Stages
Repeatable Stage: $1M – $10M ARR
You’re In the Repeatable Stage If:
- You’ve found product-market fit with paying customers who renew
- You’re building a structured sales pipeline that can be measured and forecast
- Your team is growing beyond the founding members with specialized roles emerging
- You need more formal processes as communication becomes challenging
- Day-to-day operations are becoming structured with regular meetings, reviews, and metrics tracking
Your goal: Build predictable processes for sales, marketing, and customer success that can scale efficiently to $10M ARR and beyond
Key Priorities
Establish a Repeatable Sales Motion
Create a formal sales process with:
- Defined stages and conversion metrics between them
- Clear qualification criteria for prospects
- Standardized demos, proposals, and closing methods
- Consistent pipeline reporting and forecasting
Formalize Customer Onboarding and Success
Develop structured approaches for:
- Efficiently onboarding new customers
- Regular check-ins and quarterly business reviews
- Identifying expansion opportunities
- Measuring and improving retention metrics
Build a Scalable Marketing Engine
Implement systematic marketing with:
- Multiple channels generating consistent leads
- Marketing automation for nurturing prospects
- Measurable ROI across campaigns and channels
- Clear messaging that resonates with an expanded ICP
How Do You Compare?
See exactly how your metrics stack up against other companies at the Repeatable Stage:
- Sales Metrics: What’s a typical sales cycle, close rate, and deal size?
- CAC and LTV: Are your acquisition costs and lifetime value in the right range?
- Team Structure: How are teams typically sized and organized at your stage?
- Growth Rate: Is your ARR growth competitive with similar companies?
- Efficiency Metrics: How does your capital efficiency compare to benchmarks?
Primary Functions at the Specialized Stage
Marketing
- Systematic approach across multiple channels
- Marketing automation for lead management
- Regular content creation and distribution
- Performance tracking by channel and campaign
Sales
- Formal pipeline with defined stages and KPIs
- Specialized roles (SDRs, AEs) beginning to emerge
- Standardized sales processes and collateral
- Regular forecast and pipeline reviews
Customer Success
- Structured onboarding and regular check-ins
- Usage metrics tracking and health scoring
- Quarterly business reviews for larger accounts
- Proactive identification of expansion opportunities
Product
- Disciplined roadmap planning and prioritization
- Structured customer feedback collection
- Regular sprint planning and release cycles
- Balance between customer requests and strategic vision
Development
- Transition to Agile or similar methodologies
- Greater emphasis on code quality and testing
- Emerging specialization in technical roles
- Formal QA processes and release management
Supporting Functions at the Specialized Stage
Finance
- More proactive with forecasting cash flow and burn rates
- Possible full-time controller or finance manager
- Monthly or quarterly financial statements for the board
HR
- Formalized policies around compensation and reviews
- Documented cultural values and employee handbook
- Focus on maintaining culture during rapid hiring
Recruiting
- More structured process with defined employer brand
- Consistent interview process across roles
- Small recruiting team or external recruitment partner
Operations
- Separation into IT and Revenue Operations
- Growing stack of SaaS tools requiring management
- Focus on efficient workflows between departments
Repeatable Stage Essentials
CEO Role
As CEO, you’re shifting from top doer to process architect. While still involved in major deals and initiatives, your primary focus is building frameworks that let teams succeed independently.
You’re spending more time recruiting and developing leaders, defining culture, aligning departments, and establishing metrics-driven accountability across the organization. Your strategic vision needs to extend beyond next quarter to multi-year planning.
Leadership Team
You’re likely adding or formalizing leadership roles: a Head of Sales, a Head of Marketing, and maybe a Head of Customer Success. Each leader has a small team under them. Some might still be player-coaches, but they’re building out their functions more robustly.
Department heads coordinate closely to ensure marketing generates leads that sales can convert, and that customer success can retain and grow. The leadership team meets regularly to discuss pipeline health, product roadmap, and financial forecasts.
When You Graduate
You’ll know you’re ready for the Specialized stage when:
- You have a reproducible sales and marketing pipeline with predictable metrics
- You have established onboarding processes focused on driving retention
- You can measure gross and net renewal and dollar retention rates
- You have a clear definition of SAM and TAM from bottom-up data
- You’ve mapped marketing channels with cost, conversion and win rates
- You have a fully burdened CAC calculation and reproducible quota plan
- You can forecast business performance at least a quarter ahead
Ready to Accelerate Your Growth?
- Get Your Strategic Blueprint
- Our Repeatable Stage blueprint will help you build effective processes, hire the right team, and set metrics that scale efficiently to $10M ARR and beyond.