🐶 Jacco van der Kooij

Do you know a large Midwest family? Well, if you do, then you know me.  I am the youngest of eight, raised in a small farmers'​ village in the Netherlands. If I picked an apple from the wrong tree on my way home from school, my parents would know about it before I got off my bike.

The family name is like a bank account, and my family has put their savings in it for over 50 years.  We are not rich, but the van der Kooij's are known for our hard work, and willingness to help others. So we never needed a lot of money. For my family, our reputation is the most valued asset and trust is the currency we trade in.  Every day.

Fast forward to today, a time where the subscription (SaaS) business model is impacting organizations big and small.   Why?  Because in the subscription business you MUST make a client successful!  You have to earn an honest word-of-mouth reference by exceeding a client's expectation. You have to work hard and build a reputation. I recognize this as these are the norms and values I was raised on, and I know exactly what to do.

Welcome to my village. Pop. 12,000. Established 2005.

Founder

Winning By Design helps customer to design, build and scale their sales efforts.  With offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Antwerp, Shanghai and Sydney we help clients big and small with a process driven approach to sales.  The right process executed by trained professional will help you earn more business from the right customers.

The last 48 hours have been… telling. Experienced sellers fumble deals at the goal line.  They are working closely with executive buyers who have decision-making authority and a real, urgent need for impact.

they keep hearing stories like:

“We are not signing today — we want to take a closer look at the pricing.”

“It’s queued for signature, but we need one more review.”

“We want to revisit the security terms. Something doesn’t feel right.”

Here’s an important tell:

They’re not saying No.

They’re not saying Yes.

They’re saying: Not Yet.

What is happening here?

AI joined the buying committee! And it is prioritizing risk over your year-end deadline.

AI may have collapsed the education cycle, but it is now increasing scrutiny at the moment of signing. 

In effect, AI has introduced a new stage: validation. 

In the validation stage, buyers use AI to:
1) Compare pricing at the last moment,
2) Scan contracts for non-standard clauses and surface edge-case risks,
3) Benchmark terms at scale.

And... this is happening after a verbal was given a week ago. 

In the past, sellers relied on:
+ Social contracts (I know someone)
+ Relationships (make a call)
+ Urgency and leverage (discount)

AI is immune to all of that:
- It doesn’t care about your quarter.
- It doesn’t respond to your induced deadline.
- It looks at risk and performs analysis on price.

So we get a new decision state:
Not a no. Not a yes. 
An algorithmically-informed “Not yet.”

But the effect is the same. Even if the deal closes Tuesday, your month, quarter, and for many, the year, ended yesterday. Ouch!

Yes, we are seeing the relationship-driven close being overruled by machine-verified assurance; urgency has been depersonalized.

Old Close:
Discovery → Relationship + Discount + Deadline → “Signed on Friday”

2026 Close:
Discovery → Relationship + Discount + AI Validation → “Let’s talk next week”

IMPORTANT: These deals have clear needs, urgency, ROI, and executive support, but they do require your immediate attention.

We may very well experience an industry process change in which AI validation occurs at the finish line.

So don’t sulk.
Don’t cry wolf.
And don’t start the Monday morning blame game.

Get to work. Now.
The next 48 hours matter.
Focus your team on clearing the AI-surfaced risks.

If you do, this could cause a hyper-fast start to 2026!

---

What are you hearing?

Working with customers opened my eyes and changed my life | Being kind and assuming positive intent will help you see the world from a different perspective

To all of you boarding a plane or walking into SKO,
a new year of showing up for customers begins.

Let’s Grow. Together. 


Photo: Sunset over Monterey Bay

It’s SKO season—and this year, trainers getting stuck at the border is the challenge du jour.

Now imagine running 30+ events in as many days, with every trainer en route to or from somewhere. No one to spare!!

So the call came in: “Jacco, can you get on a plane—like now?” I literally started driving before we had a flight. 

When I arrived in San Diego, my team had everything ready:

• Call recordings to review and get a sense of client's business

• A run-of-show mapped to learning objectives every 10 minutes

• A stunning customized deck (barely used—most was role-play)

• Beautiful coil-bound handouts for the workshopping

In other words, all the hard work was done. Which meant I got to do the fun part. And that part… that I know how to do 🤣

Four Red Bulls...Four hours of training!

What I found was a fully engaged team—eager to learn, brave enough to push themselves into role-play and live workshopping, and even willing to laugh at my dad jokes.

A few things made this a HUGE success:

• The CEO Alex Alexandrov was not only present the entire time, he was cheering 📣 people on. 

• The CRO Dax Powers  sat front row—and wasn’t afraid to role-play 🏀

But  most of all, the participants were locked in—hardly a cell phone in sight, can you imagine!?

People learn when they engage. They engage when leaders show up and participate.

And when that happens, my job is simple: direct the energy in the room. Make the skill stick, and let confidence build.

Thank you, Momentus Technologies  for having us partner with you, and for trusting us…  here’s to a fantastic year.   

Let’s Grow

(Thank you to my team, you all rock, so impressed with the quality of the materials ❤️❤️❤️)

WbD team is on a roll—turning a smart idea into something teams can use, right now.

The Bowtie Toolkit Preview

Alignment problems rarely show up as “alignment problems.”

They show up as:

❌ Missed forecasts
❌ Conflicting metrics
❌ Dropped handoffs
❌ Surprised churn

The Bowtie Toolkit was built to make those issues visible — and fixable.

Swipe through to see a preview of the toolkit GTM operators use to:

✔ Measure the full customer lifecycle
✔ Align Marketing, Sales, and CS
✔ Identify conversion leaks
✔ Build predictable growth motions

Want the actual editable templates?

👉 Download the Bowtie Toolkit Preview (free) via the link in the comments.

Members get the full toolkit inside the Growth Institute — but the preview is a great way to straighten things out today.


#GTMAlignment #RevenueLeadership #B2BSaaS #RevOps #RevenueArchitecture #GetYourBowtieOnStraight

RevOps will help us where we are going next. Here’s a recent guest article i did for the amazing folks at Vasco.  Hope you enjoy my musings on what no longer is the future.  

Yes i’m staling about Growth Loops and Compound Growth.

For more than a decade, SaaS growth was driven by linear productivity, with funnel optimizations, conversion rates improvements, and capacity planning. 

That model has now reached a structural limit. Linear systems depend on constant input. When the input slows, the output decays. No amount of optimization changes that.

In 2026, the question is no longer how much more can be extracted from the funnel, but how systems can be designed to compound.
 
In growth loops, the output of one cycle becomes the input of the next. Cost grows slower than impact. Cycle time shortens instead of expanding.

This is why growth loops outperform channels, and why RevOps is moving from productivity optimization to system design 📐

Read Jacco van der Kooij's article: https://lnkd.in/exUW4f8Q

Global Revenue Operations & GTM Transformation Executive | AI-Native GTM Architect | Scaled $1B+ SaaS & FinTech

I am excited be a Founding Member of the Winning by Design Growth Institute.

I’ve been closely associated with Winning by Design and Jacco van der Kooij’s team for more than eight years. Over that time, I’ve watched them continuously evolve with the GTM landscape. From early SaaS growth motions to today’s reality of AI-driven, multi-motion GTM complexity, their teams have been consistently focused on the first-principles approach to revenue, clarity of thinking, and refusal to chase noise.

After spending several years building GTM architecture and leading several transformations, I am always interested in pressure-tested systems that actually scale. That’s what drew me to the Growth Institute. It’s a community built around first principles of growth. We will be focusing on Revenue architecture, Commercial discipline, Clear ownership across the GTM engine. The things that matter when complexity shows up. These are core principles based on which the Growth Institute is being built.

It feels fitting to now work closely with the core WbD team Dan Smith Shari Johnston and Lauren Shleifer Goldstein and contribute as a founding member of this community. I’m excited and genuinely honored to help shape how the next generation of GTM leaders learn, think, and operate.
#GrowthInstitute #RevenueArchitecture #GTMLeadership #ExecutiveOperators #B2BGrowth

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