Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
AI won’t fix your sales model if the foundation is broken. In this episode, Jacco van der Kooij explains why the old go-to-market playbook is collapsing—and what the new, AI-powered future actually looks like.
Creators and Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
TRF - Jacco burn the old playbook
===
[00:00:00]
Introduction
---
Jacco: The old playbook of funding is no longer working, and the old playbook of acquiring growth is no longer working. At the same time AI comes up, if we deploy AI with the intent to make the growth at all costs operate like growth at half the cost or at the fraction of the cost, and deploying AI on that is not gonna make that playbook.
Uh, subtly work. It makes it not work at lower the cost if outbound calls are not being made. And if inbound calls are not converting, putting an AI system on something that doesn't work is not gonna make it convert any better if the process hasn't changed.
Toni: So we are back with our all time favorite, uh, you probably would've guessed it, it's uh, it's not Raul, it's, it's Jacco.
We have Jacco back here with us. Uh, Jacco, thank you so much for, for spending. I think it's the third or fourth time now with us here on the show. Sure. So thank you so much.
Jacco: Yeah, no, most welcome. Uh, apologize for how I look. I got a [00:01:00] new, a new young pup at home and, uh, sleeps on top of me still in our bed.
And so like our nights are not as, uh, uh, as easygoing as they once were, hurt.
Toni: Yeah. Yeah. You know, that that's, that's the problems of people that, uh, you know, I have kids that are kind of grown up now and probably left, left houses. Are you actually kind of, what is it called? An empty nester, I think in the us.
Is, is that what it is? Yeah. We are an empty nester. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. And now, now a young pup. But, um, uh, what did we wanna talk about today? Jacco?
Jacco: I think that what we should talk about is AI and the impact of ai. You know, like, I believe that that is a fantastic topic for us to, to go about. I think that because, you know, like we're in that, we're in the, in the two worlds colliding, right?
We're in the one leg is in the future world. It's like, okay, AI and the promise, and one land, one leg is still in the. Current world and go like, no, no, we gotta hold on to people. And those two worlds are colliding right now.
Toni: And the the thing is, I think where at least you know what, what I understand also [00:02:00] from you and kind of from your, from your thoughts where some of this is colliding the most or the worst actually.
Um, it's actually starting already kind of in the boardroom, right. I think to your point, um. Growth expectations are back in 2025. Like people wanna see growth again. Kind of all of that jazz that we had in the last couple of years. Yeah, sure. Was difficult, but now we wanna see growth again. And at the same time, AI is there at the table is like, Hey, it should kind of help with stuff.
Right. I mean, is is that the extent of, of how you see kind of those two problems or those two topics colliding right now?
AI and the old playbook
---
Jacco: Yeah, you have to think of it as two different tracks that are, you know, headed the same direction, but are not correctly, uh, integrated with each other. So, for example, the reason why growth is down is because we're using outdated playbooks and those playbooks are no longer working and simply put.
Folks, I can, I do not dare to open up an email or click a link in an email any longer. I do not dare to think that the text message is direct. My, my presumption right now is that when I get a text [00:03:00] message from a number, I don't recognize that it is phishing. My presumption is that I don't, if I get an email that I don't recognize it is phishing.
So all that means that outbound for forms of outbound or reaching out to a client is extremely tough. Like there, it doesn't matter whether you're good or bad or where your market is going up or down, that is just the nature of, of the world that we live in. And as a result, not, not just that, but plenty of elements of that.
You know, like we are living in a world where, where growth rates according to bank sites, which we participated in closely right, has halt and the cost has nearly doubled. Like, and that is the new reality. I don't think we have to debate that, you know, that won't exist. That world means that the old playbooks are no longer working.
The old playbook of funding is no longer working, and the old playbook of acquiring growth is no longer working. Right. That is where we need to start with. At the same time, AI comes up. Now, if we deploy AI with [00:04:00] the intent to make the growth at all costs operate like growth at half the cost or at the fraction of the cost, the problem is the old playbook is not working.
And deploying AI on that is not gonna make that playbook, uh, subtly work. What? It makes it work. It makes it not work at lower the cost. Right. Like that's what it does. And I think that that's what we are seeing today. The question now is what's the new playbook? Yeah. And that new playbook we at, at Winning by Design have gotten a good handle on.
And we start to understand that we are starting to see the outline of that. Um, but that new playbook is a replacement of not one playbook, but of dozens of playbook from the old world. Right, and that Old World Playbook is all about more leads, more salespeople to close the deals and so on. That's the old playbook.
And that playbook. Yeah. As we said, that has stopped working to the, sorry. This is also an important thing. It didn't stop working. If the old playbook had stopped [00:05:00] working, people would pull their money out of it, invested in otherwise. The problem is the old playbook is slowly degrading day after day, but that means that.
That currently organizations are unwilling to pull the funding out of that because that will drop 'em off a cliff. So if you're a CEO, you go like, well, I know it's bad, but at least it's something, right? Like if I pull money from that, then my whole business collapses. And so that's the world that we're saying that those worlds are colliding.
Oh, and then final point, new companies, AI centric companies are subtly we're seeing the outline of what their growth looks like, right. And whether, yeah, like right now it's, it's, it's. It's not exception stories. There are multiple ones, but we see companies like Cursor growing from zero to a hundred million dollars in like a year.
You know, like, like until we go like, wow, what are we missing? And so like all these are all colliding into, uh, the session today that I'm here with you on.
Toni: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, you know, [00:06:00] obviously, you know, previously when we chatted, uh, you know, on this show we talked about 70% of GTM in 2025 will be impacted by, by ai, right?
And, um, I think kind of, we believe that that's actually happening in front of eyes right now. Kind of, this is exactly what's happening. It's not, um, I think kind of, you know, if we got a little bit further out, it was like, Hey, it's gonna replace 70% of people that, that's, that's kind of probably kind of misleading to think about it like this.
But, um, if you, you know, if you can take the whole bow tie, right? Kind of, there's so many different opportunities where I can play a role. I think what we wanted to talk today about specifically. Is something super popular but also a little bit controversial. It's kind of the AI SDR, right? Kind of. We've seen, we've seen companies like 11 X Raul and Project a kind of, I dunno, maybe we'll, we'll get some stories out of you in a second.
Um, you know, raise phenomenal rounds, uh, with tier one investors we saw recently. Artisan, which is a similar vendor [00:07:00] also raise a fantastic round. And, um, I think even in your research, just, you know, scratching the fir uh, surface was like. 15, 20 different vendors kind of going in this direction, right? Um, so while there's a lot of hype, a lot of investor money in going into it, a lot of POCs happening, we've also seen a lot of people being unhappy.
And I think you can now either take this perspective of like, oh, all of this is trash and you know, this doesn't work and you know, this AI thing. Let's throw this out the window. Or we can say, Hey, wait a minute. Maybe, maybe something went wrong here and I think kind of peeling back that onion today with you, Jocko, I think that would actually be quite a lot of fun
Jacco: for me.
What went wrong? You're executing the wrong process. If outbound calls are not being made and if inbound calls are not converting, putting an AI system on something that doesn't work is not gonna make it convert. Any better if the process hasn't changed. Um, and, and so that's one. The second part is most executives in the boardroom are unfamiliar to what they're trying to solve, which [00:08:00] problem they're trying to solve. If the ai, and if we look at that on the departmental level, uh, you'll see departmental optimization like, look, there is no doubt. Absolutely no doubt that if you are currently writing a document that you are going to use ai, no doubt. Yes. Mm-hmm. If you are, uh, right now doing any design, there's no doubt that you'll be using ai.
All these things are already given, right? That doesn't mean that the whole thing will be developed by ai, of course, not like the, the main, the, the, the fresh id. The main thing in design is still created by an architect, but there's no doubt that if you are illegal right now. Or if you, in any, like you are using AI to an nth degree in order to make it better.
And if you're not, you know, I'm sorry. Then you, you are like that. This podcast today is not for you. Like, but like everybody is using AI already today. So that is, now if you compare it to where we were two years ago, that was still an outlier, right? In two years we're all [00:09:00] using ai. Okay? What are we using it for?
Like, what are you doing? And so, and this is my point, is like, look, if you're doing in sales, if you keep focusing on the wrong playbook, uh, you're, you're gonna get the same results. You're gonna get them faster. Anything that AI does, it generally has the following elements. It does things in more, in higher volume.
Like instead of one call, I can do a thousand calls, or instead of one email, I can write a thousand emails. We think things happen at a lower cost. Making it available to thousands of companies at the same time that otherwise would not have access to it. And then number three thing, which is the mis misunderstood part, it does it faster.
So if you didn't work, if your systems didn't work the first place, it will now work still not work it, just do it faster. And that's what we are seeing today. Everything is happening faster, faster, faster, and human beings have a hard time with that.
Raul: So you've talked about obviously the case where the playbook stopped working.
Um, I also still see companies where the [00:10:00] playbook still is working, or at least the company is growing very nicely. Uh, even traditional SaaS companies, climate tech companies, whatever, FinTech B2B companies, obviously for the companies where the playbook doesn't work anymore, maybe the executives are looking into changing something.
I see the difficulty for the people where it's working really well and they've grown to a team of 50 people now, and they're still growing very nicely, growing towards the CRC or even IPO sometimes. They're really scared to, to tinker with a machine. And I think those are really the questions here. Like where is the starting point for a company also that's maybe working still?
Well, right now, today,
The role of customers in growth
---
Jacco: uh, first of all, success stories in Go-To Market are defined by customers, not by sellers. I. The buyer defines, you know, like how they wish to be sold and, and in vertical markets, whether that's climate tech or whatever. You know, like if you sell to farmers, um, originally I would say you should probably not be that AI centric, uh, having part of my family being, being, uh.
Uh, farmers, I can tell you [00:11:00] there are more ai, uh, aware than many of us, right? Because they, they use that nowadays in order for how much, you know, like, which plant needs, how much XY. So they, they, they, they follow that quite well actually. And we work with a company in Europe called Let's Grow. And if you see how they are nowadays, climate tech works super AI advanced, you know, now.
And so, but vertical markets operate differently. Right. Like you, you in your vertical market have to adhere to what your buyer is doing and have the weigh how your buyer's buying. If they don't have a computer, then good luck being AI centric. You will still need somebody in a car to knock on the door, right?
And in many, in, in some vertical markets, it's quite okay. We are talking about the high tech, innovative, uh, segment in which companies are trying to sell to a global audience, whether that is in a different country, uh, in some form or shape, right? And so in no, and, and that way you gotta speak multiple language, multiple cultural, diverse, um, and either you adjust to that with human beings, meaning that you have to have a sales 50, you have to have Spanish people selling to Spanish people.
You have to sell German people to sell to [00:12:00] German people. And that, you know, and culturally adjustment is, is expensive. Right, because you have to invest in market. The other thing with human beings is that a human being in generally, in order for you to grow the company on the backs of human beings, you generally needs to grow with an investment of two to three years in advance, whatever.
Whatever we can say is a human being will not operate fully functionally within the first year. It runs off a multi-year cycle. That investment is expensive, and that means that your growth is always legging in the market. Markets are moving faster in today. A market opportunity presents itself. It opens and the window closes, and the window has gotten shorter.
The window is moving and that entire thing is moving faster. Speed is what, what is what kills, you know, or makes and and breaks opportunities. Our ability as organizations, innovative companies, to no longer be able to jump in on that window is a, is a problem. [00:13:00] Cursor jumped in on that window. Right. They were immediately jumping on that and boom, Canva jumped on that window.
Their organizational structures and their mindset are so strong they can jump on it. What do these companies have in in common? They're system-based companies at the core of their company. They're not built around human beings. They're built around systems and processes, and once they figured out how to do it right, all they hit is like go open up the spend, and now the spending occurs in the past.
We did that with human beings. And I have, uh, this, this, this keynote I'm working on, it has this building of Salesforce Tower. Salesforce Tower was commissioned around 2012 and was completed in 2017 and 18. And every floor that you see right as the As, and I have one of those gifts where you see like, like time lapse, right?
As it builds every floor is human beings being tacked on, on top of tact, on it is human centric growth that. Was based on the mindset [00:14:00] that growth needs to come from human being selling. And I am not a big believer. I am not the, the A believer in that. I'm a believer that some of that is true, but not all of that is true.
I believe that we are using human beings as the lowest cost general purpose computer that can be put together by two people with unskilled labor, right? Like as the joke goes, right? Like that is what we're using. We're using human. Historically, we have used human beings. As general purpose computers, we were not meant to write emails with two thumbs in the middle of the night looking at the light screen.
We're not meant to do that. We were not meant to sit behind a computer and codify emails. That's not what human beings were meant to do, but we used them to do that. That process is now being replaced by ai and we either can cry wolf over the human beings that losing their jobs over it, which is perfectly fine.
I can see that. But it's not real Like, like we created a job called SDRs that we employed thousands of people in that job, or tens or [00:15:00] hundreds of thousands of them. That was not a real job. People, that was not a real job. Even the people doing their job don't wanna do their job, right? Like, so like, and now, you know, but where is the world going? The fundamental question here is what is the new playbook? Not how are we gonna optimize the old playbook? Not, you know, like, is AI the right thing to do? The old playbook, the old playbook is no longer delivering the growth that new that companies need. You old playbook, new companies like Cursors and you know, others use a new playbook.
Our question is, do we want to talk about the old playbook? Do we want and how to make that better? And folks, you know, like. I think the writing is on the wall on that. Or do we wanna talk about the new playbook? Right? Yeah. And deploy AI technique on the new playbook. But I can tell you whether it's 11 X, whether it's any technology that deploys new technology on the old playbook.
Well, new technology times old results equals bigger old.
Toni: Yeah.
Jacco: Old [00:16:00] results on a skill.
Toni: So let's talk about the new playbook. Let's do it. Uh, and let's talk about it in the sense of, you know what, everyone is always interested in pipeline generation. Like everyone is kind of interested in that. Like, yes, I want to have that right?
And, and to your point, like, Hey, this STR thing, you know, no one, no one actually wants to do it. It's pretty expensive and seems pretty repetitive. So in, in any kind of matrix, anyone's heads, it's like, oh yeah, no, that AI should totally take care of that. Right. I know that difference between inbound and outbound, by the way.
I'm not sure kind of, you know, how, how you've kind of been seeing and exploring that, but, um, but why, why is it failing? Why, why are people failing in this? And you kind of mentioned, hey, they're kind of trying to take the old process and just kind of make it faster. And then obviously kind of this whole thing is screwing up.
But it, let's just say you are, you are super straight. You know, you, you're forward looking, you're buying into the AI thing. You really wanna make it work. Like how, how do you make it work kind of step by step? How do we get people from, forget about the [00:17:00] vendors, like it, it seems to be way more homework on their side than it is choosing the right vendor actually what they need to do.
Right? Or, or how, how, you know, may, maybe I'm getting it. Ro je,
Jacco: I don't know if you're getting it wrong. What I can tell you is we're making it too complex when you buy. Do you listen to a website with five reviews and, and that has a hundred, or do you listen to a peer who's been, who has bought the product service?
Who do you listen to?
Toni: You know, probably listen to the peer more than, than the website.
Jacco: Why? Because you don't even trust the reviews these days any longer Now, and any of you that ever worked with an entrepreneur that has their own little business reviews work really bad reviews means a one, one star rating and calculate it out.
If you have, uh, if on average, if you wanna be a successful person and a, and you want to go to a website and look at reviews, you think that anything below four and a half stars is bad in general. And restaurants. Anything below four is bad. Now calculate out how many four, five star ratings you need to have to [00:18:00] overcome.
One, one star rating, and then one, one star rating, therefore has a lot louder a voice. Then all the four star one person needs to come in and have a bad day and, and, and, and leave you a one star. Calculate it out. You're gonna need between 60 to 84 star, five star reviews. So peer reviews, when we see online.
By default are tainted the wrong way just because of the way how the algorithms works. Okay. And there's ways how to avoid that use media me. But in generally, you know, like you all experience this like one, one star rating and dude you screwed. Right? Okay. So, but we listen to peers second. But if I look at how many, uh, uh, uh, think of the following, if I have no customers.
I'm, I'm, I'm really saying to myself, Hey, if I have more customers, selling should be easier, right? If I have no customer, selling is hard, but if I have 10 customers, 20 customers, you are [00:19:00] aching for the day. You have 10 to 20 customers because you know that they can help you sell, right? Mm-hmm.
Toni: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, so customer cases, customer stories, kind of, you know what works, you know what doesn't work. Maybe you can even have like a reference call with someone. Like there, there are many reasons, many reasons why having more customers are better is, is better than not. Right?
Jacco: So then I go like, okay, so if I have 10 customers, a hundred customers, should that be better than 10 customers?
Right? Okay.
Toni: Yeah. I, I, I know where you're going with this then so, but, but please tell us.
Jacco: So why can it be that the more customers I get, the harder growth is, could it be. That it has anything to do with the fact that our dollars in marketing and sales still focused 90, 95 or higher percent stays focused on acquisition.
None of the dollars of investment shift proportionally. To where the revenue actually is generated, which we know is retention and expansion, but none of those dollars worth. Now I'm not talking about five, you know, companies [00:20:00] below 5 million Euros or anything. Folks invest in acquisition, acquisition, acquisition.
We're all, we all get that like early on you need, but if you're 20 and $30 million. We work with companies at a billion dollar plus who still are maintaining 90, 95, 98, 90 9% of all their investments focused on acquisition, acquisition, acquisition. I sit in boardroom meetings where the main thing is, hey, did you know, like what do we need to change on the comp plan of the sales people in order to drive growth?
You got your customers, and so simply put down here what we are experiencing. We are experiencing a shift in the world that customers saying, enough is enough. I don't wanna be sold any longer like that. I don't want to get that spam email. I don't want you to talk to me on LinkedIn that way. You know what?
I want to get growth from my peers. I want to have dinners with my peers. If it's, if it's high a CV, I want to go to events with my peers. If the a CV goes lower, I want to have communities that I'm part of. If they community, you know, the lower and [00:21:00] lower I go like, look, if you look at companies like Canva who operate at five to $10 million.
Yeah. Yes they did. They are popular, but the primary popular reason why they become popular is because word of mouth. What PLG has shown to us, that system-based growth works and system-based growth primarily comes from enlisting your customers into the sales process of new prospects. They're using systems and processes to do that.
What is the main thing that most go-to market, uh, uh, models, uh, figure out or have not figured out? They're not doing that. I'll give you a practical example. Imagine you organizing event. City of, you know, 300, 400 person company events in Amsterdam or in Berlin or somewhere like that, right? Somebody will say, it's like, you know, you organize the event, you work on a schedule, on the agenda, you work on the entire thing, right?
Now ask the vendor where do they get the most leads from? Ask the vendor who, who sponsors you, who pays you a $10,000, $20,000 contract to [00:22:00] sponsor your event? Right? Ask them where do they get the most leads from, and they will tell you. I got the Mos Lees from the CXO dinner the night before the event started, or the night the event started.
And oh, by the way, when you organize the event, that seems to be an afterthought, like somewhere in marketing that's an afterthought. What is the main thought is the event, the AV solution? Uh, the, the tickets that everybody gets. That whole thing is what the marketing department is focused on. And, and, and I'm not blaming them by the way.
I'm, I'm, you know, if you are in the operational part of that business that then I, that is the, you know, that's where the pain is, right? But the sales is happening at the smaller meetings. Now, if you see, how would we be able to do that? How would be able to create that single form? It's really hard. I said the other day, um, at one of these events.
And literally, um, next to me sits a person who I [00:23:00] struck a contract a hundred thousand dollars contract with us a week later. It was a 28 CEO event. I didn't know. I didn't know. AI can quickly signal that to me. It's like, Hey, you're sitting at this event, that person, you know, make sure it can even give me a report while I'm at the event.
It can give me a real time update. Right. You know, like, this is where the future of AI is. These modern playbooks. Today executed in product-led growth motions, which will ma mature into the way that human led growth motions will and will be powered by ai. So those moments where humans to human contact really matters, actually are optimized to the best of our abilities.
And today there are highly underutilized.
Toni: So let me just try and kind of piece together what you said here. We started out like, Hey, let's talk about this SDR thing. And they were like, you know what, Tony? Old playbook. Uh, a new playbook. I was like, oh, let's go for please a new playbook, Jocko. Uh, and then you went into basically, uh, what sounded [00:24:00] to me like, Hey, um, this AI SDR thing, you know, regardless how good the AI is, it's still only gonna execute the old playbook.
Is is, is that what I'm hearing you basically saying? Right. Kind of. Is that, that. That's the flaw, that's the F. That's the flaw that we are seeing.
Jacco: And growth never really came from Doug. If you look at where growth comes from, again, in scale ups, right? I'm not talking about like startups, you know, less than 10 million, right?
At scale ups, your growth doesn't come from a bunch of SDRs calling on people. In most companies, vertical markets aside, if you are selling to trucking companies and you're selling to a local trucking company in Arkansas or somewhere in the middle of the world, I get you that there's a person who picks up the phone.
Outbound is the right way. Outbound phone calls is the right way to go. Better yet, barbecue, uh, for half of Arkansas, maybe a better way to go. Yeah. But point being is you map to it. But in the general world where we need to get to a large amount of people, a relatively high volume of sales at the low a CV, [00:25:00] you need.
Hundreds of customers a year to thousands, to 10 thousands of customers a year. Okay? You need a new approach, and that SDR approach won't fuel the growth. That you need, you and your, you need, um, to the same tune. Now, if you pull all your SDRs and that growth falls to zero, yeah, people are gonna panic out of that, right?
That's what they don't want either. So you need a parallel play that you, that you start, start, uh, start up, uh, rather than, uh, waiting for the SDRs to turn around or expecting AI to make the AI function work, sorry, the SDR function work
Raul: going from where we are today. Maybe let's get practical here a little bit.
How do I look for the best, best place to start there? So the future, uh, we understand that we understand where we currently are, and that's not the thing anymore. Um, but how do I start and, and which cases are the ones that I can, first of all, have the potential right now to realize, but also maybe have the ability to, to have a good start with,
Jacco: okay, so Raul, help me out.
Right?
Human-Led Growth Powered by AI
---
Jacco: So, um, what, what was the playbook that I just came? What is the [00:26:00] playbook that I just came up with?
Raul: Give or take, you call it human led growth, uh, powered by ai.
Jacco: Okay. But where do I get my leads from?
Raul: Uh, in person events? You said, uh, events, whatever.
Jacco: True. But still, where do they come from? Who generates the leads?
Raul: People,
Jacco: which
Raul: people? Well, in that case, I don't know who goes to which event. I guess it's executives, salespeople. But essentially what I'm saying is customers. Yeah.
Jacco: Okay. Now, Raul, no offense to you, so I'm not meaning this in the wrong way, but the fact that it took you that long to come to customers is the problem We think.
We think everything except customers, right? And, and I can tell you where that comes from. It comes from the moment. In times you're the mid 2000, early 2000 10, 11, 12. In those days, CEOs of companies or founders, sorry, founders of companies were, you know, cap reversed, co coders. Mid 2015 sixteens, they become financial engineers.
The [00:27:00] CEOs of companies become financial engineers because they know now they team up with a founder. Don't get me wrong, but they take control of it. 2018, 1920s, we're shifting the technical founders to the site, you know, uh, with tip of the cap to Eric Wan, as an exception to Zoom. But everybody else, it just we're financial engineering.
Why? Because we believe that growth will come from recurring revenue and growth will come primarily by funding, funding, funding, funding. Our view on customers and what it has to do with growth has actually diminished and it doesn't ma you know, like, you know, like having said in many boardrooms and still am, that still is the prevailing, uh, mindset.
People don't think about customers the way they should think about customers, right? They're not, yeah. They think about growth. They think about comp plan for salespeople and they think about like, like that, that is what like 90% of the boardroom goes about, right? The NPS score me, and you know, like whatever is reported is like, oh, great, we're doing great.
All it is is a red flag, right? So none of that, we're not focused on customers. We're not [00:28:00] like, I don't know which language I need to tell that to people, but that's the problem. It doesn't come as a top product comes as a, as a, as a big thought, but customers are not. Now go talk to Canva. Different mindset.
Customer first go talk to product led growth. Why data driven? They see it in the metrics. Their, their metrics are, um, usage per week. Usage per day. Use it, right? Like they are the way they look at it and the engineering that they're doing is around the customers. And product let go. No product, let go.
Worked really well in developer markets, cursor, GitLab and so on, and works really well. Low price, high volume based things, right? Like, like Canva and you know, like in, in your original PLG company would, I would argue is Dropbox or, and, and the like. And so you'll see that that works really well. So that, that's thing. Unpack number one, mindset change needs to shift to customers. Number two, your best leads come from customers, not from logos. I. [00:29:00] From customers. I want you to think that users are the new buyers. Users are the new buyers. If we think with that mindset, then uh, uh, to give you an idea, think of an arrow going from the right set of the bow tie.
And going back to the left side of the bow tie, like I have acquisition, which is happening all on the left. I have retention and expansion, which is happening all the way on the right side of the bow tie, and now I'm drawing a new arrow that goes from the right side of the bow that crosses back to the left.
Users are the new buyers now. They voice that and they enable peers with that. The moment at time say, users will drive your pipeline. We start to think about it, how will users start over now if I tell you conversion rate, lead to opportunity, conversion rate, what is that? People will say it's 2%. It's 1% or something like that.
Right. Okay. I got it. It's trending up. Oh, it's trending down. Got it. Okay. What is the conversion rate from the right side of your, of your users to the left side of your users? Uh, to pipeline. Go ask that a [00:30:00] regular company. Like not, not a PLG company, a regular company, and they will go like, wait, what? We don't have that.
We don't track that. Okay, we got a problem. Because that's where growth is coming from. And you're not tracking that. You don't have processes for doda, you don't have campaigns for that. I mean, you organize a user conference every year, right? And, and you're still are debating whether you should lead, how many percentage of new opportunities you should lead into, right? Like, like this whole mindset is what AI is gonna help us because we human beings have not been able to figure that out. And that's like the main mindset is the, is is different. Today we live in a world where AI is doing what we are currently doing. And what we have been doing in the past and so on and so forth.
In the future, AI will help us. What we are unable to do, and one of the things that we are unable to do is that
Toni: can you just, you know, maybe it's just me lagging behind, but can you make the connection so the, the whole PLG user approach makes total sense, like absolutely. Referrals, [00:31:00] that's the way to go.
Or it's like a very, very. Word of mouth. Very cheap way to grow and, and I think to your point, I would say that you know, companies like Cursor Lovable and you know, bold and what have you probably have been benefiting from this immensely, right? But what I, what I currently don't get is like, you know, c can you get the AI piece back in here?
Because it is not like that this has to be here. Right? It's, it's not like, oh, it's, it's just a technology. It doesn't have to be in this part. But you kind of made the connection yourself and I just wanted to kind of double click on that. So I totally get it. So what's the, what's the AI connection here that, that, that will basically kind of help us figure this out?
Lemme
Jacco: make this, uh, clear. Um, I'm, I'm a human being. I'm doing a customer survey. I'm calling up 20 people to get an opinion. Right. Um, I get that call, I write it, I log it, I summarize it in a report. How accurate am I going to be?
Toni: Okay. Yeah. Pretty poorly. Probably
Jacco: pretty poorly because I have a human interpretation on it.
Mm-hmm. I may even have like my own voice in it. No, no, no, no, no. [00:32:00] Jennifer was off that day. That wasn't really a bad call. We're not gonna give Jennifer a once. Right? Like, I'm gonna, we're gonna play telephone, right? Like telephone, telephone, telephone. The third person who gets it, like what is still true.
Hey, I will give you a super accurate feeling to it. If you ever work with an AI system today. And you talk to it, you are kind of like, you're so blunt that you think you're rude, right? You're giving it actually an honest opinion. Okay, so, so, so one, right? How long does that take? Often it takes a customer, you know, a group, you know, like you're gonna take, you know, you're gonna get a lot of customer feedback to take three, six months before it propagate.
So that that loop that we're closing existing customers help us learn who are the better customers gonna take us months before we get that. Okay. Like I said in the beginning, the markets are moving faster now. I don't want to have like, oh, I, I placed a call to a customer. I immediately get a response back from an AI system.
How was the call? Was Jennifer on point? Right? Okay. That's a little too much, right? So, but what I can do is per today [00:33:00] I can learn from my customers. In the month of, uh, what is it where April, right? In the month of April, what were the right customers and what was the topic they wanted to talk about? What was, what was across the 200 gone calls that I recorded in the month?
Gimme the trends. Now what were the questions that left un answers. What were the top three questions? I. Okay. How do we train the salespeople right now to talk about that? What were the use cases the customers were asking for? I want instant. Instant is within our world is 30 days we'll be, we'll be fine for the time being right.
AI can help 'em with that right away. I. I can close the loop from the right side to the left side. Simple example, right now, if I now connect the left side of the bow, tie a targeting with the feedback from the customer, and I now get agent one tells me, Hey, in April, these are the new trends I. It hands it off to agent number two and agent number two says, adjust marketing spent towards these worth this, this, and this.
AI Integration in Sales
---
Jacco: Look, it's the old world combining with the new [00:34:00] world, but I'm starting to see how this is going. I am targeting my customers now based on what my current customers are grading BA great benefit from. I am using my customers in order to generate pipeline. Okay, now, this is a very early place where we would start.
What we'll end up with is closed loop systems that are constantly listening and learning and going along. Again, that doesn't mean that we're gonna fly blind on that. Human beings are very good at finding niches that can be optimized, right? But today we find those niches too late. And it takes us too long to, to capitalize on those, those specific opportunities.
And as a result, companies are no longer being able to, to, to, to, to create that growth. I can tell you if you're in a PLG firm and the campaign finds that there's a particular group of users that is, you know, like a vertical segment, a regional segment, right? Like, like subtly Canva [00:35:00] finds out that there's more users in Indonesia than anywhere else.
Um, within 30 days, the campaigns will be geared towards Indonesia and they will be harvesting fantastic users. Like it won't take one, they won't take the time to hire the salespeople in the region. Set it up. You like that will take a year to two years? No, next month we're optimizing, uh, Indonesia. That's the mindset that we're going, the speed that we need to operate with.
Toni: But it's not only the speed, right? It's also the really trying to find ways and systems to, um, harness and operationalize the insights that your, you know, your customers are kind of giving you. Right? Kind of to a degree. Right. Kind of not only from where they are and uh, and you know, how, how big they are and what kind of company they are.
Also like, you know, who of them is actually most engaging, more interested, kind of, what are they talking about? How are we gonna get more of those, right. Kind of, that's kind of the story that I'm hearing that I think is really, you know, super interesting, right. Of like, uh, taking, you know, learning from this at scale.
I. And then finding [00:36:00] ways and those ways might be different across companies and motions and, and what have you. Finding ways to apply them on the, uh, what is it? The left side of the bow tie,
Jacco: because what you're about to say touched on is a, is a, a thing we're very insecure about. We're very insecure about the following.
My first gut reaction, I had to write some tagline and it started the wrong way, so the wrong tagline I created. Don't quote me on the wrong tagline, the wrong tagline I created. Let humans do the smart work. AI do the hard work. What I found is that actually AI is better at doing the smart work. Okay. I'm not saying that humans are better to do the hard work.
That's not what I'm saying either. I'm just saying is that today we see that AI does a better job at doing the smart work. Okay. What is the role of the human beings then? Because I had to change that quote and I, I changed it to the followings. Let human beings do where it mattered. Do the work where it matters most.
And let AI do it where it scales the best scaling [00:37:00] costs, volume, speed, and so on. Intelligence, but intelligence is not, you know, like we are not having great, uh, uh, you know, like it's, I think it's a common known thing that the super, the most intelligent human beings on earth are not necessarily the most interesting people to communicate, right?
So we know that intelligence doesn't reflect. You know, what matters most or what matters between us human beings the most? What matters the most? Human connection, creativity, accountability is actually what matters the most, right? Sooner or later, somebody needs to sign off. That tower is going up and this, this person is responsible to make sure that the tower doesn't collapse, but that matters the most.
What I find is like what matters the most today, human interconnection, creativity, accountability, cultural adjustment, and so on, that matters the most. Let humans focus on that.
The Future of AI in Business Operations
---
Toni: So are we gonna get the bow back to SDC or is that, should we just, you know, kind of throw this out of the episode?
Jacco: Let me say it differently.
Uh, I think the [00:38:00] SDRs are the one who kickstarted this conversation, and therefore it's a fantastic place to have that as part of this. Like it's, but look, if I tell you. That the growth of a company depends on, on, on a bunch of new people inside your organization that have the lowest level of education on the topic, and the lowest understanding of the market, and the lowest understanding of the customer, that that's what we should depend our growth on, and I believe it's the wrong thing and it's unfair to them.
That's completely unfair to them. Right. That is the world we lived in. Why? Because it's skilled so nicely. I could take low cost people that didn't cost me any money, and I could build a company on the back of that. Well, those days are over. Uh, I believe that all playbook is gone, and the new playbook says you gotta, you gotta do tougher stuff and the tougher stuff AI can do.
Toni: But but also what you're saying, right? Kind of. It's not that the old playbooks are over because I don't know, for some reason we decided it doesn't work anymore. It's because the prospects and buyers are rejecting it. Kind of, that's, that's actually the reason, right? Kind of. It's to, to your earlier [00:39:00] point.
And it's the same with me. If I get a text from a number that I don't know, it's like, oh yeah, it's probably, oh, where should I put on my password? Dear, dear, dear Text, right. I mean, it's like. It's obviously some kind of a scam immediately and or whatever email you get. It's like obviously some kind of an outbound thing, and because we now have this filter built in, kind of, that's also to your point, that's kind of the reason why some of that playbook just doesn't work so well anymore.
Right. Again, you know, you can probably kind of move away and it's like, well, you know, there are probably some sectors where it works. There's some areas where it works. There's some stages in an organization, but it might still work. Right? But. As a whole, what we are seeing, kind of that approach is just getting harder and harder to execute.
Let me say like this right's
Jacco: selling timeshare with an outbound email still is, is gonna be a problem selling timeshare while the person is at the, that, that the point of destination, looking at the room that, that would be their room. I can see that still works. You know, like, yeah, I can see that you are on vacation.
You like it, you have a new dream. You are like. In an inspirational moment. Yeah. I can see how [00:40:00] that works. But not via email and you know, like Yeah. And I'm using the, the, the B2C commercial of, uh, timeshare, uh, sale. Right. Yeah.
Raul: I'm also seeing what is really powerful, what you mentioned. Uh. Couple points before, just the, the sheer amount of potential coming with this hive mind, with this memory that, that AI can have.
Um, when it comes to obviously unstructured data, what's happened in the conversation, what's actually been talked about and what the topics are that should be talked about now? I think this is. Even if you are an avid denier of ai, like this is really hard to deny. Uh, and I think some people are still approaching, kind of wrapping their head around what possibilities that entails.
So in a world where you have that hive mind, like what will that bring us?
Jacco: I wanna give you an example. So Winning by Design has a method called spiced. S stands for situation. P stands for pain. I stands for impact. CE stands for critical event and D stands for the decision Process and and [00:41:00] Decision Process, decision criteria and DecisionMaker Spiced.
Okay. SPICE is publicly available. Uh, in fact, uh, Chad g. PT is very well trained on it. Um, I, I want people to do the following, right? If you're listening to this, I want you to take the transcript of this call, or, or, or the, of a customer call. You have, you have a, you have a transcript of a customer call something, right?
You upload that in chat GPT, and you ask your GPT, can you run the winning by design spiced analysis on this particular customer, um, uh, transcript. It'll give you, oh, the situation that the customers experience is this, the pain that they're experiencing is blah, the impact that they want out of that is blah, blah, blah.
Um, a critical event was not mentioned, but I believe it was blah, blah, blah, and the decision process, blah, blah, blah, blah. We follow this X, Y, z. We now have made, uh, a customer conversation machine readable. Okay, now I can use that spiced and run another 15 calls and also say, do you do that for [00:42:00] spice? Then can you do that for spice?
Can you gimme spice analysis on that call? And that call? And that call, I now have 15 spiced analysis on call. That means I now have 15 calls that an AI system look with through the lens of a framework and categorized. I can now say, summarize that for me, and I now get a coherent report. This is the situation and this is the pain.
I can hand that off to my marketing. The department says, Hey, can you target that group particular on that? Is our website geared towards that? Essentially what spiced is doing in this case, it is making human conversations machine readable. Okay. Now, when we originally conceived spiced, it was because the SDR needed to hand the call off to the ae, and the AE needed to hand the call off to to, to CSMs.
And so that was, it was important that we all spoke the some la same language, so that the, the, the phone, the telephone, play it, you know, like it would have the highest resolution of the signal. Now today, I need the human to AI [00:43:00] interface. I need the humans and the interface to connect with each other because, you know, like AI systems are constantly listening to a gun call or listening to a, a fathom call or listening to a grain call, or listening to any call, right?
They, they're listening to that. They arca archiving that, right? And so right now, post call, I need an, I need an immediate interface. Like, oh, that was the spice. And I can categorize, and gosh forbid that, not gosh forbid, but everybody will file it to serums. What happens? When AI steps in, like what we're seeing with One Mind and they're in a realtime call, I mean like they're literally sitting on our call right now.
What we're doing with One Mind right now as a technology is they're listening to our calls and I can literally say, Jack, can you go off mute? Raul and I are currently about this topic. What do you suggest? Now suddenly we have real time spiced analysis of the call situation, situation, pain, real time relevance.
And it may say, [00:44:00] Raul, hey, I see that you bought over the past three weeks products X, Y, Z from us, or at least your, your peers in the business did. I am now getting an AI system that in real time is listening to the CRM that can in real time to uh, uh, interact with that data. Look, when that occurs, role, you and I are having a different conversation, and that includes pricing.
Because if, if the, if I now talk about, so compliance, I would say, Jack, Jack, what is the, what is the rules of our so compliance, blah, blah, blah. And then you will ask, oh, do you guys adhere to blah, blah, blah? And the AI system will tell you what our SOC compliance on that specific, like how do am I supposed to know?
Raul: Mm-hmm.
Jacco: Okay. Now think about that in price. Think about that. I say that. You say, Jocko, what's the cost of your price? Well, I can tell you today that the number one re the number one reason why. Why think? Because salespeople are discounting too much, way too much, right? We're trying to save single digit percentages on the retention while double digit digit discounts are given upfront.
Right? And [00:45:00] so why am I still talk? Why you and I like, I can simply ask Jack, Jack, what's the price for like 15 seats of this? Jack, what's the price for that? And you and I are pinging our AI system on price and it doesn't discount. Well, it gives you, look, I have always am a big believer role that a discount given to a specific customer is a disrespect to all the people who've who were willing to pay full price, right.
Yes, there are cultures that think that this is an art. Fantastic. Celebrated. Go ahead. I just like that everybody gets the same price, right? Like, and there will be discount based on volume based on this, or there may be discount on based on current demand and, and, and, and, and, and, and, uh, offering. Right? If I'm a consulting firm, I, my trainers may not be deployed this month.
Okay? I'm willing to give you a price this month, this price, like this whole nature, suddenly starts to change. That's ai, that's the dynamics of AI that the world that we're entering. And my point is that if we go back and [00:46:00] we think that AI is gonna be SDR calls and stuff like that, like, like folks, we're not, we're just not getting it right.
We're just executing on old playbook at a lower cost. And we already knew that that playbook didn't work.
Wrapping up
---
Toni: So having an eye on the time here, I unfortunately to interrupt our little chat here. Um, and you know, we started this conversation now talking about, you know, a AI and STIs and all of that stuff. Our wonderful Ja it took us on a journey that took us really far away from that, which is, which is fantastic.
Um, so really to wrap it up, it's, it's not only kind of thinking about, Hey, how do I implement ai? It's also, well, you know, what does the new playbook look like? I. For that new playbook, how can I leverage AI for that? Right? And, uh, and as, as per usual, um, uh, Jocko and Winning by Design can obviously help you with those kind of topics.
Um, but otherwise, Jocko, thank you so much for basically being our MVP here. Um, and, uh, and thanks for spending, spending time with us. Look, I
Jacco: think you to, to, to, to, to, to close on this. I, I, [00:47:00] I think that we are in a moment of transformation. And this moment of transformation, you know, like started at, you know, like in 2021, we should have started it at 2019 and 20, but Covid, you know, put it to put a damper on it and accelerated us further in the wrong direction.
Then we started that in 2020, you know, or two at the same time AI came in. Look, we did not know in 2020 or two, th I didn't know about chat GPT until it came out, like, what is it, late 2022 or something like that, in that timeframe. So like, so we, those are two different streams. Keep in mind those two, we are now in the world of chaos when those two worlds are colliding.
And in one hand we wanna hold onto the human-based processes, and on the other hand, we're not used yet to the ai. What I can tell you is the determining factor of success is not how well AI will do. It won't be. That will go faster. The determining factor of company's future success is in your human capability, in your executive team to [00:48:00] understand what is going on and to make investments today so that you can go faster in the future.
It is the human beings who will slow growth down. That's the understanding that we're, that we're, that we're headed for. And that's like, you know, like we have a tendency to have about, I think a podcast once every, uh, once every year. So let's see next year, how, uh, how in, what is it in that point in that we'll be in 2026 to see how, how, how well that stuck.
Toni: Let's do that. Um, everyone thanks. Thanks for listening, RO thanks for kind of being part of this. Um, and then yeah, see you. See you next time. Cheers boys. Thank you for having me.
On the next episode
---
Toni: Before we wrap up here, you shouldn't miss out on my discussion with Ammas, the CEO of get swan.com. He's been very vocal on LinkedIn about reaching 10 million a IR per founder and its three founders only, no employees by using AI agents.
We are also gonna talk about the second wave of AI adoption. And [00:49:00] how that looked like. So if you don't wanna miss it, hit that subscribe button and see you next time.
Amos: The biggest misconception of people are looking from the outside is that thinking, okay, they're just hiring digital workers instead of growing the team.
It's not about how can we add an ai, SDR, how can we add an AI support rep? It's not about, uh, abstracting away the relationships with our customers so that AI could take over everything and manage it for us. This entire notion of building an autonomous business is designed around, around changing the operating system of your business, around unlocking that 100 x growth out of the same human stack.