Revenue Architecture: Selling with Precision How SPICED Transforms Sales, Ops & Customer Success

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Welcome to the Force & Friction Podcast, where we break down what really moves the needle in GTM, RevOps, AI, partnerships, and SaaS growth.

In this episode, we revisit our Revenue Architecture series, diving deep into the SPICED framework with Graeme Pitches, a certified revenue architect with over 20 years of experience leading international sales and enablement efforts.

Graeme guides us through his philosophy that "how you sell is as important as what you sell," demonstrating how SPICED transforms not just sales conversations, but the entire customer journey across sales, operations, and customer success. This is the blueprint for moving from product-centric pitching to impact-focused customer engagement.

We explore why SPICED's simplicity makes it universally adoptable, how it prevents deals from dying on the vine, and the practical steps for implementing this framework across your entire revenue organization to drive predictable, sustainable growth

Graeme Pitches

Graeme is a Certified Revenue Architect with over 20 years of experience leading international sales and enablement efforts. He’s built revenue teams across industries, driven expansion strategies, and helped companies move beyond surface-level selling into operationally sound, repeatable GTM motions.

Graeme is known for challenging sales conventions, ditching “hope you are well” openers and “About Us” decks, and pushing teams to embrace frameworks that align with how customers actually buy.

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What is SPICED?

SPICED is the diagnostic framework that powers customer-centric conversations across the entire customer journey. It's the universal language that enables every customer-facing role, from marketing to sales to customer success to understand, document, and act on what truly matters to your customers at every stage of the bowtie.

Unlike traditional sales methodologies that focus primarily on closing deals, SPICED is designed for recurring revenue businesses where profits are realized through sustained customer impact over time. It shifts the focus from "Do we have budget?" to "Is this a priority?" with priority being determined by the customer's desired impact.

It is built on five foundational components that work across both sides of the bowtie:

1. Situation (S): The Customer's World Situation captures the relevant background facts and circumstances about your customer's environment. This includes company size, industry, tools they use, organizational structure, maturity level, and strategic initiatives.

"Situation defines the tools, people, industry, and landscape of the company. Situation questions help you understand the size of the opportunity, tools they use, and other facts to determine whether the prospect is a good fit for your solution."

On the left side of the bowtie, Situation helps qualify prospects and determine fit. On the right side, it evolves to track changes in the customer's environment that create new opportunities for expansion or signal potential churn risks.

2. Pain (P): The Problem That Drives Change Pain addresses the acute challenges and frustrations that brought the customer to you. These can be emotional issues affecting individuals or rational issues affecting the company—cash flow problems, costly mistakes, or pipeline generation challenges.

"Pains are often expressed at a superficial level. To identify the true needs requires a deeper diagnosis."

Pain isn't static. On the left side, you diagnose the initial pain. On the right side, you monitor whether that pain is being resolved and identify new pains that emerge as the customer's business evolves.

3. Impact (I): The Desired Outcome Impact reveals the core business objectives your solution helps achieve. This includes both Rational Impact (increasing revenue, decreasing costs, improving customer experience) and Emotional Impact (individual benefits like career advancement or reduced stress).

"Impact can be both emotional, focused on individuals, and rational, focused on the overall company."

Impact is the North Star for the entire customer journey. On the left side, you align on the desired impact. On the right side, you measure and optimize for recurring impact delivery, ensuring customers achieve their goals consistently over time.

4. Critical Event (CE): The Urgency Driver Critical Event is the deadline by which the customer must achieve impact or suffer negative consequences. This creates urgency and drives behavior—whether completing implementation, expanding usage, or renewing contracts.

"Critical Events drive behavior, whether that be completing implementation, expanding use, or completing renewals or upsells."

Critical Events exist throughout the customer lifecycle. Initial events drive the purchase decision, while ongoing events drive adoption, expansion, and renewal decisions on the right side of the bowtie.

5. Decision (D): The Process and People Decision encompasses the people involved, the process they follow, and the criteria they use to evaluate solutions. This includes understanding stakeholders, approval workflows, and success metrics.

"Decisions are usually made by a group of stakeholders rather than a single decision-maker."

Decision-making continues post-sale. While the initial decision focuses on purchase approval, ongoing decisions involve implementation choices, expansion approvals, and renewal commitments.

The Real Job of SPICED

SPICED's job is to create a uniform, customer-centric approach that facilitates seamless handoffs and provides a consistent, high-quality experience throughout the entire customer journey.

It defines:

•How to diagnose customer needs with precision and empathy

•How to align all customer-facing teams around what matters most to the customer

•How to track and optimize for customer impact across the entire lifecycle

•How to identify expansion opportunities and renewal risks before they become critical

It is the essential framework for moving from product-centric selling to impact-centric customer success.

Because here's the truth: In recurring revenue businesses, the conversation doesn't end at the sale, it evolves. SPICED ensures that evolution is guided by customer impact, not internal processes, creating the foundation for sustainable, recurring revenue growth.

SPICED BOWTIE

Here are the core areas we discuss in today's episode:

1: The Foundation: Why "How You Sell" Matters More Than Ever

Graeme opens with a powerful story that illustrates why sales approach can make or break even the most obvious deals. He shares an experience where a market-leading software company lost a sale at the one-yard line due to poor sales execution.

"Their rep was out for the week, right? And so actually, the very first demo and discovery have was with the sales manager, and the session was amazing... Following week, the actual AE who's assigned to our account, took over the call... This gentleman had been at the President's club the previous week, and he would not shut up about how much fun he had at this president's club."

This story reinforces his core belief that regardless of whether you're a startup challenging incumbents or a market leader, how you sell fundamentally matters. The customer experience during the sales process directly impacts purchase decisions and sets the tone for the entire relationship.

2: SPICED as Framework, Not Methodology: The House Analogy

Graeme distinguishes SPICED from traditional sales methodologies by positioning it as a foundational framework rather than a rigid process. He uses a compelling house-building analogy to explain this concept.

"I personally don't believe that SPICED is a methodology. I believe it's a framework... As a framework I like to think of it's like your house, right? You're building your house, you have your, you know, 3 or 4 bedrooms. You have your 2 bathrooms, you have your kitchen, you have that very strong foundational framework. The brand of kitchen sink, or the brand of windows... That's more kind of a methodology."

This framework approach allows teams to layer their existing methodologies (MEDDIC, Sandler, etc.) on top of SPICED's structure, creating a universal language that works across finance, marketing, sales, CS, and expansion teams.

3: The Critical Event Distinction: Why Most Deals Die on the Vine

One of Graeme's most powerful insights centers on the difference between critical events and compelling events, and why this distinction determines deal outcomes.

"Most deals die on the vine from customer indecision, right? And if we don't do a good job of digging into: Is it a critical event or a compelling event? They could have a big pain... We could have the decision makers mapped and the decision criteria known. But if their timeline isn't known, what's driving them to make a decision... a lot of the deals that die on the vine from customer indecision."

This insight reveals why traditional qualification often fails—teams focus on pain and decision-makers but miss the urgency driver that actually compels action. Without a true critical event, deals stall indefinitely regardless of how well other elements are qualified.

4: The Full Bowtie Impact: From Sales Qualification to Customer Success

Graeme emphasizes that SPICED's real power emerges when applied across the entire customer journey, not just the sales process. He explains how poor sales qualification directly impacts customer success outcomes.

"Are we qualifying these customers? Are we understanding what the impact is that they want before they sign up for a solution, so that when they sign up, they are able to actually get that impact and get the outcome that they want... And that very first call on the implementation side should be, listen, okay, let's recap why you purchased us. What outcome are you looking to achieve, and within which timeline?"

This cross-functional approach ensures that the impact promised during sales is actually delivered during onboarding and beyond, creating a seamless handoff that reduces churn and increases expansion opportunities.

5: The Adoption Strategy: Domino Reps and Data-Driven Conversations

Graeme shares his practical approach for implementing SPICED across organizations, focusing on both top-down leadership and bottom-up adoption through what he calls the "domino rep theory."

"I'll do a specific training, and I will get some feedback from a couple of reps. Right? Not your top reps, but not your bottom reps. Right kind of your up and coming reps... I'll get them to test that... live in the field, and then we'll record those calls. Then I'll take those calls, and I'll showcase them when I do the overall training for the whole team."

This strategy creates peer-driven adoption while providing concrete examples of success, making the framework feel achievable rather than theoretical. Combined with executive reinforcement, it drives organization-wide implementation.

Final Thoughts

Graeme leaves us with a powerful perspective on the future of revenue architecture and SPICED adoption. While acknowledging the challenges of implementing dense, comprehensive frameworks in fast-moving environments, he emphasizes the transformative power of the conversations these tools enable.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful... it's meant to drive a conversation, right? And again, if you're not even able to get that conversation to go 'Hmm! Actually, does it make sense to have an outbound SDR team with an ACV under 5K?' You can't have that conversation, you're not going to get revenue architecture implemented."

His final insight focuses on the visual power of revenue architecture frameworks to surface problems that executive teams didn't know they had, creating the foundation for data-driven decision-making rather than emotional finger-pointing.

"It removes that whose fault it is. Right. Okay, it is what it is... what matters is how we move forward? How do we reduce our churn? What can we do with the onboarding team to do that... let's not argue whose fault it is.

Contact Graeme at The Craig Group

Click here to visit craiggroup.io

The Revenue Architecture Series

Watch more episodes from the Revenue Architecture Series - get started with the founder of Winning By Design Jacco van der Kooij's interview - watch that here:

The Revenue Architecture Textbook

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Mike Midgley runs a portfolio career, a dynamic digital entrepreneur, NXD, strategist, public speaker, Winning by Design certified Revenue Architect and Host at The Force & Friction Podcast.

Mike has achieved successful six and seven-figure exits over a 30+ year career, raised in excess of £1.6m [$2.5m] in Venture Capital and franchised his businesses 68 times.

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