Doug Camplejohn
(00:01)
Welcome everybody. I’m Doug Camplejohn, and on this episode of Revenue Renegades I am very excited to welcome Jacco van der Kooij. Jacco is the founder of Winning by Design and a Red Bull fueled maniac that I've known for about a decade. So welcome to the show Jacco.
Jacco
(00:27)
Thank you for having me. It is an absolute pleasure and a treat.
Doug Camplejohn
(00:32)
So I always love to hear founding stories. I know we don't want to make this a sales pitch, but I'd love to hear about what was the genesis and how Winning by Design came together.
Jacco
(00:44)
It was pretty much fueled by spite. I just was working with another VP of sales and that VP of sales was talking about how he was gonna twist the arm of this customer and extract money and I go like, can it be the case that this is what the future of sales is like? And I felt the need that, based on the lessons that I had learned over 20 years working with some of the world's best in sales, I felt that we needed to pass that on to the next generation in a more constructive way than just me talking occasionally to a person.
Doug Camplejohn
(01:20)
I love it. Now, obviously there's lots of sales consulting firms out there. What's kind of different about the Winning by Design approach? How do you go about thinking about this?
Jacco
(01:29)
Yeah, historically, I believe very much in the best interest of the customer. believe that when you have superior knowledge over what your customer has, it is your responsibility to make sure that you help your customer succeed. And whether that is services, whether that is a product, whether you are a doctor selling medicine, so to speak, or somebody at a car shop recommending better tires for your car so you can reach your destination safely. That ultimately is to make sure you help your customer succeed.
When SaaS came to be, that to me was the ultimate business model because the success of the customer fundamentally is codified inside the SaaS model. If you don't bring them success, they churn, right? And so that's where I started to focus first and foremost, coming out of historically hardware sales like Cisco routers like and software sales as in perpetual software licensing. So SaaS to me was the rescue.
Doug Camplejohn
(02:22)
Got it. So I know that, you know, 2021, just going back in time a little was a crazy year. And you've been kind of critical during that period of time about this kind of grow at all costs mentality. What do you think about where we are now? Some would say it's all better now. Some would say there's still some hangover. But you know, what are you seeing SaaS companies still getting wrong about their go to market strategies today?
Jacco
(02:47)
I know like I almost said jokingly, but almost everything you said was wrong. It didn't start in 2021 This started in 2012 because in those days I saw that Jive and One other company they went public and I go like this can't be I mean like this cannot be the case They were acquiring revenue at such a high cost right that I couldn't believe it I wrote a Prezi around it in 2012 which found it essentially Winning by Design as we know it today So that was one
Second, I tell you, in 2021, actually during the time frame, was right at the end of December that year.
DocuSign was the first one that toppled. It was the first domino that fell in the public. And ever since those dominoes have not stopped falling, including today. And the reason why I'm saying that is this fire right now is burning full on. Among companies that are considered unicorns, the fire of growth at all costs and the damages caused is still raging around. There are no air tankers dropping, you know, like fire retardant on that fire and with a nod to what's happened in LA. Not at all. That still is going on full on. What we do see is that there's a group of customers, a group of companies that essentially has found a way around it and is establishing a new mall. And they are drawing so much attention that we kind of forget about that fire burning elsewhere. But that fire is still burning, Doug.
Doug Camplejohn
(04:16)
Wow. Okay. So, you know, there's a lot of companies that are obviously stuck in that mentality of growth at all costs. There's a lot of them that are sitting in these very old outdated processes as well. You know, what are some of the most common mistakes other than, you know, burning piles of cash that you're seeing? And why is it so hard for companies to kind of see that and break free from it?
Jacco
(04:37)
First of all, the addiction to growth, from the get-go, the concept of a startup and a scale-up is to grow in order to reach valuation. That leads to wealth for its founding group often. That has not stopped. It's not like the business model changed at all. The drive continues to be. That fundamental valuation is based on growth. Cost is a factor. You need to be mature enough and need to be capable enough that you can keep growing.
But it is not like that investor says, slow your growth down, it will be fine. No, it's not. Growth continues to be the dominant force, the dominant driver behind it. In order to do that, the big mistake that people make is that they misunderstand how the engine works. And I'll give you a simple example. What you, the world you and I grew up in,
is a world of exponential growth. We don't expect to go from $2.2M to $2.4M, $2.8M. We go 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. We want that triple, triple, double, growth. And in order to do that, that is a form of exponential growth. There's an exponential curve to that. Now, historically, the way we tackle that is we use human beings. Well, let me tell you the following. If you want to dig a hole with a shovel twice as big in the same time,
You're going to need twice as many people, right? And if you want to dig a hole twice as big, you know, like in half the time, you're going to need four times as many people, right? Like you're going to need an exponential amount of people in order to hit an exponential growth. That's the problem of growth at all costs. We based it on human effort.
and we hired people exponentially, and you know this, you and I were there around, like we opened up floors and buildings and hired dozens of SDRs and AEs, like it was like a free for all, right? That's where we're coming from. And that is a misunderstanding. Like the growth of human beings is naturally linear while you're trying to create exponential growth. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how one part of the engine works that they don't get.
Doug Camplejohn
(06:45)
Yeah, I made the same mistake as a first-time CEO. I was like, well, clearly I need this number. This is what the quota is per rep. I just put it in the spreadsheet, and that's how we'll make sales. And I think, remarkably, there are still a large number of companies that are pursuing the same model.
Jacco
(07:00)
Absolutely. And that is because it's familiar, Human beings are often, you know, like we are habitual. So it's familiar. The models are there. The comp structures are there. Like you can think about it. And yeah, what we, what I believe is a lack of education, right? And that's obviously what we are trying to do these days with a course called revenue architecture. We're just trying to teach and educate and show to people like where does growth really come from? How do you generate it?
Doug Camplejohn
(07:24)
So there are multiple paths I want to go down here, but let's talk about revenue architecture for a minute, because I think one of the things that was a big light bulb moment for me when I did your seminar down in Santa Cruz was this notion of the bow tie model versus the kind traditional sales funnel. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jacco
(07:43)
Yeah, like historically human beings work off models whether we do it consciously or subconsciously whether you're Mozart or whether you're like a Picasso you use a system. That system for the time being, let's call it a model which is a combination of processes and systems working together. If your model is wrong your output will be wrong if you're not basing yourself on the right model. Now historically we base ourselves on the funnel. It's a model, right? It's a simple model but it's a very effective model. Leads come in at the top, deals come in at the bottom.
We think automatically that if I want twice as much revenue at the bottom, I need twice as many leads at the top. It's a very common thing, right? But that model is all focused on revenue growth, coming from acquisition. So if I want to grow faster and I look at the funnel, which is an incomplete perspective, hey, if I want to grow faster, more leads are needed. That delivered this incredible, insatiable hunger for leads, right? And this constant drive, close more deals, do this and that.
However, the companies that we know of, subscription-based and consumption-based models, are based on recurring revenue. That does not happen in the funnel. That happens after the funnel. That mindset has a simple statement that rings true for me. The funnel stops where recurring revenue begins. And that means we need a new model.
Now, I don't want to go reinvent the whole top of the funnel, right? I don't want to reinvent that. Like, look, we have plenty of sales automation systems. Everything is already really well tuned. Marketing campaigns are really well tuned on what we call the funnel. What if we just keep that as is? There's not necessarily something wrong with that. And then we continue and build on that. And that created the reverse funnel, aka a bow tie, if you twist it on its side. That bow tie covers the entire customer journey.
And it opens our eyes to all kinds of new avenues that we previously were blind to.
Doug Camplejohn
(09:36)
Is there any reason, just to push back on that, mean, bow tie is a sexy metaphor, I get it, you're a stylish guy, but like, is there any reason why it's not just two parallel funnels? You've got one for the new customer and one for kind of renewal and expansion.
Jacco
(09:51)
Yeah, it's perfectly fine to do that. I think as long as it captures the whole customer journey. Now, the question of the funnel is, what historically, when you see the open, the aperture of the funnel, what does the aperture represent? And so I figured out, look, the aperture represents, at the top, we call it total available market. That's the total, or total accessible market, if you want to be a stickler about it. But that is the aperture at the top.
That essentially is a reflection of how much impact your product can provide, would it be in an ideal situation? If you would create another funnel out of this, then what would the funnel represent? And I figured out in my ID that the boat I represent on the other side, as it goes back open, it goes to the value actually put into real practice. We call that impact. What is materialized out of those customers? How much impact were you able to do? Allowing us to incorporate expansion sales as well and cross-sell and whatnot. And so to me, the aperture of the funnel and the aperture of the bowtie reflects the total impact of the customer. First an opportunity and later on realized.
Doug Camplejohn
(11:04)
Okay, that makes sense. So let me go back to your digging a big hole and throwing bodies in it, you know, comment. That's kind of a perfect segue to AI and digital employees. You've always, what I've loved about watching you over the last decade plus is, you know, you were on the bleeding edge, but not just for technology's sake. You know, sometimes it's process, sometimes it's technology, but you seem to have really leaned into this AI stuff. You know, I watched the collaboration you did with 1Mind.
Tell me how you're thinking about AI and how it's going to impact sales.
Jacco
(11:37)
Yeah, it goes back actually to a very natural behavior that I have. I'm a typical engineer, so I go back to processes, systems and people. And I believe that those are the three modules we tinker around with. Process, systems and people. What we see, as we evolve over the years, we put emphasis on certain things. So for example, a new tool comes out, an outreach or a sales loft. the system is there, now we need to map the process to it and the people need to be trained on it, the skill set, right?
And so we are now at an age where we are seeing, where we are benefiting what happened in PLG. When PLG came around, it showed what I said earlier, that exponential growth actually where people cannot generate it, systems can. It showed that if we create a system in which customers can buy by themselves, click, and the systems behind the scene, data-driven, process-centric, can actually create growth that it does.
And for a small group of customers, it created that. For customers whose product was much in tune with a product-led growth. We learned from that. We now see that AI-led growth is actually doing the same for a new category that previously we used people for. Look, if you're buying a quarter million dollar software package, you're not gonna enter your credit card information PLG growth. I got that. And perhaps if you're buying a $20,000 product, you're not gonna go through the entire process with a human being, but a part of the process only. You still may want to have at the end, towards the end, like a talk to a human being. But a large part of the process can be done better. So I'll give you a simple idea. No human being should be involved in forecasting deals. If you have a reasonable size of deals going through your, there's just no need for it. AI can do a better job. No need should be for summarizing emails and experiences. You should review it perhaps, but the large amount of labor should not be. We can go down that list. No human person should be involved in updating a CRM system. That should all be done automatically. Once you give in to that concept and to that narrative, then slowly but surely you go like, folks, it is not the thought that shouldn't be - what AI will impact where we're going. The thought should be what will AI not impact where we're going and focus our human efforts on that.
Doug Camplejohn
(13:58)
So what are your thoughts about, obviously there's a lot of buzz in two areas right now, many areas in go-to-market, but obviously there's a lot of effort going on in customer support, right? And so you've got everything from Brett Taylor doing Sierra and folks like that on the high end, down to Intercom on, you know, kind of more everyday tools. But there's also been a ton of investment and hype around AI SDRs. What are your thoughts about those areas?
Jacco
(14:26)
Okay, so we have to understand it's all dependent on the business, right? It's one of the questions, well, it depends on what. What does it depend on? So first of all, I'll give you an idea on how AI works in three dimensions. It allows us to do more volume, it allows us to do it at lower cost, and it allows us to do greater quality. If I have it write more spam emails, essentially what it's doing, same process, growth at all cost process, higher volume at lower cost. Arguably, we know that that ain't gonna work. Well, not arguably, we know that that ain't gonna work.
For most companies. if you have a large inbound flow, and you generally have 24-7, you have a global brand name, an inbound SDR slash AI will help you there. Why? Because you have seasonality. There's a lot of things going on, a lot of stuff gets dropped on the floor, and you're going to find that you're gonna benefit from that. If you sell to the tune of a $50,000 service, and you have an inbound person answering that, and I purposely don't call that person an SDR, then an AI system ain't gonna work, right? You probably need to make sure that you have a skilled human being on the phone to pick up the CXO's call or the head of tech, some IT executive on the call, where you can give straight answers. And so it depends on where that is and where it applies. And generally I find that today we live in a world of volume and cost.
And over the next few years, we're going to see the shift to improve on quality rather than just cost savings and volume increase.
Doug Camplejohn
(15:59)
So you did a very interesting partnership with a company called 1Mind, and Amanda's going to be on the show shortly. And you invented the Americanized version of Jacco, Jack. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Jacco
(16:13)
Yeah, there were a lot of things going through my mind when we came up with that. First of all, we are a consulting service and we provide advisory services towards our customers. You can't advise somebody on what to do if you haven't tried it yourself. So we felt the need that you got to get in there, got to get ugly, got to get dirt on you and start working. So we worked with 1Mind, brought Jack on board and then we decided, okay. Then the question came is,
Is Jack going to be an avatar? Is Jack going to be like a humanoid? And if he's a humanoid, who does he represent? And so in the world and having a reasonable brand exposure in the world, I've evolved myself as the company name. We decided it had to be me. We decided that we can't make it an avatar. It needs to be a real human being with the jokes and the personality that reflects me. And today, you go to it, people who go to the WinningByDesign.com website, you'll see Jack at the bottom or if you type slash AI, you go straight to all the AI offerings. But what you see there is a person with a personality, right? You can talk to Jack about Red Bull or you can make crack jokes to him and say certain things, right? And so like, and he responds or you can, you know, like try to trigger him with bad language and he will respond very nicely, right? He stays calm.
Our idea was we need to learn it from the get-go, we need to get the metrics under control, we need to know what works and what doesn't work, so we can later on recommend to our customers what to do when they find themselves in a similar kind of position.
Doug Camplejohn
(17:42)
I encourage everybody to try it. It's really fun to interact with a virtual Jacco for sure. What do you think, so we talked a little bit about SDRs and then support and success reps. How do you think that AI is going to kind of affect the role of the CRO and the VP of sales?
Jacco
(18:02)
Yeah, I think that it's, yeah, for this particular case, I compare it to the 1960s, 70s, you're a car manufacturer. You need to know what the robot can do. Can it weld? Yes. Can it design a brand new car? No. Okay. So as a CRO, you need to know where in my organization, that's the point of all, where in my organization do I want to deploy AI? And what is it? Am I?
Do I want to do it to increase volume? Do I want to do it because it lowers the cost? Or do I want to do it to increase an experience, customer experience? What's your angle? So that's one. Number two, I wrote an article on this somewhere, process before technology. If you do not have a good process, putting AI in place is just not gonna make it any better. You're just gonna do more of the bad stuff. So you gotta make sure that you know. For example, if you today are based on writing lots of outbound emails and you have AI take that over, yeah, you're gonna get.
Same kind of bad results. But if you know the process and it works, then you can use AI to make an improvement on that process. For example, going back to even your old days at Fliptop, targeting the right customer, looking for the intent data is an excellent application of AI today.
Doug Camplejohn
(19:20)
It's a great point. Today the stack, as you know, has gotten incredibly complicated and expensive. So throwing yet another thing on the pile sometimes just feels like it's just going to make the Frankenstein monster have, you know, extra bolts. When you're thinking about the kind of technologies that are being used, how do you think rev ops and people in the go-to-market function should think about simplifying that stack versus adding to it versus integrating it?
Jacco
(19:56)
Now, you know, like this is again, no different. I often use the factory analogy because it helps us understand. It's tactile. We can see it, right? Like if I have a welding robot today and I want to modernize it, I'm not modernizing the robot from the experimental phase to the production phase. I mean, I'm modernizing a robot that is already in advanced stages of development, right?
So if you look at that too today, you have a lot of tools. Several of these tools should be in advanced stages of the development. CRM should be mature. Forms of marketing should be mature. This new technology shouldn't compare with that. This is just a new technology that you put in. Your first engagement is experimental. You deploy a pilot, you test it out.
Your next phase is that you integrate it with other elements such as CRM, if you have a HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever you have, you integrate it with your CRM systems. And slowly but surely, you know, like that technology matures. Now, as a company, as an organization, certain products need to be matured. You can't afford that they're an experimental phase. But it also says like that you in that point of your software stack, you are consolidating tools, you're consolidating CRMs, you're consolidating databases. That doesn't mean that there's no room for making room for new technology to actually come into the stack for which you need to make sure it's like, we do need to keep experimenting with these new tools.
Doug Camplejohn
(21:28)
I like that. So I also heard you say it's kind of not about the selling process, it's about the buying process. How do you think the buying process changes with all this new technology?
Jacco
(21:40)
Yeah, and you just set the scene and you know, like we have spoken about this in the past. It's like I come from the belief that people hate being sold something with a vigor like they hate being sold. They recognize it. They have an instant reaction against it, but they love to buy. We all love to buy and so if you make the process based on creating a great buying experience then you know, like you're likely to benefit the right customers, volume of customers and rapid growth out of it. Now most organizations, almost everyone, are focused on creating a better seller experience. At the end of the year in Q4 for most companies, nobody is worried about the buying experience. Everybody's working about comp plans and regions and quota and all that, right? For three months, everything is hyped up.
In late January, February, all the comp plans, mind you that the year already started in January, but all comp plans come, revised comp plans come out. And if we would put the same amount of energy in creating a fantastic buyer experience, we wouldn't have to worry too much about hitting quota and stuff like that.
Doug Camplejohn
(22:54)
Very interesting. So a lot of the work that you do in Winning by Design, if I've got this correct, is with companies that are already a little later stage. They're not seed stage, they're not trying to reach their first million, they're trying to scale their processes They already have something in place. What do you think that earlier stage companies should do or think about from the get go so they don't have to fix a broken machine later on?
Jacco
(23:23)
Okay, let me depict a picture to you because what is happening is far bigger than we can imagine, right? And obviously sitting in America down here or in Silicon Valley today, I'm in Santa Cruz, like on the park in my van. I want you to think about this. If you're in Latin America, you cannot sell to America. I mean, the exchange rate is six to one. So if you think that our salespeople are expensive while living in California, try to multiply that by five or six and think about that. That doesn't mean they built the worst products in Brazil. No, they have some fantastic products, right? Resultados Digitales, the HubSpot of Latin America, fantastic product. Take Blip, a fantastic product. They have fantastic products coming out of that region, but they can't sell it. But now, with AI, folks, it will be democratized. Every company around the world can now start considering launching an AI based system selling into America. Currently we have our SDR operate on average to call for four minutes and 11 seconds. Jack operated on average four minutes 11 and it has increased to about six minutes and something 20 seconds. That means that per call today, we were at four minutes 11 seconds paying 56 cents per call. So whatever it has gone up to six minutes, call it less than a buck. Every call is made on us - that lasts at average length, costs us one buck. That is a whole different idea of thinking about cost centers right now. I'm not saying Jack, therefore we'll do the complete close. No, no, right. But the cost efficiency democratized GTM. That means that the world no longer is just American companies selling to American companies. The German companies, the Belgium companies, the Dutch companies, the English companies are all chomping at the bit to come selling to this market where the prices are so much higher.
Their products are going to be all based on approximately the same AI algorithms coming approximately from the same AI providers, approximately using the same color schemes, We're all blue, yellow, purple, right? Running on the exact same machines, our mobile phones and our desktops doing exactly the same thing. you know, like, so I think the world is going to get in for a rude awakening - for an exciting awakening of what is about to happen.
Doug Camplejohn
(25:44)
Well, I also think, you know, it's the first time you see the video representation of somebody and just being able to select the language, you know, and suddenly they're speaking to you in Portuguese or German or French, whatever. It's fascinating how that shrinks the global map as well.
Jacco
(26:01)
Absolutely, like Jack is on the website, Sunni will speak Spanish, Sunnis will speak Portuguese, right? And that's what's the flip of it. The other thing I tell you, what we learned with AI, in the process, we launched a new service, our advisory service, and we needed Jack to be trained on the advisory service, okay? We upload the new docs in Jack, and that Monday morning, Jack is selling advisory services, and our head of operations, Sherry, says,
I don't think I would have been able to do that with our sales organization, right? That would have taken a long time. Like that is the beginning that starts to create the outline. The other thing, I think that you asked the question earlier, which is now a good time to answer. I believe that today most buyers are not very happy with the buying experience they have in B2B. I think they condone it because there's no one else, but I think that that buyer experience overall is a pretty sucky experience.
And I think that in the future, the same way that Uber didn't go after taxis from the get-go, it went after a better experience. The same that Airbnb didn't go straight after hotels in the same way that Netflix didn't go after the video store in the first days, right? The current experience is not going after making a better seller experience. It is going after creating a better buying experience. We know the outline of what that better buying experience looks like.
We know the two or three fundamental elements that it's based on. And again, that leads to an exciting future.
Doug Camplejohn
(27:32)
What does that mean for the future of sales jobs? Because sales has always been kind of this catch-all career plan. Like, you know, I was an athlete or a business major or something like that and I don't know what to do or I just came out of the military. You know, go be an SDR and go get in on the ground floor. How is that going to change?
Jacco
(27:48)
Yeah, you said it a bit seconds ago, catch-all. The great thing about sales was that it was a catch-all function, where relatively low quality level skills created the highest sense of income, right? AI is gonna rip that to pieces, unfortunately. I'm not worried about like, look, I'm not worried about the right people finding the right jobs in sales. That will continue to be. Sales is a fantastic job and will always be a fantastic job for those who take it seriously.
But you know I've stood in front of large halls with sometimes hundreds or even thousands of sellers, right? And I look into the eyes of the people and I go like, how many people want to be here today versus going mountain biking if they had the choice? Right? And I don't mean mountain biking on a Friday afternoon. We all want to do that. But when you wake up, what is your motivation? Do you really want to do their job? Unfortunately in sales, we have a disproportionate amount of people who do not want to be there, but primarily do it for the money, which is fine.
if you're going for a $80,000 job. But it's not fine if I pay you a quarter million dollars for that, right? I am like, can't, and you like as you I both know, salaries of SDRs over a period of years catapulted from $40,000 to $85,000 and salaries of average sellers of $20,000 platforms catapulted from $120,000 to today, right? $180,000 to $220,000 dependent on the region you're selling to. Like folks, that's not the raise of the minimum wage kind of level, right? That's doubling the salaries, right? And yeah, we now need higher quality people for that and AI is gonna let go of all those people who can't.
Doug Camplejohn
(29:21)
Do you think, it seems like what Marc has been doing at Salesforce is taking a lot of sales engineers and kind of taking more technically skilled people and moving them into sales roles, signaling that maybe the role of the salesperson has to be somebody who is much more savvy about the products than they've been in the past.
Jacco
(29:42)
Yes. What we said a second ago, and I think we pointed out, is like, hey, don't worry about what AI will change, worry about what AI won't change, right? This is an example of that. When you're buying a $250,000 solution or $80,000, it doesn't have to be that high. When you spend $35,000 on a solution, you want to make sure, does it work with the infrastructure I have right now? Will it integrate with HubSpot? Will it integrate with Salesforce? How does it integrate with Slack? You want to know that.
You can't have an SDR say, let me take the notes and let me get back to you, right? No, like so, when we now get to that call, we need experts, right? So all the way up to that point, high velocity 24-7, and then we get to the human experience. The human in the loop is now high. In other words, hey, if I fail this call, the results are instant, right? Like a human in the loop, we're not fixing potholes, we're not building roads. Human in the loop right now, we're building bridges.
And if I built a bridge wrong, it's going to collapse here, right? And that’s where the architect now comes into play. If I don't make a good recommendation right now, if I don't say this is the right SOC compliance level, both the customer and ourselves are going to be in a heap of trouble. Human in the loop, super high, right? AI, advisory role. You know, you can point out the consequences, but the decision needs to be made between two human beings.
Doug Camplejohn
(31:06)
But you think that's going to continue for a while or we start going from more copilot to autopilot mode?
Jacco
(31:11)
Look, the other day somebody came to me and said, hey, I want to spend some training money. Where do I spend it? I got to train it on an expertise level in your market and in your business. Like, I'm certain that we can spend some money on training salespeople. That skill is needed too. But the primary thing that your customers are asking for, they want to talk to experts on the phone.
Doug Camplejohn
(31:29)
So it's interesting, I was at a gathering of a bunch of founders at Obvious Ventures the other night and the topic of conversation was the one person billion dollar startup.
It seems like the trend that I'm seeing in a lot of startups is a much smaller headcount plan, both in the beginning and going forward, to achieve some very interesting growth numbers.
Jacco
(32:08)
Yeah, I'm a big believer that we're going to need a lot less people, right in multiple forms of the business. Today, if I have an expert on my team, right, let's say an ABM expert or pick an ABM expert, by the time the customer pays for the expertise that that person brings on the table on a call, the going rate is 3X.
Now, where does that, in other words, if I pay that person $10, the customer's got to pay $30. So where does that remaining $20 go? Like what happens, right? Where's the overhead? Where's the distribution? And today that is a lot of tools and a lot of legal and financial and the whole infrastructure. And that is all because it's based on human beings and human beings are extremely expensive. I'm asking you to dig a hole. Is the human body capable of digging a hole? Absolutely.
Was it designed to dig a hole? Absolutely not. Right? Same here. We are using human beings in many ways and forms in the ways they never were intended to. You know, like there's a saying that the human being is the lowest cost general purpose computer that can be created by unskilled labor, right? Like that statement is true. We're using that highly unskilled labor for a very low cost and AI comes in and says like, well, I can do it at a lower cost better. That means that we need to find what human beings are really good at, right? Why do we need human beings? Right? And I think that we, and like I said, I come back to the beginning, are like, we are too focused on what AI will change and we should focus our human perspective on what AI will not change.
Doug Camplejohn
(33:52)
People often think about AI these days because of ChatGPT as its LLMs, and AI is obviously many different models, many different structures, and I think many different roles. I think there's this notion of a coach, a companion. I think there's a notion of, in some cases, replacement. But I do think that it's going to be... It's really fascinating. Like you, I have some gray hair, and I've never been more excited in my entire career of a technology than what we're playing around with now.
Jacco
(34:31)
Like, know, like you go back and you see it's like, were times, you know, like we're on the cusp of a Renaissance of sorts, right? Like in many ways, the analogies to the Renaissance are really, really including that of a disease that hit us. But we are right there, and particularly in SaaS. Now another thing is we are at the tip of the spear. We have to understand that this podcast, talking about a market in the form of SaaS, is the absolute sharp end of the tip of the spear. We are the first to go. We are the first to benefit. And for us to see this, I couldn't be any more excited about it. I do think that we're going to see a lot of changes at executive management.
I think that what we are experiencing is that there's many executives who still have no clue of the speed that this is happening and what is happening. And if given a choice, and it's for many reasons, it's been a fatiguing past years, right? But if given a choice, they'd rather just go back to growth at all costs and show up and run another campaign and stuff like that. But those days, I believe, are over for most industries.
Doug Camplejohn
(35:38)
So, Jacco, like always, this is a calorie-rich conversation, right? I love the pace at which you and I have these chats. I want to wrap up with a few questions for you.
If you think about something that you just wish would go away or could be one task that could be replaced by AI, what would it be?
Jacco
(36:03)
Okay, first things first in our industry, it's spam. You know, like, can't touch the phone any longer, can't open an email, that's gotta go away. It is the detriment of our industry and the technology that we have allowed to give rise to that is unfair. So let's keep it on the business level. Spam needs to go away.
Doug Camplejohn
(36:21)
Got it. What's something you're passionate about that might surprise people?
Jacco
(36:26)
What I'm passionate about is surprising. I'm very passionate about picking up plastic. I'm a big believer that you got to give back every day and you don't change the world overnight by just doing a lot. Although I support that as well. But I pick up plastic, cigarette butts, not with the intent to save humankind, but with the intent to save the animal kingdom. I believe that if we all do that every day a little bit, then we can make a far bigger impact than we would ever know.
Doug Camplejohn
(36:54)
I love that. What's one thing you can't live without in your daily routine?
Jacco
(37:00)
Nowadays I have to say chat GPT is part of my daily routine. Obviously I could live without it, but I'm making a point like chat GPT and AI is playing a real important role. But as part of my routine, I have a certain way of working and that way of working I got accustomed to is in a van, in nature, either on the beach or under a tree. That is vital for both my creativity and keeping perspective on technical solutions. And then the second, for my health and being as I often run the trails that I'm parked next to.
Doug Camplejohn
(37:34)
I love it. Finally, how can listeners help you get in touch with you and kind of help your cause?
Jacco
(37:41)
Yeah, I think helping the cause is the big thing. I think that we should strive for a better world in where we are at. I think it should be more scientific driven. I don't like the fact that we just pursue something because history has proven that it works because, you know, like history has been wrong and it got us into a real bad situation right now. So I go like, okay, let's fix, let's put together a solid mindset, use scientific practices and frameworks in order to do that.
So that's the approach they can find us. WinningbyDesign.com and Revenue Architecture is a known book. But that's it. But in the end, just like, the last thing that's important for me. And you'll see me, I do this every time I speak in public, every keynote I'm given. Kindness, Doug, kindness. I like to feel like joy and kindness is, the world around us is being captured in this fear mode, right? Amplified by social media and all the stuff that I don't control about, right?
And so can we please be kind to each other and spread joy, sing a little bit, show a smile, be happy, and then I think that the world is gonna be a better place.
Doug Camplejohn
(38:47)
I love that. That's a perfect note to close on. Jacco, my friend, it is always a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.
Jacco
(38:54)
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure and a treat.
