The core question behind this episode is uncomfortable and increasingly common.
Why does revenue break after growth, not before?
Deals close, ARR climbs, and headcount scales. Then margins slip, exceptions pile up, and finance starts asking questions no one can answer cleanly. Nothing looks obviously broken, and yet revenue stops compounding.
Welcome to GTM Vault, trusted by 25,000+ founders and operators building durable revenue systems.
This week’s guest is Mark Walker, CEO of Nue, a modern quote-to-cash platform powering some of the fastest-growing SaaS and AI companies in the world.
Mark has spent decades inside pricing, CPQ, billing, and revenue infrastructure. He has seen the same failure pattern repeat across early-stage startups, scaled SaaS, and multi-billion-dollar enterprises.
It is about why revenue systems fail quietly when pricing models evolve faster than the infrastructure supporting them.
Inside this episode
This conversation breaks down why most revenue failures are not sales problems, marketing problems, or people problems.
They are coherence problems.
Pricing, packaging, quoting, billing, and revenue recognition drift out of alignment. Teams compensate with heroics. Growth hides the cracks. Then scale exposes the limits.
By the time dashboards show trouble, the system has already been broken for quarters.
Discussed in this episode
1:36 Why revenue failures are system failures
4:48 The first signal founders miss before things break
6:31 Why fear, not price, drives buying decisions
10:42 How pricing uncertainty kills deals late-stage
12:42 Why committed spend models dominate AI and SaaS
16:19 Where teams get burned with usage-based pricing
22:04 Why legacy billing systems fail at scale
24:36 How fragmented revenue data makes AI dangerous
32:25 Why fixing downstream friction accelerates GTM
Key takeaways
Revenue does not fail loudly.
Revenue almost never collapses at the close of a deal. Contracts are signed, quotes are approved, finance signs off, and everything appears healthy on the surface. The failure happens downstream, when billing systems cannot reflect commercial reality, exceptions multiply, revenue begins to leak, and teams compensate manually. Growth masks the damage until scale makes the problem impossible to ignore.
Pricing models evolve faster than revenue infrastructure.
Modern SaaS and AI companies change pricing constantly. Seat-based models give way to usage, usage becomes credits, credits become committed spend. The product evolves and the revenue model evolves, but the systems running pricing, quoting, billing, and revenue recognition remain static. That mismatch is where friction is born, and it compounds quietly as the business grows.
Revenue leakage is the earliest warning signal.
Most teams look for churn, pipeline decay, or slowing sales velocity when something is wrong. They miss the first signal, which is almost always revenue leakage. It starts small, often one or two percent, and growth hides it. At scale, that leakage compounds into margin erosion and valuation damage that no forecast ever modeled. This is not a finance issue. It is a system design failure.
Pricing is now GTM architecture.
Pricing is no longer just a number or a spreadsheet exercise. It is infrastructure. When pricing, CPQ, billing, and revenue recognition live in disconnected systems, experimentation becomes slow and expensive. Every change requires approvals, workarounds, and manual fixes. The fastest-growing companies win because pricing is configurable, not rigid. Flexibility is speed.
Coherence beats heroics at scale.
Early-stage companies survive on heroics. Scale exposes them. At growth, systems must absorb complexity so people do not have to. When teams are forced to negotiate deals with customers and internal finance at the same time, velocity collapses. Smooth systems move faster than reactive teams. Coherence is speed.
Frameworks from the episode
1. The coherence test
Before chasing growth, ask a single question: can pricing, quoting, billing, and revenue recognition change together without breaking? If the answer is no, growth will expose the gap. Coherence is not a nice-to-have. It is the minimum requirement for scale.
2. The revenue leakage audit
Before fixing pipeline or demand generation, audit the fundamentals. Contracts, quotes, orders, and invoices should reconcile cleanly across systems. When they do not, revenue is already leaking. Leakage is rarely visible in dashboards. It hides in mismatches between systems.
3. The pricing flexibility rule
Design pricing systems for the company you are becoming, not the one you are today. If enterprise contracts, usage-based pricing, or hybrid models are anywhere in your future, lightweight systems will create drag later. Simplicity now often becomes rigidity at scale.
4. The AI data coherence rule
AI does not fix fragmented systems. It amplifies them. When revenue data lives in disconnected models, context degrades, accuracy drops, and trust erodes. AI is only as effective as the coherence of the system underneath it.
What to do this week
Audit whether pricing, CPQ, billing, and rev rec live in disconnected systems
Identify where revenue leakage is being masked by growth
Review whether pricing experimentation is constrained by infrastructure
Map where teams rely on manual fixes instead of system design
Remove one heroic workaround and replace it with a durable system decision
Why this matters
This decade does not reward brute-force execution. It rewards design.
Revenue does not scale because teams work harder. It scales because systems absorb complexity without breaking. When revenue models outgrow the systems running pricing, quoting, billing, and recognition, growth stops compounding and friction replaces momentum.
The companies that win are not the ones with the most heroic teams. They are the ones that invest early in coherence, flexibility, and infrastructure that can evolve as fast as their business model.
Build systems, not heroics.
This is GTM Vault.
If this episode changed how you think about pricing, revenue infrastructure, or GTM systems, forward it to one operator responsible for scaling revenue this year.
Connect
Follow Mark Walker: LinkedIn | Nue
Follow Rick Koleta: LinkedIn | GTM Vault
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