Jacco van der Kooij

If we want to grow fast, funnelism must end. In SaaS and AI. That was my opening at the Impact Summit in San Francisco this week.

My talk track:

- We are dependent on Email, SEO and Social, technology from the 90s, in a funnel approach that stems from the late 1800s.

- Meanwhile, autonomous cars are zooming around us, and rockets land backward.

- It's time to see the problems in GTM for what it is: Funnelism.

- Funnelism is the belief that growth is all about acquisition. It is the practice of optimizing for winning new deals at the expense of retention, expansion, and most of all, customer impact.

- It is a system that produces metrics that look like growth while it hollows out the business.

If that sentence stings, it's supposed to.

- Funnels are a linear GTM approach, and they worked for Perpetual Software; its leaders applied the same principles when they took on leadership roles in SaaS.

- We are still using a 25+ year old linear GTM approach and apply it to a growth engine that is powered by compound growth.

- AI applies first-principle thinking.

- When its users achieve impact, they come back, expand, and advocate. And when you deliver more impact, your customers spend more.

- That is growth that creates growth, and at a lower cost. Also known as growth loops.

- Growth loops require you to model the complete customer journey.

- 20 years ago, we evolved the funnel to the waterfall. It gave us MQL and SQL.

- AI introduces us to growth loops with new metrics: k-factor (viral), c-factor (Community), and a-factor (Advocacy).

It depicts customers/users as the engine.

- SaaS historically seen T2D3 as its top-of-class. It's as fast as human-led GTM can go, powered by a generation of SDRs, AEs, and CSMs.

- AI grows much faster. Cursor & Lovable are often quoted, but are out of spec. Cursor has a tight developer community. Lovable has a consumer-like TAM. But Harvey? Harvey is exactly what B2B SaaS is all about.

- Harvey doesn't sell seats. It sells impact. That impact generates advocacy that goes back into the product and the GTM motion in real time. The loop starts to compound using real-time data. It is based on systems, not people. Loops, not funnels.

- Think of this as a shift from Uber to Waymo. From a fleet of drivers to an autonomous system. Same job, different infrastructure. One scales linearly with more drivers. The other scales with the system itself.

In closing: We must treat growth as a system. A system based on compound growth requires a GTM motion built around compound growth (loops). It can be modeled mathematically with inputs, outputs, and constraints.

It enables scenario analysis with a probabilistic outcome (not just forecasting)

Thank all of you, the 180 best-in-class CxOs, who joined the experience called the Impact Summit, a big THANK YOU, on behalf of all of us at WbD.

We appreciate you.

Let's Grow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Beautiful coil-bound handouts for the workshopping

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

Four Red Bulls...Four hours of training!

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

A few things made this a HUGE success:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Grow

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

Gong's pricing changes have sent shockwaves through the industry this week. Inboxes and slack channels are buzzing about one thing: “What do we do about this quote?”

Yes, the cost of AI has suddenly become real for many companies. Very real.

The latest shift is a consumption-based Gong Credits layer for AI agent workflows. The seat, which was already disputed, is no longer the whole story.

On one hand, it is reasonable for Gong to ask.

AI changes the vendor cost structure. Compute, tokens, API calls, and agentic workflows are variable costs against what has historically looked like fixed enterprise pricing. At scale, success can become expensive. And quickly.

On the other hand, it is reasonable for customers to be frustrated.

Buyers are being asked to pay for premium seats, platform fees, services, and now variable AI consumption on top. In other words, the customer inherits the vendor’s compute risk that has nothing to do with their outcome.

And, make no mistake, many more vendors will follow.

This is the AI model's known Achilles' heel, and it's about to get real.

For years, AI adoption moved through three questions:

First: “Is your team using AI?”

Then: “Is your data safe?”

Now: “What does this cost if it works?”

That last question is the one most companies are not ready for. It was not needed; SaaS had a ~fixed cost to scale. This is why AI-readiness cannot be about tools alone. It has to become system architecture.

When evaluating your AI and GTM stack, you need at least 3 design criteria:

Criteria 1 — Growth: How does this tool help us hit our targets? Are teams adopting the workflows, or are we paying for playing?

Criteria 2 — Cost: What does this actually cost at scale? How does the vendor’s consumption model work? What happens when adoption spikes?

Criteria 3 — Architecture: Are we paying multiple providers for the same underlying intelligence?

Many pay for Google Workspace, Zoom, and Gong — all recording calls.

It feels like I am paying Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount to watch the same Top Gun movie.

Look, consumption-based pricing has real benefits. It is a useful tool, but we should learn as organizations to work with it.

So, please — with a cherry on top — stop treating AI procurement like a subscription renewal. Stop handing out AI tasks like candy at a kids party, and then fuel it with a mandate that everyone must “go AI,” without proper design.

Growth is already hard.
AI can accelerate it.
But now it's more expensive than ever.

Let’s Grow. Carefully. Please.