage matters, pain-point tables for CMOs and CROs, and quotes from the ARISE GTM team with hard-won wisdom.

You’ll also see an original case snapshot of ARISE OS in action at a (anonymised) SaaS company, and a 90-Day Roadmap showing how to implement ARISE OS in three months flat.

We’ll show you how to measure success with a KPI tree linking every tactic to top-line goals (no vanity metrics here, only what moves the needle). Finally, we’ll tackle common objections (e.g. “Do we really need an OS? Can’t we fix one department at a time?”) and debunk them one by one.

By the end of this guide, you’ll understand how a go-to-market operating system transcends siloed tactics. Whether you’re trying to accelerate pipeline, tighten your RevOps framework, improve net revenue retention, or all of the above, ARISE OS provides a structured but flexible path to do it in a fraction of the time.

It’s not theory – it’s a proven approach that has already powered 100+ SaaS teams to faster growth. Now let’s dive into why silos are impeding your growth and how to break free.

Why Siloed Tactics Stall Growth

Silo syndrome is the silent growth killer in B2B companies. It happens when marketing, sales, and customer success each operate on their own island of strategy, data, and goals.

Perhaps Marketing is churning out leads without visibility into what Sales considers a qualified lead.

Sales might be closing deals without proper onboarding plans from Customer Success.

Customer Success, in turn, might be scrambling to reduce churn from customers that were never an ideal fit to begin with.

The result? Sub-optimal outcomes at every stage of the customer lifecycle. It’s like three uncoordinated chefs trying to make one meal in separate kitchens – messy and inefficient.

The costs of these silos are huge. Misalignment doesn’t just cause internal frustration; it hits the bottom line. Consider that companies where marketing and sales are deeply aligned achieve 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability on average, while misaligned orgs often waste resources and see pipeline leakage.

In fact, poor marketing-sales coordination is estimated to cost businesses over $1 trillion annually, a staggering figure that highlights how much potential revenue is left on the table.

What’s more, siloed data means leaders don’t have a single source of truth to make decisions. Marketing trusts one dashboard, sales another, and there’s endless debate over whose numbers are “right” instead of working collaboratively to improve them.

Why do silos form in the first place?

Often it’s a cultural or structural issue. Teams have different KPIs (leads vs. opportunities vs. retention) and are incented to optimise locally rather than globally.

Over time, each department develops its own processes and tech stack, think fragmented CRM, separate spreadsheets, and maybe a patchwork of project management tools. Even implementing a RevOps function or fancy collaboration software doesn’t automatically solve this; if the strategy itself is created in silos, tools won’t bridge the gap.

Silos thrive in the absence of a unifying operating system.

Let’s put it bluntly: siloed tactics don’t scale. You might hit a growth spurt here or there, but it won’t be sustainable. Leads generated by an isolated marketing team might not convert if sales isn’t on the same page about the campaign. A stellar sales quarter can be wiped out by churn if customer success isn’t prepared to deliver on promises.

This is why so many startups hit a plateau after initial traction, the “random acts” of marketing and ad-hoc sales heroics can only carry you so far. Without a holistic GTM framework, growth stalls.

So, what’s the alternative?

Breaking down silos requires more than a mandate to “align teams.” It requires an operating system that by design forces cross-functional planning, execution, and learning.

A go-to-market OS ensures everyone is rowing in the same direction. It institutionalises communication and transparency: marketing knows what happens to the leads they source, sales knows the messaging and context behind campaigns, and success gets involved before new deals close to prepare for onboarding.

The ARISE OS was built precisely to facilitate this level of integration. It provides a common language and process for all revenue teams, so nothing falls through the cracks.

Importantly, ARISE doesn’t replace your team’s expertise – it amplifies it by connecting the dots. Your demand gen lead can still run creative campaigns, and your sales director can still push their reps to hit quotas, but now they’re doing it in concert, informed by shared data and strategy.

The outcome is synergy: 1 + 1 + 1 equals 5 in terms of impact. Marketing’s efforts improve sales results, which set up customer success for better retention, which in turn fuels upsells and advocacy feeding back into growth. In other words, alignment isn’t just corporate kumbaya; alignment is ROI.

Before we explore how ARISE creates this alignment, let’s cement the key point: Siloed tactics stall growth because they lack the multiplier effect of an integrated strategy.

If each team is pushing in a slightly different direction, the company essentially runs in circles. A unified go-to-market operating system like ARISE is the answer – providing the focus, coordination, and compounding effect that siloed efforts can never achieve.

With the “why” established, we can move on to the “how”, starting with an overview of the ARISE OS flywheel that powers compounding growth.

The ARISE OS Flywheel: A Go-to-Market Operating System in Action

Think of the ARISE OS as a growth flywheel for your go-to-market. Each stage of ARISE feeds the next, creating momentum that accelerates with every rotation.

Instead of the traditional linear handoff (marketing does stuff, then sales, then success, often disconnected), ARISE is circular and iterative.

It’s an operating system in the truest sense: a set of processes and shared frameworks that all revenue teams run on continuously, not a one-and-done project or a static playbook.

Here’s how the flywheel spins in practice:

Assess →

You begin by taking stock of your current situation across marketing, sales, and customer success. This isn’t a superficial checkup; it’s a rigorous diagnostic covering metrics, processes, tech stack, and team skills. The goal is to pinpoint exactly where the bottlenecks and opportunities lie.

For example, Assess might reveal that your lead-to-opportunity conversion rate is abysmal, or that your churn is creeping up in a specific segment. These findings set the agenda for what comes next.

Research →

Armed with the assessment insights, you dive deeper externally. This could mean researching market trends, analysing competitors, and gathering voice-of-customer data.

If Assess told us conversion is low, Research might investigate why your target buyers hesitate – maybe competitor X offers a feature you don’t, or your messaging isn’t resonating. It’s about filling knowledge gaps and validating assumptions with data.

By the end of Research, you have fresh intelligence and customer insight, ready to spark new ideas.

Ideate →

Now the fun part: brainstorming solutions. With evidence from Assess and Research in hand, cross-functional teams ideate new strategies and tactics. Crucially, this isn’t siloed ideation (e.g. marketing coming up with campaign ideas alone).

ARISE Ideate sessions bring everyone to the table – marketing, sales, CS, RevOps – to throw around ideas that cut across the customer journey.

This is where you might conceptualise an ABM campaign targeting high-value segments identified in research, coupled with a tailored sales play and success plan to onboard those accounts. Nothing is off-limits at first; the goal is to generate a range of possibilities.

Strategise →

Not all ideas will make the cut, so the Strategise stage is about curating and formalising the plan. It transforms great ideas into a coherent go-to-market strategy.

Decisions solidify around which campaigns to run, which sales plays to implement, what product or messaging pivots to make, and how it all ties together on a timeline. The output is a clear roadmap (often a 90-day plan for quick impact) that specifies who will do what, when, and with what resources. It’s the blueprint that aligns all teams.

At this point, everyone knows the game plan and their role in it. Marketing knows how their campaign leads will be followed up by sales, sales knows what enablement content is coming, etc. The silos have been replaced by a single game plan.

Execute →

Finally, you launch and execute the strategy in unison. Campaigns go live, sales outreach begins with new messaging, customer success readies resources for the influx of new customers.

What makes ARISE execution different is the emphasis on agility and learning. It’s not “set and forget.” As data flows in, the teams huddle to review: Are we getting the expected pipeline? How are leads progressing? Where are deals stalling?

This tight feedback loop allows for rapid adjustments, maybe tweaking ad targeting, updating a sales script, or adding a customer touchpoint to keep the strategy on track.

Execution is also where the RevOps folks work their magic, ensuring systems (like CRM dashboards, automation, etc.) are capturing the right data and automating handoffs, further smoothing cross-team collaboration.

When you complete one cycle of Execute, you don’t stop, you feed the results right back into the next Assess.

Perhaps the campaign doubled web traffic but conversion still lagged; that becomes a focus for the next round. Or sales crushed the quarter but customer success is overwhelmed; noted for next cycle improvements.

In this way, ARISE OS institutionalises continuous improvement. Each loop of the flywheel makes the machine run more efficiently. Over time, small optimisations each cycle lead to big gains, a compounding effect that is near-impossible to achieve with ad-hoc initiatives.

It’s worth highlighting that ARISE OS is technology-agnostic yet tech-integrated. It doesn’t matter if you use HubSpot, Salesforce, or spreadsheets – the operating system overlays on top. But it also prompts you to integrate your tools where it counts.

For instance, as part of Strategise or Execute, ARISE will encourage connecting your CRM, marketing automation, and analytics so that data is shared (no more marketing and sales living in different systems).

The OS itself can even be delivered inside platforms like HubSpot via custom objects and workflows, so your team executes within their everyday tools, not in siloed documents.

In summary, ARISE OS replaces the start-stop rhythm of siloed projects with a steady flywheel of growth. Every stage adds momentum:

• Assess gives direction,
• Research adds knowledge,
• Ideate sparks innovation,
• Strategise provides focus, and
• Execute delivers results.

As you repeat the cycle, what you get is a self-reinforcing system. It’s the difference between pushing a boulder uphill repeatedly (siloed campaigns) versus building a wheel that keeps spinning on its own (a unified growth engine).

This flywheel mentality is at the heart of modern RevOps and agile marketing methodologies, and ARISE brings it all together in one package.

Before we dive into each pillar in detail, keep one guiding thought in mind: No single campaign or tactic, no matter how brilliant, will 10x your growth. But a well-designed system that continuously produces and scales winning tactics just might.

ARISE OS is that system. Now, let’s unpack each of its five stages and see how you can apply them.

Assess: Benchmark Everything and Expose the Gaps

You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. The Assess stage is all about shining a floodlight into every corner of your revenue engine to understand where you stand.

For CMOs and CROs, this stage can be equal parts enlightening and uncomfortable – enlightening because you finally get a holistic view, uncomfortable because it often reveals hard truths.

But that’s exactly the point.

Assess gives you the empirical baseline you need to drive change. It’s the equivalent of a comprehensive medical exam for your go-to-market. Skipping it is like treating symptoms without diagnosing the disease.

During Assess, the ARISE GTM team works with you to audit metrics, processes, and team capabilities across the entire customer lifecycle.

We’re not talking about a cursory glance at Google Analytics or the CRM dashboard; we mean digging into pipeline data, conversion rates, customer retention stats, campaign performance, content effectiveness, sales process adherence, CRM usage, tech stack integration – the works.

Importantly, Assess is cross-functional. Instead of separate marketing audits and sales audits, it’s one integrated assessment. You’ll see how marketing’s lead quality affects sales outcomes, how sales handoff affects customer success, etc. The deliverable is a clear map of where your funnel is healthy, where it’s leaking, and why.

For many leadership teams, this stage is a reality check. Let’s face it – internal biases can skew our perception. The marketing team might believe they’re doing a great job because MQL volume is high, but an unbiased assessment might show only 10% of those MQLs ever convert to SQLs (ouch).

Sales might boast about closing deals, but maybe 40% of new customers churn within a year, wiping out the gain.

Assess brings these facts to light without blame. It’s data-driven and objective, creating a shared understanding among all stakeholders. When a CMO and CRO look at the same assessment report, it levels the conversation: “Alright, here’s where we are, now what are we going to do about it?”

To illustrate, here are some common pain points that a robust Assess stage uncovers for each role:

In the Assess stage, these frustrations get surfaced with hard data. For example, you might discover that while marketing generated 1,000 leads last quarter, only 100 became SQLs and 20 closed – a huge drop-off indicating either lead quality or nurture issues.

Or you might find that sales cycle length has increased 30% in the last year, pinpointing process friction. Perhaps NPS or customer satisfaction scores are languishing, forewarning churn. By benchmarking dozens of KPIs across marketing, sales, and CS, we assemble the puzzle of your revenue engine’s current state.

Another key part of Assess is evaluating team capabilities and toolsets. Do you have the right people and tech in place to hit your goals? Maybe your content team is stellar but you lack sales enablement resources, or your salespeople aren’t fully using the CRM features you pay for.

We sometimes find companies have powerful tools (marketing automation, BI dashboards, etc.) underutilised due to siloed adoption. Assess flags these gaps and inefficiencies. It’s common to realise you’re paying for software or collecting data that no one uses – easy cost savings or reallocation opportunities.

By the end of Assess, you should have quantitative benchmarks and qualitative insights. For example: conversion rates at each stage (MQL→SQL, SQL→Proposal, Proposal→Close), average deal size, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (LTV), retention rate, NPS – all baseline values.

Plus diagnoses: “We’re weakest in mid-funnel conversion” or “Our onboarding process is under-resourced, leading to poor activation.” This becomes the “before” picture that every subsequent ARISE stage will build upon. And down the line, when you Execute changes, you’ll compare back to these baselines to measure improvement.

Crucially, Assess gets everyone – CMO, CRO, RevOps, etc. – on the same page. It’s hard to argue with a single-source-of-truth assessment. That alignment in understanding is half the battle in breaking silos. Suddenly, instead of finger-pointing (“Sales isn’t following up!” “Marketing leads suck!”), the conversation shifts to joint problem solving. Both CMO and CRO see, for instance, that lead quality and follow-up process need work; it becomes “let’s fix it together” rather than “your team’s issue.”

In summary, Assess sets the foundation.

It grounds your ambitious growth plans in reality and data. It might be humbling, but it’s empowering. Because once you know exactly what’s wrong and where, you can do something about it. Skipping this step is like setting out on a journey with no map and a broken speedometer – you’re just hoping for the best.

ARISE OS doesn’t do hope; it does evidence. And evidence-based strategy starts here. With our assessment in hand, we’re ready to move to the next stage: researching the market landscape and customer insights that will inform our game plan.

Research: Listen to the Market Whispers

If Assess is about looking inward to understand yourself, Research is about looking outward to understand your market and buyers. This stage injects the voice of the customer and the realities of the competitive landscape directly into your strategy.

Why is that so critical?

Because companies often fall into the trap of inside-out thinking, assuming they know what customers want or why deals are won/lost, without actually validating those assumptions. Research flips the script to outside-in: we gather real evidence from the field so our strategy isn’t built on opinions or outdated lore.

During the Research phase of ARISE OS, we focus on a few key areas:

Customer and Prospect Insights

This can involve customer interviews, surveys, and reviewing any available feedback (support tickets, win-loss call recordings, etc.). The goal is to unearth pain points, decision criteria, and perceptions of your product/service.

What do customers say was the reason they chose you (or didn’t choose you)?

Where do they see value, and where do they get frustrated?

For prospects who didn’t buy, why not – was it price, feature gaps, competitor preference?

These insights are gold for shaping messaging and priorities. For example, you might discover that prospects consistently mention needing a certain integration that you don’t offer, or that customers aren’t aware of a feature you already built, indicating a marketing communication gap.

Competitive Intelligence

We analyse your key competitors’ moves, their product changes, messaging, content strategy, pricing models, and go-to-market tactics. It’s not about reacting to competitors’ every move, but about understanding the context you operate in.

Maybe a competitor has started targeting a new segment or offering a cheaper entry-level product. Knowing this helps you differentiate. We often perform a SWOT analysis or similar for each major competitor, and also identify where there’s white space.

The aim is to spot opportunities: perhaps no competitor is owning the narrative around a certain pain point, an opening for you to claim. Or maybe all competitors look the same in messaging, suggesting a chance to zag where they zig.

Market Trends and Benchmarks

This involves looking at industry research, analyst reports, and broader market data relevant to your business. Are there emerging trends (technological, regulatory, economic) affecting customer needs or budgets?

For instance, if you’re in fintech SaaS and new compliance rules are coming, that’s a marketing angle and a product consideration. We also benchmark where possible – e.g., what’s the average net revenue retention in your sector, or typical CAC payback period?

This helps set realistic targets and might highlight if you’re lagging in an area everyone else has figured out. It also lends credibility internally: recommending a change is easier when you can say “75% of our competitors do X, and we currently don’t.”

In essence, Research provides the why behind the numbers we saw in Assess. If Assess revealed, say, low conversion in mid-funnel, Research might uncover that prospects find your content unconvincing compared to a competitor’s or that your sales demos aren’t addressing a key concern. It connects the dots externally.

CMOs and marketing teams usually embrace this stage (it’s their wheelhouse to study the market), but ARISE makes sure sales and CS teams are involved too. We often say, your front-line employees are an untapped research asset. Sales reps know the objections they hear daily. Customer success knows why customers are angry or ecstatic.

So ARISE Research will include internal interviews or workshops with these teams to download their anecdotal knowledge and then back it up with structured external research. It breaks another silo: no more “market research = marketing’s job only.” It becomes a shared exercise.

Here are the kinds of pain points that solid Research helps resolve:

In ARISE’s Research phase, we tackle these issues head on. For example, we might update (or create) your buyer personas based on fresh interviews, ensuring they include real language customers use and current pain points.

We document the customer journey in detail: awareness triggers, info sources, evaluation criteria, etc. This often reveals misalignments – e.g., perhaps prospects heavily rely on peer reviews in the awareness stage, but you have no presence on review sites or case studies to leverage that.

Or research might show that a “secondary” segment you’ve ignored is actually showing high interest in solutions like yours (time to consider an ABM pilot for that segment).

Win-loss interviews are a particularly high-yield research activity. Speaking directly with a handful of recent prospects, both those who chose you and those who went with another solution, can provide eye-opening feedback. We make it a point to conduct or facilitate these interviews.

The unfiltered quotes from real buyers can challenge preconceived notions. For instance, a win interview might reveal the client chose you for a feature your team thought was minor (indicating an angle to double down on), while a loss might reveal the prospect didn’t see differentiation (indicating a messaging problem). It’s common for companies to think they know why they win or lose deals, but research often uncovers a different reality.

From the CRO’s perspective, research is equally vital. A CRO might be focused on short-term quota and pipeline, but the best CROs are hungry for market intel that makes their sales strategy sharper.

During ARISE Research, CROs get tangible outputs like updated battlecards versus competitors, objection-handling scripts derived from real prospect pushbacks, and clarity on what not to focus on in sales pitches.

For example, if research shows customers don’t actually value a particular feature much, sales can stop over-indexing on that in demos. If it shows a new competitor is offering month-to-month contracts causing deal friction, the CRO can address that in pricing strategy.

By the end of the Research stage, you’ll have a trove of actionable insight: a clear picture of customer wants and fears, competitor positioning maps, and identified gaps between market needs and your current approach.

These findings serve as fuel for innovation in the next stage. Without them, teams often recycle the same stale ideas. With them, you have fresh clay to mold strategy from.

Importantly, the research deliverables are shared across teams, not kept in a marketing vault. This might include a research report or workshop where marketing, sales, CS, product, and execs all absorb the findings together.

It’s another alignment moment, everyone grounding themselves in the voice of the customer. There’s often a palpable shift in mindset: instead of debating opinions, teams start saying “According to our customers, X...”, which is far healthier.

So, Research is the bridge between identifying internal problems (Assess) and formulating creative solutions (Ideate). It prevents the common pitfall of brainstorming in a vacuum. With solid research, your Ideate stage will be grounded in reality and far more likely to produce winning ideas. Let’s move on to that creative part, where we turn all this insight into game-changing ideas for growth.

Ideate: From Blue Sky to Actionable Ideas

Armed with a clear picture of internal gaps (from Assess) and external realities (from Research), it’s time to get creative. The Ideate stage is where we break out of conventional thinking and imagine new approaches to achieve our growth objectives.

This isn’t your typical brainstorming where HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) dominate or where teams only propose ideas within their silo (“marketing suggests a campaign, sales suggests a spiff, CS suggests a webinar…”). ARISE Ideate is deliberately cross-functional and unconstrained, yet structured enough to turn creativity into concrete proposals.

During Ideation workshops (often facilitated by the ARISE GTM team), we gather a mix of stakeholders – marketing managers, sales leaders, SDRs, account execs, customer success reps, product folks, RevOps analysts, anyone with a perspective on revenue growth.

We present the key findings from Assess and Research as the springboard: “Here’s where we are; here’s what the market is telling us.” Then we pose targeted ideation prompts.

For example: “How might we improve lead-to-opportunity conversion given what we learned?” or “What bold moves could differentiate our buyer experience from Competitor Y?” By framing the challenges clearly, we focus the creative energy where it matters.

Ideation in ARISE often produces a range of ideas, big and small. Some examples that could emerge:

• Marketing might suggest a targeted ABM campaign for the segment that research showed is underserved, combining personalised content and outreach (involving sales in execution).

• Sales might propose a consultative selling training + new playbook if we learned that buyers crave more advisory sales interactions. Or perhaps a new trial/offering structure to reduce friction.

• Customer Success could bring up creating a community or user group to boost retention (since research indicated customers value peer support).

• RevOps could pitch automating a currently manual handoff or implementing a dashboard so that all teams share live performance data (addressing an Assess finding about siloed reporting).

• Product input might be to bundle a feature differently or offer a limited-time integration to address a competitive gap revealed in research.

• Or someone might float a more radical idea: e.g., pivoting messaging to a new pain point entirely, or launching a partnership program to expand reach.

During Ideation, no idea is immediately shot down. We use divergent thinking first (lots of ideas), then converge.

One method: we allow participants to anonymously write down ideas (to get beyond hierarchy or shyness), then discuss. We cluster similar ideas, debate merits, and often combine concepts. An “out-there” idea from one person might spark a practical variation from another.

A critical aspect is ensuring ideas are cross-functional by nature. If marketing proposes something that doesn’t involve sales or CS, we ask, “How can we involve those teams to amplify this?” For instance, an idea of a new webinar series from marketing becomes more powerful if sales uses it in their cadences and CS uses recordings for onboarding. In ARISE Ideate, the best ideas typically have multiple departments collaborating by design, which further busts silos.

Consider some pain points teams face before a process like this:

By bringing everyone together, ARISE Ideate changes this dynamic. Ideas get richer and more relevant because they incorporate diverse perspectives.

For example, marketing’s idea to start a podcast might be refined by sales suggesting it target specific prospects and by CS adding that it could feature successful customers (building advocacy).

Now it’s not just a podcast for awareness; it’s a multi-purpose idea touching pipeline and retention.

Of course, not every idea is a good one, and we can’t do everything. The latter part of Ideate is about prioritisation. We typically evaluate ideas on impact vs. effort (or cost).

Which ideas, if executed, could move the needle the most on our objectives? And do we have the resources/skills to execute them well?

Often, a few themes emerge. For instance, several ideas might cluster around improving buyer education, suggesting a strategic theme of “educate early to improve lead quality.” Another cluster might revolve around “speed up sales cycle,” etc.

The output of Ideate is a shortlist of high-potential ideas or initiatives that will form the core of the strategy. These might be packaged as strategic pillars or campaigns. For example, we might come out with something like:

1. Launch a 3-month ABM pilot targeting 50 Tier-1 accounts (cross-team effort).

2. Implement a new sales enablement sequence focusing on value consulting, with content from marketing.

3. Create a customer community and referral program to boost retention and expansion.

4. Adjust pricing/model for a land-and-expand approach as a response to competitor pricing (involving product, finance, sales).
   Each of these is a substantial initiative addressing key findings from Assess/Research.

One more subtle benefit: Ideation energises the team. After Assess and Research, some may feel a bit down (“wow, we have a lot to fix” or “competition is tough”).

Ideate flips that into excitement.

People see concrete, innovative paths forward. And because they contributed, there’s built-in buy-in. A sales manager is far more likely to support a campaign if it incorporates their ideas, for instance. The organisation starts to shift from siloed defenders of territory to a unified creative force tackling problems together.

By the end of Ideate, you have not just ideas, but the seedlings of your new go-to-market plan. We’ve essentially co-created potential solutions with those who will execute them.

Now it’s time to formalise these ideas into a strategic plan of attack – that’s where the Strategise stage comes in, turning the what-if into a concrete roadmap.

Strategise: Crafting the Unified GTM Game Plan

Ideation gave us great ideas; Strategise turns those into a focused action plan. This stage is about taking the raw material of brainstormed initiatives and shaping it into a deliberate strategy with clear priorities, timelines, and owners.

It’s often the phase where CMOs and CROs sit down together (with RevOps and others) and make the tough decisions: what exactly are we going to do, and how do all these moves fit together coherently?

The output is essentially your new go-to-market strategy, likely captured in a roadmap document or presentation that will guide the next quarter(s) of work.

Strategise in the ARISE OS is not a long, drawn-out annual planning exercise (we’ve all seen those strategy decks that gather dust). It’s fast and iterative, often a one or two-week process to finalise the plan coming out of Ideate.

The key here is integration and clarity. We ensure that marketing, sales, customer success, and RevOps plans are all aligned like puzzle pieces to the same picture.

Here’s how we typically approach it:

Define Strategic Objectives

First, we revisit the big-picture goals. What are the primary outcomes we’re chasing? Is it to accelerate top-line growth by X% this year? Improve net retention to Y%? Increase market share in a segment? We set or refine the North Star metrics.

For example, a strategic objective might be “Double inbound pipeline in 6 months” or “Improve cross-sell revenue by 30%.” These give direction and help evaluate which ideas contribute most.

Select and Scope Initiatives

From the Ideate shortlist, we decide which initiatives to pursue (given resources and impact). This means some ideas will be shelved or saved for later, and that’s okay. The goal is to do a few things exceptionally well rather than many things poorly.

Each chosen initiative gets scoped: what’s the deliverable and timeline? who is the owner? what teams are involved? We may decide, for instance, to execute three major plays in the next quarter:

1) an ABM campaign (owned by Marketing with Sales support),

2) a sales process overhaul with new enablement (owned by Sales with RevOps help), and

3) a customer expansion program (owned by CS with Marketing content).

Other good ideas might be scheduled for subsequent quarters or require dependencies.

Align Tactics and Channels

For each initiative, we map out the required tactics and channels. Strategise is where you plan the integrated campaign details or playbook steps.

Taking the ABM example, strategy would outline which accounts to target, what personalised content is needed, the cadence of touchpoints (ads, emails, LinkedIn, events), how SDRs will follow up, and how success will be measured (e.g., meeting rates, deal velocity from those accounts).

It’s like writing the playbook that multiple teams will execute together. Every tactic gets assigned, maybe Marketing writes the case studies and runs ads, Sales does personalised outreach and meetings, etc., all coordinated on a schedule.

Document Processes & Responsibilities

A unified GTM strategy often entails new processes. Perhaps we establish a service level agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales (e.g., marketing will deliver N qualified accounts per week via ABM, sales will follow up within 24 hours). Or define how leads from the campaign get routed and tracked (RevOps sets that up in CRM).

Strategise stage locks these down so no one is unclear on “who’s doing what.” It may also include decisions on any tooling changes, e.g., adopting a sales engagement tool or reconfiguring your HubSpot/CRM for new stages. All of that goes into the plan.

A common pain before this stage is a lack of one coherent plan:

The Strategise stage addresses these by creating one master plan that everyone can rally behind. A true go-to-market operating system shines here because it ensures every tactic ladders up to a strategy, and that strategy serves the business goals.

We also are careful to include measurement in the strategy. For each initiative, we define KPIs and leading indicators.

For instance, if one pillar of the strategy is improving win rate via sales training and content, we set a target win rate increase and maybe intermediate measures like proposal-stage conversion or rep proficiency scores.

This ties back to our Assess benchmarks – essentially we’re writing down what success will look like in numbers so we can track it in Execute.

Another element: risk mitigation. A good strategy anticipates potential pitfalls and plans contingencies. If we’re betting big on an ABM campaign, strategy might note “If by mid-quarter we’re not seeing enough engagement from Target Accounts, we will adjust by expanding the list or adding XYZ tactic.”

It’s not that we expect failure, but this keeps us agile, important in modern GTM where you need to iterate quickly.

By the end of Strategise, you often have a strategic plan document or one-page strategy map. It could be presented as, say, three strategic pillars each with key actions. For example:

1. Expand into Top Enterprise Accounts (ABM Initiative) – Goal: 20% increase in enterprise pipeline. Owner: CMO, supports: Sales Director & SDR lead. Tactics: ABM campaign Q3 targeting 50 accounts, personalized content, executive events, SDR outreach. KPI: Pipeline from these accounts, meetings set, deals closed.

2. Accelerate Sales Cycle (Sales Enablement Initiative) – Goal: Reduce sales cycle from 90 to 60 days. Owner: CRO, supports: RevOps, Marketing. Tactics: Implement MEDDIC sales process, new proposal templates, value calculator (Mktg builds), weekly deal coaching sessions. KPI: Avg. days to close, win rate improvement.

3. Increase Net Revenue Retention (Customer Expansion Initiative) – Goal: NRR from 100% to 110%. Owner: Head of CS, supports: CMO (for upsell campaigns). Tactics: Customer community launch, quarterly business reviews for top clients, cross-sell campaign to existing base with targeted offers. KPI: NRR, expansion ARR, churn rate.

Everything in the plan ties back to those objectives. Moreover, by naming owners and contributors, accountability is clear.

At this stage, stakeholder buy-in is crucial. We typically hold an alignment meeting with the leadership team to present the strategy and ensure all questions are answered. Because everyone has been involved through Assess–Research–Ideate, there are usually fewer objections. It’s more of a rallying moment: “This is our playbook for the next 90 days; let’s execute it with excellence.”

The strategy is now set. The teams know what to do and why. The final step is doing it and doing it in a synchronised, accountable way. That’s the Execute stage, which we’ll delve into next, showing how ARISE OS ensures the beautiful strategy on paper becomes tangible results in practice.

Execute: From Plan to High-Velocity Execution

A brilliant strategy means nothing without execution. The Execute stage of ARISE OS is where the rubber meets the road. Where we launch the campaigns, roll out the sales plays, and implement the changes we planned, all with tight coordination and feedback loops.

The mantra here is “execute, measure, iterate”. ARISE is unique in that execution isn’t the last gasp of a project; it’s an ongoing, energised sprint that feeds back into the continuous improvement cycle.

Execution in a traditional setting often falters due to silos resurfacing. Marketing runs a campaign but doesn’t inform sales of the context, so leads get lackluster follow-up. Sales starts a new pitch deck but doesn’t tell marketing, so messaging diverges.

ARISE OS prevents this by treating execution as a team sport from day one. We set up mechanisms for communication and accountability that persist throughout the execution phase (and beyond).

Key elements of the Execute stage include:

Launch Coordination

On day 1 of execution, every involved team knows the playbook. We often hold a kickoff meeting or “launch day war room.” For example, if we’re kicking off that big ABM campaign, marketing hits the go-button on targeted ads and personalised content, while sales begins outreach to the first batch of accounts, and customer success might be briefed on potential upsell conversations.

There’s excitement and clarity, no confusion about timing or roles. This is enabled by assets prepared in Strategise: content is ready, sales scripts are ready, tech triggers (like workflows) are set up. It’s a synchronised launch rather than a staggered, awkward rollout.

Regular Syncs and Stand-ups

During the execution period (say the 90-day sprint), ARISE OS enforces frequent check-ins. This could be weekly revenue team stand-ups or bi-weekly performance reviews. 

In these meetings, marketing, sales, CS share updates on their pieces of the plan. It keeps everyone accountable and informed. If marketing sees early indicators that, say, email engagement is low, they raise it and perhaps sales can follow up via calls – agile adjustments.

Conversely, if sales hears consistent prospect feedback, they funnel it back to marketing to tweak messaging on the fly. These syncs replace the old silo meetings; they are cross-functional by design.

Dashboard and Data Tracking

RevOps typically provides a unified dashboard visible to all teams (often built in CRM or BI tool) showing how execution is going. Key metrics tied to our strategy are tracked in near real-time: leads generated from campaign, conversion rates, pipeline added, win rates, retention numbers, etc.

This transparency is crucial.

Instead of each team tracking their own success in isolation, everyone sees the holistic picture. If one metric is lagging, it’s identified early. For example, if halfway through the quarter we see high lead volume but low SQL conversion, the team can react, maybe adjust targeting criteria or have SDRs refine their approach. Data, not gut feelings, drives mid-course corrections.

Enablement and Support

As execution unfolds, ARISE OS ensures teams have the support they need. The best plans still encounter bumps, a sales rep might need a new piece of content to handle an objection, or customer success might find they need additional training on the new upsell process. ARISE is proactive here.

Part of our process is a “support backlog”, items identified during execution to create or fix. Perhaps a competitor launched a surprise promo; marketing quickly crafts a counter-comms and shares it with sales. Or initial calls reveal a certain technical question stumping reps; product team hops on a training to clarify.

This responsiveness keeps execution velocity high. The plan isn’t static; it’s adaptive.

Let’s revisit pain points that plague execution in siloed environments and how ARISE execution overcomes them:

ARISE’s execution framework addresses these by keeping everyone in lockstep. It’s akin to an orchestra performing with a conductor (the ARISE OS plan) – each section plays their part at the right time, adjusting volume and tempo together.

One practical example: say our strategy included a webinar as part of the ABM campaign. In ARISE Execute, marketing would not only promote it, but also loop in sales early and sales might personally invite key prospects.

After the webinar, marketing and sales immediately meet to discuss attendee engagement. Sales then reaches out to attendees with context (“Hey, I saw you asked about X during the webinar…”).

Without ARISE, that webinar might have happened, marketing counts leads, and sales treats them as cold contacts days later. With ARISE, the execution was orchestrated end-to-end for impact.

Another example: our plan to accelerate sales cycle with a new MEDDIC process. Execution means sales managers actively coaching reps deal-by-deal on MEDDIC criteria each week.

RevOps ensures MEDDIC fields are in CRM and being filled. Marketing provides additional case studies or ROI calculators as needed when reps hit specific stages.

In weekly pipeline meetings (now attended by marketing and RevOps too, perhaps), they review deals and identify where a tweak is needed. It’s a living execution, not set-and-forget.

Importantly, ARISE fosters a culture of accountability without blame.

Because all are aligned on the plan, if something underperforms, it’s not finger-pointing but problem-solving. For instance, if conversion targets aren’t being met, the group asks “What can we do to improve?” instead of marketing thinking “Sales is slacking” or sales thinking “These leads suck.”

In one ARISE case, when early campaign results were weak, the marketing and sales leads literally sat side by side to listen to call recordings and review lead data, then jointly refined the targeting criteria and talk track.

The result: conversions improved within weeks. That kind of agile, ego-free teamwork is a hallmark of ARISE execution culture.

As execution progresses, we’re also gathering learnings for the next cycle. We document what messages resonated most, which tactics had the best ROI, where unexpected challenges arose. ARISE OS is big on retrospectives.

At the end of the execution period (say end of quarter or project), the team does a retrospective meeting: What went well? What didn’t? What did we learn about our market or operations?

These insights feed into the next Assess phase of the flywheel. Maybe we learn that a certain vertical responded really well, that could influence our next research focus or strategy to double down there.

Or we learn that our internal approval processes slowed us down – something to streamline for next time.

By completing Execute, we ideally hit or made strong progress toward our objectives (and if not, we learned why and can adjust). We’ve now taken ARISE OS through a full cycle.

But execution is never truly “done”, it transitions seamlessly back into assessment and iteration. The revenue engine should now be running more smoothly, with some quick wins achieved and a foundation for bigger wins ahead.

To cement the impact of execution, ARISE emphasises celebrating successes too.

If a campaign crushed its pipeline goal or if sales shaved 20 days off the sales cycle, we broadcast that internally: “Look what alignment achieved!” It boosts morale and reinforces the value of this operating system approach. The engine builds momentum culturally as well.

We’ll soon talk about measuring success and the KPIs that matter (in the Measuring Success section), but before that, let’s illustrate all of this with a tangible example.

In the next section, we’ll provide a brief Case Snapshot of an anonymised B2B SaaS company that went through ARISE OS, to show how Assess through Execute played out in real life and the results they saw.

Case Snapshot: From Siloed Chaos to Compound Growth – ZenMarket’s ARISE OS Journey

Meet ZenMarket, an anonymised B2B SaaS scale-up that provides an AI-driven marketing analytics platform. ZenMarket’s CMO and CRO were struggling with classic silo issues: the marketing team was driving plenty of trial sign-ups, but sales complained those leads were “small fish” and rarely converted to big deals. Meanwhile, customer success was firefighting churn as some promises made in sales demos didn’t match product reality, causing disappointment post-sale. Growth had flatlined, and the board was asking questions.

Starting Point

At the end of Q2, ZenMarket’s metrics told a grim story – lead-to-opportunity conversion was only 5%, sales cycle stretched 90+ days, and net retention was 90% (meaning they were losing more to churn than upsells were adding). Marketing, Sales, and CS each blamed different factors.

The CMO thought Sales wasn’t following up expertly; the CRO thought Marketing wasn’t targeting ideal customers; the Head of CS said both were selling to bad-fit users.

In truth, all teams were operating with partial info and bias. ZenMarket’s leadership decided to implement the ARISE Revenue Engine Operating System™ to break the stalemate.

Assess

In July 2024, an ARISE-led assessment uncovered critical insights. For one, 70% of Marketing’s trial sign-ups were coming from very small businesses, even though ZenMarket’s product was geared for mid-market (a clear misalignment in targeting and messaging).

Sales data showed these small leads rarely converted to paid, which hurt the close rate. The assessment also found the sales team was inconsistent as half the reps followed the playbook, others improvised, leading to wildly different win rates (the top rep closed 3× more than the bottom).

On the customer side, churn analysis revealed a spike in cancellations at the 3-month mark, often tied to lack of onboarding and confusion about advanced features. These facts were sobering but galvanising: ZenMarket now knew where the gaps were.

Research

In August, the ARISE team helped ZenMarket conduct research to explain the “why” behind those gaps. Customer interviews revealed that small business users were signing up due to ZenMarket’s appealing ad campaigns (“AI marketing for everyone!”) but quickly found the product too complex – hence the early churn.

Larger potential customers (the true ICP) weren’t as drawn in by the messaging, seeing ZenMarket as “maybe too startup-y.” A win-loss analysis with recent prospects confirmed that mid-market buyers needed more consultative sales engagement; they often chose a competitor that provided more hand-holding during trials.

Competitive research showed ZenMarket’s biggest rival had begun offering a 60-day free pilot with dedicated support, an insight that helped inform new strategy. All this external input set the stage for big changes.

Ideate

Armed with assessment and research insights, ZenMarket’s revenue teams came together in a workshop. Ideas flew around: Marketing proposed creating a “white-glove trial” for high-value prospects (instead of the self-service free trial that wasn’t converting).

Sales reps suggested a formal sales engineer or solution consultant role to assist on demos for bigger clients. Customer success pitched the idea of a user academy or training program to improve onboarding. Someone pointed out they should probably qualify out the smallest leads faster, and instead focus on fewer, bigger fish.

The group also brainstormed messaging pivots, perhaps lean less on “AI for everyone” and more on “scalable AI for growing marketers,” to better attract mid-market firms. They even considered changing the product packaging: offering a streamlined version for SMBs and a premium for mid-market, so each segment gets what they need. No idea was off-limits.

By the end, they clustered around a few bold moves: refocusing on quality over quantity in lead gen, enhancing the trial experience for serious buyers, and improving post-sale onboarding dramatically.

Strategise

By early September, ZenMarket’s leadership had distilled these ideas into a clear strategy for Q4.

Strategic Objective 1: Improve SQL quality and double the trial-to-paid conversion rate. To do this, Marketing would shift spend towards channels rich in mid-market audiences (e.g., LinkedIn targeting by company size) and launch a new content campaign (“AI Marketing at Scale”) with case studies from bigger clients.

They also agreed to gatekeep trials: any trial sign-up from a company larger than 200 employees would be routed to Sales as a “Concierge Trial”, where a rep and a solutions engineer would personally engage the account through the trial period.

Smaller sign-ups would still get the self-serve trial, but with clearer messaging that ZenMarket’s advanced features are geared to scaling needs (to set expectations).

Strategic Objective 2: Shorten the sales cycle by 30 days. For this, they formalised a MEDDIC-based sales process and assigned their top performing rep to mentor others on discovery techniques. Marketing created a ROI calculator tool to help justify value faster, and RevOps ensured every late-stage deal had executive oversight to remove roadblocks.

Strategic Objective 3: Boost 3-month retention (onboarding success). They decided to implement a proactive onboarding program: every new customer gets a dedicated CS contact and 3 training sessions within their first month. They also built an email/onboarding sequence in-app push messaging guiding users through key features. Importantly, they aligned all these pieces in one roadmap so Marketing, Sales, and CS were executing in concert.

Execute

In October, the new plan went live. Marketing pruned their lead gen sources ruthlessly, they cut a spend on a broad Facebook campaign that brought volume but low quality, reallocating budget to a targeted LinkedIn campaign offering a white-paper on enterprise AI marketing (which attracted larger prospects).

At the same time, they didn’t shut off small businesses entirely; they simply moved them to a nurture track with educational content, knowing they were less immediate revenue.

Sales, upon receiving concierge trial leads, treated them like gold: The assigned AE and solutions engineer would kick off the trial with a call, set success criteria with the prospect, and essentially treat it like a pilot project. They even closed two large deals during the trial when those accounts saw quick value.

The sales team had weekly stand-ups to share progress on these concierged trials, it created healthy competition and collaboration (“How did you get DeptStore Co. to engage so much? Share what you did!”).

Customer Success rolled out the new onboarding for new customers: a CS rep was in the loop as soon as a deal closed. They hosted “Day 1” welcome calls and did feature walk-throughs by Week 2. An internal Slack channel #new-customers kept Sales and CS aligned on any early warnings or wins.

Throughout the quarter, the ARISE OS dashboard tracked trial conversion rates, sales cycle, and 3-month retention for the cohort that started post-change.

Results by Quarter’s End: By December, ZenMarket saw tangible improvements.

The lead-to-SQL conversion rate improved because marketing was feeding sales fewer, but much better, leads. MQL volume was actually down 20%, but SQLs were up 15%. Trial-to-paid conversion jumped from 10% to 25% for those concierge trials (nearly double), and even the self-serve trials had slightly better conversion due to clearer qualifying and nurturing.

The sales cycle average dropped from ~90 days to ~65 days for mid-market deals, thanks to better qualification and value demonstration (reps were closing in the second month more frequently).

Most heartening: the 3-month retention rate for new customers in Q4 was 98% (versus the troubling 90% prior). Essentially, churn in those first critical months almost disappeared because the onboarding and expectations were so much better managed. One large client even expanded license count in month 2, boosting NRR.

ZenMarket’s CMO and CRO reported to the board that, after a period of stagnation, Q4 saw a 20% QoQ increase in new ARR and early signs that this growth was sustainable (not just a one-off).

The board, impressed, asked how and the answer was the ARISE Revenue Engine OS. By breaking down silos, ZenMarket turned scattered tactics into a coordinated growth machine. Perhaps just as important, the once-siloed teams now worked as a single revenue unit. The collaboration sparked by ARISE became the new normal.

This snapshot of ZenMarket may be anonymised, but the outcomes mirror real-life ARISE OS successes. The message is clear: when CMOs and CROs unite their teams under one operating system, 1 + 1 + 1 can equal 5, growth becomes a compounding, cross-functional effort rather than a tug-of-war.

90-Day Implementation Roadmap: Launching ARISE OS in Three Sprints

Adopting the ARISE Revenue Engine OS might sound like a big undertaking, but it can start delivering results in as little as 90 days. Here’s a step-by-step roadmap breaking the transformation into manageable sprints. In three months, you can go from disjointed tactics to a pilot of your own compounding growth engine:

Days 1–30: Foundation and Assessment

Sprint focus: Prepare and diagnose. In the first month, secure executive buy-in and form your cross-functional ARISE squad (marketing, sales, CS, RevOps reps).

Kick off with an ARISE bootcamp to educate the team on the methodology and ethos. Then execute the Assess stage vigorously: gather data, run internal audits, conduct team workshops to surface pain points.

By Day 30, you should have a baseline “state of the union” report and a few quick wins in motion (e.g., easy process fixes or re-alignments discovered during assessment). It’s common in this phase to also address low-hanging fruit. For instance, if you found missing CRM fields or an obvious content gap, you can fix those in week 3 or 4.

End this sprint with a clear list of priority gaps and opportunities, and communicate these findings widely to seed urgency for change.

Days 31–60: Strategy Design and Quick Builds

Sprint focus: Research, Ideation, and strategic planning. Month two is action-packed creative time.

Conduct the external Research (customer calls, competitor mystery shops, etc.) early in this sprint front-load those insights. Use weeks 6–7 for Ideation workshops.

Don’t shy away from bold ideas; encourage the team to propose solutions to the biggest issues identified. By mid-sprint, start narrowing to a concrete action plan. Assign owners to each strategic initiative and have them flesh out mini execution plans.

Meanwhile, any enabling work that can start should start: for example, if part of the strategy will require a new report or a piece of content, begin building it now.

By Day 60, lock in your Strategise stage deliverables, a one-page strategy outline or OKR list for the next 30 days and beyond. Also, take this time to align stakeholders outside the core team (your CEO, product team, etc.), so everyone is on the same page before big changes roll out.

Days 61–90: Execution and Pilot Launch

Sprint focus: Launch key initiatives and measure. This is where the rubber meets the road.

Kick off the Execute stage with a team all-hands meeting: re-affirm the game plan and timeline. Then launch your first ARISE-inspired campaigns or process changes. For example, if a new ABM outreach or revised sales script is part of the plan, roll it out in week 9. Treat this as a pilot period, you are not instantly changing everything on Day 61, but rather deploying new plays in a controlled way.

Have daily or semi-weekly stand-ups during critical launch weeks to monitor progress and tackle issues. By now, you should have a real-time dashboard up (even a simple one) to track leading indicators. Expect to iterate: maybe the first version of a campaign message doesn’t hit, so you tweak it by week 10.

Perhaps sales needs an extra training session on the new process – schedule it. By Day 90, you’ll have initial data on what’s working. Conduct a brief retrospective with the team: What have we achieved? Where do we need to adjust? You should see early wins, maybe an uptick in SQL quality or smoother internal handoffs, even if the full revenue impact is still compounding. Capture these wins and feedback.

After 90 days, you’ve effectively implemented ARISE OS basics: a cross-functional team cadence, a unified strategy, and a taste of execution excellence.

The next step is to rinse and repeat, carry forward lessons into the next 90-day cycle, scaling what works and refining what doesn’t. Each quarter will build on the last, and because you front-loaded cultural and process alignment in that first sprint, subsequent sprints can move faster and drive bigger outcomes.

Remember, the 90-day roadmap is not just about projects, it’s about habits. By sticking to this timeline, you instill a sense of urgency and momentum. The quick results and transparency will win over skeptics and build confidence in the ARISE OS approach. In short, 90 days is all it takes to prove that a go-to-market operating system isn’t a pipe dream – it’s your new reality.

Measuring Success: Building a KPI Tree for Growth Momentum

How do you know if the ARISE Revenue Engine OS is working? You measure it, comprehensively and intelligently. Traditional dashboards often exacerbate silos (marketing looks at MQLs, sales at quota, CS at NPS, all in isolation).

ARISE OS takes a different approach: a unified KPI tree that connects every activity to overarching goals. Think of it as a pyramid of metrics, where the top is your North Star (e.g., annual recurring revenue growth) and below are the drivers from each function that feed it. This way, everyone sees how their piece contributes to the whole, and progress (or problems) can be traced to the source.

In the embedded image above, you can see a simplified KPI tree example. Let’s break that down in practical terms for measuring your ARISE OS success:

North Star Metric (Top of Tree)

This is the ultimate outcome you’re trying to drive. Often for CMOs and CROs, it’s something like ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) Growth Rate or Total Revenue. It could also be a composite like Net Revenue Retention if expansion is a big focus (which combines new sales and churn into one figure). Pick one or two North Stars that definitively indicate business health. For our example, let’s say ARR Growth is the one. This will be influenced by how well you acquire new customers and how well you retain/expand existing ones.

Primary Branches: New Business vs. Expansion

We break ARR Growth into two main components: New Business ARR (revenue from new customers) and Expansion ARR (net revenue from existing customers, which is basically upsells minus churn).

This immediately assigns accountability. Marketing and sales primarily live on the new business side, while customer success and account management live on the expansion side.

ARISE OS ensures you have initiatives in both, avoiding lopsided focus. In measuring success, you track both new ARR and expansion ARR separately to see where growth is truly coming from.

Secondary Branches: Key Drivers

For each of those, list the KPIs that drive it. On New Business ARR, typical ones are:

• • Pipeline Generation: Are we creating enough pipeline (in dollars) to hit targets? This can be broken into sub-metrics like MQLs, SQLs, opportunities (but rather than volume alone), ARISE would emphasise pipeline quality/quantity in revenue terms. For example, “Pipeline Created This Quarter (by $)” is a great metric that both marketing and sales influence (marketing feeds it, sales qualifies it).

  • Win Rate: Of the opportunities, what percentage do we win? This gauges sales effectiveness and alignment of product-market fit and targeting.

  • Sales Cycle Length: How fast are we closing? Shorter cycles mean faster revenue and often indicate better product-market fit or sales efficiency. If your ARISE initiatives targeted cycle time (like ZenMarket did), this is a crucial metric.

  • Average Deal Size (ACV): Are we winning larger deals, perhaps thanks to better targeting or upselling in the sales process? This can be a lever for ARR growth too.
    These secondary metrics, when multiplied together (pipeline * win rate * avg deal size, etc.), roughly drive New Business ARR.

On the Expansion ARR side, drivers might include:

• Net Revenue Retention (NRR) Percentage: This is a powerful summary metric itself. If NRR is above 100%, you’re growing within your base (good!). It’s influenced by upsell and churn.

• Gross Churn Rate: Track what percentage of revenue or customers churn in a period. ARISE likely introduced initiatives to reduce churn, so you want to see this percentage drop. Remember that even a 5% improvement in retention can boost profits by 25–95%, evidence of how vital this is.

• Upsell/Cross-sell Rate: How much additional revenue are you generating from existing customers? This could be measured as % of customers who expand, or expansion ARR as % of starting ARR.

• Customer Satisfaction Metrics: such as NPS or CSAT or product usage adoption rates are leading indicators that feed into churn or upsell. For example, an increase in onboarding completion rate might correlate with higher retention.

Each metric in the tree should have a clear owner and target. Marketing might own pipeline $ (at least the top-of-funnel portion), Sales owns win rate and deal size, CS owns churn, etc., but they all see each other’s metrics in one view. No metric lives in a vacuum.

One practice ARISE encourages is building a dashboard that mirrors the KPI tree. You might have sections for each branch. For instance, an executive dashboard could show:

• ARR Growth (overall), with a gauge or trend.

• New Business vs Expansion ARR, with each tracking to targets.

• Under New Business: pipeline coverage ratio (pipeline/target), win rate %, sales cycle days, etc.

• Under Expansion: NRR %, gross churn %, upsell ARR, maybe customer health score average.

By reviewing this regularly (say, in weekly leadership meetings), you quickly diagnose where momentum is building or slipping. Did ARR growth slow? If pipeline is strong but win rate dropped, you know to investigate sales execution. Did churn spike? Look at NPS or support tickets to find why, etc.

Avoiding Metric Overload

ARISE OS has a lot of moving parts, but be careful not to overwhelm teams with too many KPIs. The tree helps focus on the critical few at each level.

For example, marketing might internally track dozens of campaign metrics, but at the leadership level, maybe only 2-3 roll-up metrics represent marketing’s contribution (like pipeline and web conversions).

Keep the tree pruned to meaningful metrics. Also, ensure each metric is well-defined (everyone should agree on how it’s calculated to avoid definition silos, e.g., what exactly counts as “pipeline” or “an upsell”).

Another ARISE twist: make sure metrics encourage cross-functional behaviour, not silo behaviour. For example, if you set a marketing goal purely on number of MQLs, they might hit it by flooding volume.

Instead, a shared goal like pipeline $ or SQL-to-deal conversion rate pushes marketing and sales to work together on quality. Similarly, measuring customer success on NRR encourages collaboration with sales on expansions, not just preventing churn. The KPI tree fosters this because lower-level metrics roll to shared higher-level outcomes.

One more dimension. ARISE likes to include leading and lagging indicators. Revenue is lagging (result of many actions). Leading indicators might be things like product adoption rate or content engagement or meeting set rate, which give early signs that final metrics will improve.

Incorporate some of those into the tree at appropriate levels. For instance, if one initiative was a new onboarding program, a leading metric might be “% of new users completing onboarding within 30 days.”

That will ultimately feed into churn reduction, but you can measure it immediately to gauge execution success.

Finally, celebrate and communicate the successes in these metrics. When you see, for example, net revenue retention climb from 100% to 105%, that’s huge, it means compounding growth from your existing base.

Share it with the whole company: “Thanks to better alignment and a focus on customer value, our NRR hit 105% this quarter, a record high.” Metrics tell a story of progress; use them to reinforce the ARISE mindset. Likewise, if a metric stalls or reverses, use the transparency to galvanize problem-solving without blame.

In essence, measuring success with a KPI tree turns your growth journey into a science. It provides early warnings and proof points. It keeps the entire go-to-market team honest and aligned. And crucially, it makes visible the compounded impact of many small improvements.

One quarter you might see win rate tick up, next quarter pipeline grows, next retention improves, before you know it, these combine to double revenue growth, and you can point to exactly how it happened. That’s the power of an operating system approach: when you measure it end-to-end, you can manage it end-to-end.

Common Objections, Busted: Addressing Your Doubts About a GTM Operating System

Implementing a go-to-market operating system like ARISE OS is a significant shift – and it’s natural for questions or objections to arise from the team or other executives. Let’s tackle some of the most common objections head-on and bust the myths with reality:

Objection 1: “We’re already doing fine with our current tactics – why change now?”

Reality: Doing “fine” isn’t the same as maximising potential. Your current siloed tactics might maintain the status quo, but they rarely produce breakthrough growth. In fact, they could be masking inefficiencies. For example, you might be hitting targets but at what cost? Probably with higher spend or effort due to duplication and misalignment. Companies that unify their marketing and sales strategies see on average 19% faster growth than those that don’t.

ARISE OS is about unlocking the compounding gains that fine doesn’t give you. It’s the difference between linear progress and exponential progress. Plus, the market isn’t standing still – competitors, buyer expectations, and technology evolve. A proactive OS ensures you stay ahead of the curve, not just “fine” in a bubble. In short, “fine” is the enemy of “great,” and ARISE OS is designed to make good companies great by eliminating the drag of silos.

Objection 2: “This sounds too complex – we don’t have time for a massive process overhaul.”

Reality: Adopting ARISE OS is done in agile sprints, not a big bang boil-the-ocean project. The 90-day roadmap we outlined proves you can start seeing results in one quarter, with iterative changes, not massive disruption. It’s about working smarter with what you already have.

In fact, ARISE often saves time by cutting out redundant efforts (like marketing creating decks sales never uses, or sales chasing unqualified leads). Yes, there’s an initial investment of time to align and set up the cadence, but once the flywheel is spinning, it actually frees time.

Meetings become more efficient because everyone’s looking at the same data, plans require less rework, and teams spend less time firefighting miscommunications. We often say ARISE OS is “build the plane while flying it”, we implement it while executing your current quarter goals.

No downtime; just gradual improvements that compound. So it’s not adding complexity – it’s reducing it by replacing ad-hoc processes with one coherent approach.

Objection 3: “We don’t have the budget or resources for this kind of transformation.”

Reality: ARISE OS isn’t about spending more; it’s about maximising ROI on what you already spend. Many companies find that by aligning efforts, they can reallocate existing budget to more effective uses. For instance, ZenMarket in our case study cut wasteful spend on low-quality leads, freeing budget for higher-impact campaigns – all within their existing marketing budget.

Also consider the cost of not doing this: siloed operations lead to inefficient customer acquisition costs and missed revenue opportunities (remember that $1T is lost to poor alignment!). By implementing ARISE, you might actually lower CAC, improve retention (which boosts lifetime value), and get more out of current headcount because they’ll be rowing in sync.

If anything, ARISE OS can help justify budgets to the CFO because it ties every dollar to tangible outcomes. And you don’t necessarily need to hire a swath of new people, often it’s leveraging current team members in cross-functional pods or temporarily borrowing an analyst here or a designer there for integrated projects. It’s a reconfiguration of resources more than an expansion.

Objection 4: “Our business is unique – a one-size-fits-all framework won’t work here.”

Reality: Absolutely, your business is unique, and ARISE is built to be flexible. It’s an operating system, not a rigid playbook. Think of it as a template that you customise. The Assess stage ensures we deeply understand your specific bottlenecks and strengths; the framework then adapts to address those.

In practice, ARISE OS engagements at a small SaaS startup versus a mid-market fintech look different in the details. What remains constant is the process of cross-functional alignment and data-driven iteration. ARISE doesn’t prescribe “you must run ABM” or “you must use MEDDIC” – those tactics emerge from the analysis if appropriate.

For example, if your sales cycle is already super short, ARISE isn’t going to force a complex sales process on you; maybe your focus will be more on expansion or market penetration. We’ve had clients in niche industries use ARISE OS with great success precisely because it uncovered insights unique to their buyers, which a generic approach would’ve missed.

So rather than one-size-fits-all, think “one framework fits all sizes”, it scales and molds to you.

Objection 5: “Can’t we just fix one department at a time instead of an all-encompassing OS?”

Reality: You could try, but partial fixes often don’t stick. If you improve one silo without the others, the old frictions tend to resurface. For example, you might invest in sales training (fixing one department), but if marketing is still feeding poor-fit leads, that training won’t yield much.

Or you might optimise marketing automation, but if sales and CS aren’t part of that strategy, leads might flow faster to a dead end. ARISE OS purposely addresses the entire revenue engine so that improvements are systemic.

It’s like whack-a-mole if you go one department at a time, you knock one problem down, another pops up elsewhere. By orchestrating change across teams simultaneously, ARISE creates synergy: the whole truly becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

That said, the framework does allow focusing on weakest links first (maybe you emphasis more on marketing and sales alignment initially, then loop in CS a bit later), but it keeps all parties in the conversation from day one.

Consider the OS approach as future-proofing, you’re building the connective tissue between departments so that any future fixes or innovations automatically propagate benefits to all. Fixing one department might give you a short-term bump; fixing the system gives you exponential, long-term growth.

By tackling these objections, we see that most concerns such as complexity, cost, relevance are based on assumptions that a GTM operating system is heavy, inflexible, or impractical. The reality is the opposite: ARISE OS is a pragmatic, customisable approach that accelerates what’s already working for you and fixes what’s not, with your team, not to your team.

Every company that has successfully adopted an operating system mindset wonders why they ever operated without one, because once silos are gone, the old ways of working seem obviously inefficient.

So, if you or someone in your org raises an eyebrow with “Do we really need this?”, you now have the answers. It’s not extra work; it’s the work that should matter. It’s not cookie-cutter; it’s tailored by your own data. And it’s not an expense; it’s an investment likely to pay itself back many times over in growth. Now, with doubts addressed, let’s talk about how you can take the next step to actually implement ARISE OS and reap the rewards.

Time to Ignite Your Revenue Engine. Let’s ARISE and Grind

Tired of random acts of marketing and misaligned sales plays? ARISE Revenue Engine OS transforms go-to-market chaos into a coordinated growth machine.

It’s the operating system our ARISE GTM team uses every day to turn siloed tactics into compounding revenue for B2B SaaS and Fintech companies, and it’s ready for you.

No more finger-pointing between teams, no more guessing which levers to pull. With ARISE, you’ll get a proven 5-step playbook, a battle-tested team of strategists, and an approach tailored to your unique business.

We’ve helped startups and scale-ups just like yours unlock sustainable growth in 90 days or less, and we’re obsessed with your success. If you’re a CMO hungry for quality pipeline, or a CRO aiming for predictable, scalable revenue (and sanity in the process), let’s talk.

Plug in the ARISE OS and watch siloed efforts snap into a powerful revenue engine. It’s time to leave the growth stalls behind and embrace an ethos of aligned, intelligent execution.

Ready to ARISE? Talk to our team today and let’s turn your go-to-market into a compounding growth machine.