🐶 Jacco van der Kooij

Winning by Design

Winning By Design helps customers design, build, and scale their growth engine.  Established in Silicon Valley in 2012, we help clients big and small with a process-driven approach to sales.  A proven process implemented by the right systems and guided by a trained professional will help you grow faster.

Founder

SaaS Keynote speaker for conferences around the world

Keynote Speaker

Storm Ventures

Sales Architect to accelerate the development of sales teams across Storm Ventures portfolio companies such as AirPR, AtScale, CloudWords, Digital Shadows, Gather, GuideSpark, LitBit, LogicHub, Logikcull, RainforestQA, SourceClear, SwiftStack, TruStar, etcetera.

Sales Mentor/Architect

Reach Capital

As a Sales Mentor I help accelerate the growth of Reach Capital portfolio companies.  Reach is focused on Educational Technology companies (EdTech).  In this role I am encouraging a customer centric approach to sales that is focused on providing students, teachers, schools and districts with insights to help them understand what they are up against.  We can use technology to close the opportunity gap, empower our educators, provide insights to families, and inspire our children.

Companies under my care are: eSpark, FreshGrade, KickUp, NearPOD, Schoolzilla, WriteLab etcetera

Harmonic

A friend called me up and asked me to help out.  With a little bit of money in my pocket from the recent acquisition I thought why not!  I found myself arguably with one of the best teams I've ever worked with.  With best I mean, professional, capable, willing... and with the ability to perform under constantly changing circumstances.  I helped setup the sales team that in 6 months they won marquee deals in the Media&Entertainment space such as Amazon.

Sales Consultant

QUMU - A Rimage Company

Qumu focuses on providing video within the enterprise and make it as easy as e-mail.  Think of Youtube for the enterprise providing use-cases like All-Hands LIVE CEO meetings, employee training etc.  

During the day I was responsible for Customer Success, Professional Service, Worldwide Channel/Reseller and Technology Partnerships.  In this role I developed strategic relationships with AT&T, relaunched a global channel program and launched a mobility & social media integration platform program. At night I worked on the acquisition of Qumu and in October 2011 we were successfully acquired.

VP Corporate Strategy

KONTIKI

I loved working for Kontiki. We ran the company on passion in the morning, fear of success in the afternoon, and on RedBull at night.  Every white board space was used to scribble ideas on, we papered the walls so we could detail out the GTM campaigns and put a SaaS sales model together.

We helped customer such as ABNAMRO, Ally Financial, Avery, Equinix, Fortis, Gartner, JDSU, LQM, Nationwide, NCR, PNC Bank, Salesforce, Qwest, Starwood and signed BT as a global reseller

VP Worldwide Sales

Technicolor

Technicolor was a dream job that combined my passion for sales, my love for media & entertainment, and working with a great executive team full of friends.  We set out to change the world of online entertainment, enabling online movie & music stores long before it was hip and cool. 

 I was married to United traveling around the world to help customers such as Lovefilm/Amazon, Microsoft, Paramount, Play4Film (ITA), Sony Playstation, TESCO (UK), TIVO, Warner Bros., Warner Music, Hot Topic and many more.

VERISIGN

At one point in time VeriSign wanted to launch a service to help make digital content exchange a reality (think digital locker).  The initial focus was on distributing content from the studios through On-line Video portals / On-line Movie Rental services and User Generated web portals.   Its COO put me in an executive role to position VeriSign as a key provider of Digital Content Distribution, Mobile Messaging Platform and its traditional Network Security services with Disney and News Corporation.  After 6 months VERISIGN spun-out its M&E businesses (Kontiki).

Sales Executive

As a kid I was fortunate to be raised around farms.  This allowed me to built forts, rafts, and create bonfires with my friends.  It was a great childhood.  I wanted my kids to experience the same. So I built my own pirate ship.  No design or anything (influenced by Barbara Butler's wonderful designs). Over the years the project expanded with a zip-line, a tree house, a tea house, water cannons, and a couple of water balloon launchers.

Pirateship builder

Tandberg Television

Managing the Key Accounts such as: DISH/EchoStar, Technicolor, Disney, Safeway, IntelSat for TANDBERG Television selling electronic solutions at the intersection of internet and television to deliver and present video securely to the end-user over IP and TV networks. TANDBERG Television was acquired by ERICSSON end of April, 2007.

Sr. Director of Sales

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.

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.

I spent the last weeks reverse-engineering how AI-natives grow so fast. From $1 to $10M measured in months. Here’s what I learned..

Most use a:
- Subscription pricing model
- PLG-like GTM motion

And, obvious but worth calling out:
- They did not hire 10's of SDRs, AEs, and CSMs

But also surprisingly...
- Very few used AI-tools in their GTM motions 

So what do AI-natives do to catapult growth? 

It’s a simple two-step process:

Step 1: Obsess over “Immediate and Recurring Impact”

+ Instant setup & onboarding
+ One-click integration
+ Intuitive, self-guided UX
+ Rapid path to habit-forming daily usage

Step 2: Enable users to become your growth engine

They designed this in... 
+ Built-in viral loops (users invite users, word spreads organically)
+ Real-time data infrastructure & mindset (to figure out what works)
+ View retention & expansion as outcomes, not goals with campaigns

Important!: Most AI apps right now don’t require centralized approval and often have freemium starting points, e.g. users can "buy" it on the spot. 

Now compare this to the classic SaaS-native playbook which relies on an approach around two “reservoirs”:

1. Lead Reservoir

Fill it with leads—email captures via content, SEO, outbound, events etc—and “nurture” them. As you grow, marketing must find ever-more leads to hit the next growth target. It never stops, that is... until it breaks.

2. Customer Reservoir

This is all about getting renewals, better yet expansions from your champions. It takes time (years) for growth to compound, and most SaaS-natives don’t have that time.  For example most CROs are on a 18-month fuse. They want growth now.

Important observation, buyers and champions are rarely users. So you are talking to a very different persona (and not one driving adoption on the ground).

With that said, AI-natives leverage a very different reservoir: 

3. User Reservoir

Say per customer there's ~10 users.  That means 100 customers = ~1,000 users—several of whom get asked once or twice a year, “What do you use?” by their peers.  Users are by definition your ~ICP

So that’s not just a lead; that's more likely an immediate opportunity. 

Key insight: As growth accelerates you gain more users, more uses = more pipeline. In other words, the system start to, in part, fuel itself. 

We performed repeated scenario analysis on this, using their metrics, over and over again, and the math back this up. This works.

The key difference? 
- SaaS-Natives look at customers as "Logo's"
- AI-Natives look at customers as "Users."

So maybe the 2026 growth playbook should bring more users into the fold?

If you are intrigued and want to dive deeper, join one of our Growth workshops in the next weeks: 

- San Francisco (At Dropbox)
- Chicago (At G2)
- Washington (At Pavilion GTM Summit)
- New York (At Insight Partners), and 
- Ghent (At WinterCircus). 

You know where to go for the 🔗 for the dates and details👇.

Jacco van der Kooij

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

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