Jacco van der Kooij

Why organisations work with Jacco van der Kooij

• He built the operating language that serious SaaS revenue teams already use. Bowtie, SPICED and Revenue Architecture are not proprietary curiosities; they are the common vocabulary at companies like DocuSign, Uber Eats, Adobe and MURAL.
• His work treats go-to-market as a designed system, not a set of sales tactics. Leadership teams leave with a structural view of acquisition, retention and expansion as one connected revenue engine.
• He has operating credibility from inside enterprise technology. Senior roles at Kontiki, Qumu and Technicolor sit underneath the frameworks, so the advice is grounded in execution, not theory.
• He is published where serious readers look. Harvard Business Review (with Frank V. Cespedes of Harvard Business School) and a shelf of best-selling books including Revenue Architecture and Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization.
• He advises the capital side, not just the operating side. Growth advisory to Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures gives him a cross-portfolio view of what compounds and what breaks.

Biography highlights

• Founder of Winning by Design, a go-to-market consulting and training firm working with hundreds of recurring-revenue companies worldwide.
• Creator of the Bowtie customer-journey model, the SPICED qualification framework and the Revenue Architecture operating model.
• Author of Revenue Architecture (2023) and co-author of Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization and The SaaS Sales Method series.
• Co-author with Frank V. Cespedes of the Harvard Business Review article “Hiring Star Salespeople Isn’t the Best Way to Grow” (February 2016).
• Clients and training partners include Uber Eats, DocuSign, Adobe, MURAL, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and OwnBackup.
• Growth advisor to Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures.
• Keynote speaker at Dreamforce, SaaStock Dublin, SaaS Growth London, MarketingProfs and RD Summit Brazil.

Biography

Recurring revenue rewrote the economics of B2B software, but most companies still run sales, customer success and marketing as separate departments with separate targets. Winning by Design, the firm Jacco van der Kooij founded in 2012, exists to correct that.

The core of his work is a set of frameworks that have become standard vocabulary inside serious SaaS revenue teams. The Bowtie extends the funnel into onboarding, adoption and expansion, so leadership can see acquisition and retention as one connected system. SPICED gives every customer-facing function a shared qualification model. Revenue Architecture, the 2023 textbook of over 250 diagrams and blueprints, ties the two into an operating design for recurring-revenue growth.

His authority is grounded in operating history before it is grounded in publishing. Senior sales and strategy roles at Kontiki, Qumu and Technicolor sit underneath the frameworks. Harvard Business Review published his co-authored work with Frank V. Cespedes of Harvard Business School on why hiring star salespeople is a weaker growth lever than organisational design, a piece that now reads as the seed of the larger thesis.

Today his focus is how compounding growth systems behave under AI. He advises executive teams and venture capital firms, including Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures, on redesigning go-to-market operating models where probabilistic modelling and AI-enabled workflows replace linear funnel thinking. The training side of the business has equipped revenue teams at Uber Eats, DocuSign, Adobe, MURAL and Hewlett Packard Enterprise with the same operating language.

Key speaking topics

• Revenue Architecture for recurring-revenue businesses
• The Bowtie customer-journey model
• SPICED qualification and customer conversations
• Go-to-market operating design for B2B SaaS
• AI-enabled go-to-market and probabilistic growth modelling
• Sales organisation design and scaling
• Executive growth governance

Ideal for

• CROs, CCOs, VPs of Sales and VPs of Customer Success rebuilding the revenue engine around recurring revenue
• B2B SaaS founders and executive teams moving from founder-led selling into scaled, systematised go-to-market
• Venture capital firms and boards overseeing growth-stage portfolio companies
• Corporate transformation leaders inside enterprise technology businesses shifting to subscription or consumption models

Audience outcomes

• A shared operating language across sales, marketing and customer success that replaces siloed vocabulary.
• A structural view of the full customer journey through the Bowtie, from acquisition into retention and expansion.
• A working grasp of SPICED as a qualification and conversation model any customer-facing team can deploy.
• A clearer read on where AI meaningfully changes go-to-market design and where it is overclaimed.
• Specific diagnostic questions leadership teams can use to locate the actual bottleneck in their growth system.