Why Your Revenue Engine Is Underperforming (And Where to Look First)
The Symptom Everyone Feels But Can't Quite Name
There's a particular kind of frustration that hits founders and revenue leaders somewhere around the 18-month mark of scaling.
Things are working — kind of. Revenue is coming in. Reps are making calls. Marketing is producing content. The CRM has data in it.
But something feels off.
Pipeline moves slower than it should. Forecasts feel more like educated guesses than predictions. You're hiring, buying tools, and investing in growth — but the return doesn't match the effort. Every quarter feels like a grind to get across the line, and you can't quite put your finger on why.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. And more importantly — this isn't a "you" problem. It's not a talent problem. It's not a budget problem. It's not even a technology problem.
It's an architecture problem.
The Race Car Analogy
Think about a professional racing team for a moment.
You can have the most talented driver on the grid. You can have the best pit crew, the biggest development budget, and the most advanced wind tunnel data available. But if the chassis of the car has a structural flaw — a hairline fracture in the monocoque that nobody caught during assembly — none of it matters.
That car isn't winning a race. It might not even finish one.
Every lap, the vibrations get worse. The driver compensates by over-correcting, which burns the tires faster. The pit crew starts making reactive changes to fix symptoms — adjusting wing angles, changing tire pressures — but the root cause is buried in the structure. It's invisible unless you know exactly where to look.
Now apply that to your revenue engine.
Most companies are running their go-to-market motion on a cracked chassis. And instead of diagnosing the structural issue, they're adjusting wing angles.
What "Cracked" Actually Looks Like
Let's get specific. Here's what a fractured revenue architecture looks like from the inside — and why it's so hard to diagnose when you're the one driving the car:
Fragmented Visibility
Marketing tracks performance in one platform. Sales tracks in another. Customer success has its own spreadsheet. Finance pulls numbers from a BI tool that doesn't quite match any of the above.
Each department is reporting "up" to leadership, but the numbers don't reconcile. Marketing says they generated 200 MQLs last month. Sales says they only got 40 worth talking to. Customer success says churn is rising but can't attribute it to anything upstream.
The CEO sits in a Monday morning meeting staring at three different versions of reality.
This isn't a "data" problem — it's a systems integration problem. When your tools, processes, and teams aren't connected to a unified data model, every decision you make is based on a partial picture. And partial pictures lead to expensive mistakes.
Departmental Misalignment
Here's a scenario that plays out in virtually every scaling company:
Marketing sets quarterly goals based on lead volume and cost-per-lead. Sales sets goals based on revenue closed. Customer success sets goals based on retention and NPS.
On the surface, these seem aligned. More leads → more revenue → more customers to retain. Simple, right?
Except marketing optimizes for volume and starts generating leads that look good on paper but have low intent. Sales burns cycles qualifying leads that were never going to buy. Close rates drop. Sales blames marketing. Marketing points to their MQL numbers and says "we delivered."
Meanwhile, the deals that DO close are misaligned with ideal customer profiles because the qualification criteria were never unified. Customer success inherits accounts that were poorly sold, churn spikes, and now everyone's pointing fingers.
The problem isn't that these are bad teams. It's that their goals, metrics, and definitions were never engineered to connect. They're all playing their own instruments well — but nobody wrote a score for the orchestra.
The Tool Graveyard
If you've been scaling for more than two years, you almost certainly have what I call a "tool graveyard" — software that was purchased with great intentions, implemented with varying degrees of completeness, and is now either:
Used by one person who "figured it out" and has become a single point of failure
Collecting dust because the team reverted to spreadsheets
Actively creating more work than it saves because it was never properly integrated with everything else
The average B2B company uses somewhere between 40-90 SaaS tools. Most of them don't talk to each other. Many of them overlap. Almost none of them were implemented as part of a cohesive revenue architecture.
Every tool you add without a unified plan is another instrument playing a different song.
Reactive Decision-Making
When your visibility is fragmented, your departments are misaligned, and your tools don't connect — you end up making decisions reactively instead of proactively.
You hire a new rep because pipeline feels thin, not because the data told you exactly where the bottleneck is. You launch a new outbound campaign because the CEO read an article about intent signals, not because your system identified a specific segment showing buying behavior. You restructure comp plans based on gut feel, not because your infrastructure surfaced which behaviors actually drive revenue.
Reactive decisions aren't always wrong. But they're always slower, more expensive, and harder to learn from — because you can't trace the result back to a clear input.
Why This Happens (And Why It's Not Your Fault)
Here's the thing that most founders and revenue leaders need to hear:
This isn't a failure of effort, intelligence, or ambition.
This is a natural consequence of how companies grow.
In the early days, everything is duct tape and hustle. You close deals through relationships, referrals, and force of will. The "system" is a spreadsheet and a shared Slack channel. And it works — because you're small, fast, and everyone is in the same room (literally or figuratively).
But then you grow. You add people. You add tools. You add departments. And each addition is a rational decision in the moment: "We need a CRM. We need a marketing platform. We need to hire a sales manager."
The problem is that each of these decisions is made independently. There's no master blueprint. No architectural plan. No unified vision for how information flows, how teams connect, and how decisions get made.
And suddenly, at 20 employees or 50 or 200, you wake up one morning and realize the machine you built — one piece at a time, with the best of intentions — doesn't actually function as a machine. It functions as a collection of disconnected parts, each running its own logic.
I lived this myself. As an SVP of Sales, I watched AI and automation transform the landscape in real time. Every day I could feel us falling further behind — not because we weren't working, but because we didn't have the skillset or the infrastructure to find the edge, test it, and deploy it. When I tried to bring in technical resources to help, they couldn't speak sales. They didn't understand the revenue motion. They needed constant supervision that negated the point of having them.
That experience — that gap between what I knew was possible and what I could actually execute — is what eventually led me to build Foundations. But more on that later.
The Instinct That Makes It Worse
When leaders feel the symptoms of a broken revenue architecture, the instinct is almost always the same:
Do more of what you're already doing, but harder.
Pipeline is slow? → Hire more reps
Not enough leads? → Buy a lead gen tool or outsource to an agency
Reps aren't hitting quota? → New comp plan or new sales training
Data is messy? → Hire a RevOps person to "clean it up"
These aren't irrational moves. They make sense on the surface. But they all share the same flaw: they treat symptoms, not the structure.
Hiring more reps into a broken system just multiplies the dysfunction. Buying more tools without an integration plan adds to the graveyard. Outsourcing lead gen to an agency that doesn't understand your customer or your motion is pouring water into a leaking bucket.
You cannot accelerate out of a structural problem. You have to engineer your way out of it.
So Where Do You Actually Look?
If the problem is architecture, then the diagnostic needs to be architectural.
That means stepping back — way back — and evaluating your revenue engine across multiple dimensions simultaneously:
Acumen — Does leadership have clarity on the go-to-market vision? Can they articulate it in a way that every level of the organization can execute against?
Data — Is information flowing through the organization in a way that's unified, accessible, and actionable? Or is it siloed, duplicated, and stale?
Enablement — Do the people executing the work have the skills, knowledge, and resources they need to perform? Or are they guessing?
Process — Are workflows designed intentionally, or did they evolve organically and now nobody questions them?
Talent — Are the right people in the right roles? Were those roles designed for where the company is going, or where it was two years ago?
Technology — Are your tools working as a connected system, or as isolated islands that create more manual work than they save?
These six lenses — which we call the ADEPTT framework — are where every revenue problem lives. Sometimes it's one. Usually it's several. Always, they're interconnected.
The point isn't to audit for the sake of auditing. It's to find the hairline fracture before you spend another quarter (and another six figures) treating symptoms.
What This Series Will Cover
Over the next several weeks, I'm going to break down every layer of this problem — and more importantly, what the solution actually looks like.
We'll cover:
Why CEO vision breaks down before it reaches execution (and the real cost of that breakdown)
What GTM engineering actually is and why it's different from anything else in market
Why the default playbooks — hiring, outsourcing, buying tools — fail more often than they succeed
How to think about your revenue architecture as a connected system instead of a collection of parts
Real transformation stories from companies that made the shift
Whether you're a founder who knows the product is great but can't figure out why distribution isn't keeping up, or a revenue leader who feels the machine grinding but can't find the wrench — this series is for you.
The first step is always the same: stop adjusting wing angles and start looking at the chassis.
This is Part 1 of a 12-part series on GTM engineering and the future of revenue architecture. Next up: "The Broken Telephone Problem — Why CEO Vision Gets Lost Before Execution."