SPICED Secrets: How Marketing Ops Masters Revenue Architecture | David Howard S6:E6

Written by Mike J Midgley | Oct 30, 2025 9:33:34 AM

Welcome to another episode in our Revenue Architecture series on the Force & Friction Podcast, where we break down what really moves the needle in GTM, RevOps, AI, partnerships, and SaaS growth.

Today, we're diving deep into the SPICED model and how marketing ops can master this framework with David Howard, Head of Marketing at Agentic Partner Group.

David brings over 15 years of B2B SaaS marketing and demand generation expertise to our conversation, but what makes his perspective unique is his operational mindset. He describes himself as someone who brings "structure to order chaos", and in today's world of marketing complexity, that's exactly what we need.

Based in San Francisco and working with AI-centric startups, David has witnessed firsthand how the Silicon Valley landscape has evolved post COVID, from labor market changes to the integration of AI in go-to-market strategies. As a certified Winning by Design Revenue Architect, he's passionate about implementing frameworks like SPICED that create scalable, repeatable processes.

In this episode, we explore how SPICED transforms traditional marketing qualification, the power of the bowtie model over funnels, and how AI is revolutionizing the way we approach discovery and prospect research. David shares practical insights on instrumentation, sales and marketing alignment, and why GTM engineering is the future of revenue operations.

David Howard

A marketing operations expert and Head of Marketing at Agentic Partner Group who specializes in building scalable marketing infrastructure for AI-forward startups.

His approach combines deep technical fluency with operational excellence to create marketing machines that perform at scale.

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Understanding SPICED: A Framework for Customer-Centric Growth

If you work in a recurring revenue business, you’ve probably noticed that traditional sales methodologies often stop at the deal. SPICED takes a different approach. It’s not just another sales framework, it’s a shared language that brings marketing, sales, and customer success together around one goal: understanding and delivering what truly matters to the customer at every stage of their journey.

SPICED isn’t about pushing deals through a pipeline. It’s about diagnosing, aligning, and acting with precision across the entire bowtie model, from the first conversation to long after the contract is signed. Instead of asking, “Do they have budget?”, it prompts teams to ask, “Is this a priority?”, with the answer rooted in the customer’s desired impact, not our internal targets.

At its core, SPICED revolves around five key elements that work seamlessly on both the pre- and post-sale sides of the bowtie:

1. Situation (S): Understanding the Customer’s World

This is where everything starts. Situation focuses on the facts and context that shape a customer’s environment: their industry, company size, tech stack, org structure, maturity, and strategic direction.

Think of it as your opportunity to map the terrain. On the pre-sale side, Situation helps you qualify fit and tailor your approach. Post-sale, it’s about tracking changes — new tools, leadership shifts, market moves — that might signal growth opportunities or emerging risks.

“Situation defines the tools, people, industry, and landscape of the company.”

2. Pain (P): Surfacing the Real Problems

Customers rarely walk in and tell you their deepest business challenges on day one. Pain captures the frustrations and problems that drive them to seek change, whether that’s a broken process, a costly inefficiency, a missed target, or simply someone in the business under pressure.

Early on, you diagnose these pains to understand their urgency and scope. Later, you measure whether those pains are actually being resolved and uncover new ones as the business evolves.

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

3. Impact (I): Defining What Success Looks Like

Impact is the heart of SPICED. It focuses on the outcomes the customer is trying to achieve, both rational (revenue growth, cost reduction, efficiency gains) and emotional (personal wins like career growth, recognition, or peace of mind).

Pre-sale, this is where you align on what “good” looks like. Post-sale, it becomes the North Star for your relationship, the standard against which you measure progress, prove value, and guide expansion.

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

4. Critical Event (CE): Establishing Urgency

Every customer has deadlines that drive action, whether it’s a product launch, a board meeting, a renewal date, or a regulatory change. Critical Events define those moments. They provide the “why now” that drives deals forward and keeps momentum going throughout the customer lifecycle.

On the left side of the bowtie, Critical Events push buying decisions. On the right, they motivate adoption, expansion, and renewals.

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

5. Decision (D): Understanding the Who and How

Decision covers the people, process, and criteria behind customer choices. Who signs off? What hoops do they need to jump through? What metrics matter? These insights are crucial to navigating complex buying committees and avoiding surprises.

And it doesn’t stop at the sale. Post-sale decisions determine how the solution is rolled out, who champions expansion, and how renewals are approved.

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

Why SPICED Matters

The real power of SPICED is in its consistency. It gives every customer-facing team a unified way to:

Diagnose customer needs with depth and empathy
Stay aligned on what actually drives value for the customer
Track progress toward impact over time
Spot expansion opportunities and churn risks before they happen

This shift from product-centric selling to impact-centric success is what makes SPICED so effective for recurring revenue businesses. It ensures conversations don’t end when the deal is signed, they evolve. And that evolution is guided by the customer’s desired impact, not internal milestones.

In a world where sustainable growth depends on retention and expansion, SPICED isn’t just a nice-to-have framework. It’s the backbone of a truly customer-centric revenue engine.

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

1. From Chaos to Order: The Marketing Operations Philosophy

David opens by explaining his approach to bringing structure to the chaotic world of startup marketing operations.

"All I get it in place. Instrumenting in Salesforce, instrumenting in Marketo and HubSpot. And then being able to do the reporting on it, right? So, you know, I've long kind of broken it down into three silos, kind of like campaign execution, there's reporting on the execution, and then there's sort of, MarTech operations."

His three-pillar approach, campaign execution, reporting, and MarTech operations provides a framework for creating scalable processes. The key insight is that without proper instrumentation and reporting, even the best campaigns become lost opportunities, like leads from events that disappear into the void.

2. The Bowtie Revolution: Why Funnels Are Dead for SaaS

David emphasizes the critical shift from thinking in funnels to thinking in bowties, especially for SaaS companies focused on recurring revenue.

"Winning by Design is still working on this, on getting folks to adapt the notion of a bowtie, not just a marketing funnel, right, for SaaS... If you dig into the mathematics and you do the exercises all the way across the bowtie, it's really clear to see how just incremental improvements at every step of the way amplify, you know, your growth model at the end."

The bowtie model forces companies to think beyond acquisition to renewal, upsell, and expansion within current clients. This mathematical approach shows how small improvements across the entire customer journey create compound growth effects that traditional funnel thinking misses.

3. SPICED as Universal Language: Beyond Sales into Marketing Ops

David explains how SPICED becomes more powerful when implemented as a common language across all go-to-market functions, not just sales.

"My belief is, it can be taught and implemented across the go-to-market team, the SDRs, the AIs, customer service people. Because there's applicability there as well. So they all speak the same language, they all think about approaching accounts the same way."

The framework's power lies in its consultative approach, eliciting information through questions rather than telling. This creates alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success teams, reducing the finger-pointing that often occurs when teams operate with different qualification criteria and reporting systems.

4. AI-Powered SPICED: Research Before the Call

David reveals how AI is transforming the SPICED methodology by enabling deep prospect research before initial contact.

"One of the biggest things, you know, in the SPICED model, I think, is using the deep research AI tools to really dig into prospects before you actually do outreach. You know, I think there's opportunity to answer a lot of those SPICE questions before you even get on the call with a prospect."

This approach allows sales teams to jump in with leading questions that confirm research or elicit clarification, avoiding the "vendor fatigue" that occurs when prospects have to repeat their situation to multiple vendors. It shortens discovery cycles and differentiates the sales process.

5. GTM Engineering: The Future of Revenue Operations

David predicts the evolution toward GTM engineering as organizations recognize revenue generation as an engineering discipline.

"I think that's what we're looking at, is wider and wider acceptance that, this is a form of an engineering exercise, you know, building the revenue, right? And that's, that's what we do by design shows the architectural revenue architecture, And engineering, right? And it's mathematically quantifiable."

This shift represents moving beyond gut-based decisions to data-driven, mathematically quantifiable approaches to revenue generation. Marketing has already evolved this way with multiple platforms and data analysis - now the entire go-to-market function is following suit.

Final Thoughts

David leaves us with a vision of the future where GTM engineering becomes pervasive across organizations.

"We'll get wider and wider acceptance outside of you know, winning by design, savvy, demand gen people of the idea of go to, you know, go-to-market engineering. That's going to be more pervasive. It's going to broaden out of the marketing department, and we're just going to see organizations thinking more and more in terms of that, that framework."

His insight emphasizes that successful revenue generation requires the same systematic, engineering-minded approach that has transformed marketing operations, with frameworks like SPICED serving as the common language that enables this transformation across entire organizations.

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

Order you text workbook on Revenue Architecture - more than a 'read' this is a comprehensive workbook to ensure you up skill your knowledge.

Learn more about David's team at Agentic Partner Group here:

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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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