Ulf Valentin: Welcome to the Revenue Code. My name is Ulf Valentin, and there's a question I keep running into when I work with B2B industrial companies, and they ask themselves, why is our revenue not growing the way it used to, even though we have more people, better people, more tools and even more data than ever before? And the answer I have come to believe is most companies do not have a revenue system in place. They have a collection of revenue activities, and that's the fundamental difference. And my guest today has coined the term exactly for this revenue architecture. Jacco van der Kooij is the founder of Winning by Design, author of the book Revenue Architecture and one of the most influential thinkers in revenue design globally. And he's worked with over a thousand companies from DocuSign to UberEats. And today I want to explore a very concrete question. What does revenue architecture have to do with B2B industrial companies, machine builders, steel manufacturers, energy companies, and what do they need to do to actually grow? Jacco, welcome to the Revenue Code.

Jacco van der Kooij: Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure and to be here, Ulf.

Ulf Valentin: Jacco, let me start with a direct challenge. The revenue architecture was built for SaaS companies, selling recurring revenue, subscription models, digital go-to-market, a steel distributor in Germany who has been running relationship sales for, let's say, more than 100 years. They would say, this is not my world. Is he right or is he wrong?

Jacco van der Kooij: So, you know, I wouldn't say people are wrong or right. I think an opinion is fantastic to have. I think the following is the case. When I built the revenue architecture system, I built it as an engineer, as an electrical engineer, and I was an engineer known as a mean time between failure engineer. I calculated the failure rates between chip sets when it went into MPEG2 set-top box. That was my role. And I looked at sales and I understood exactly that it was the same problem. So, let me explain to you a little bit where it comes from. When we deal with a customer one-on-one, that is a unique experience. Every experience is unique. If I have a million customer relationships one-on-one, I actually start to adhere to scientific principles. It's purely by the size of the amount of samples. Building this revenue architecture for SaaS was actually not what I did. I built it for recurring revenue opportunities. Recurring revenue opportunities, SaaS is simply one of them. But as you will see with most of your customers, most of the people who are listening to this podcast, you don't sell to a customer once. You sell to them two, three, four, five, six times. And why is that important? Because you make more profit on the second, third, and fourth time. On the first time, you generally do not make a lot of profit because it costs you a lot of time and energy to earn that customer's trust and so on. And therefore, when profit comes in the second, third, and fourth, that becomes a recurring revenue opportunity. This doesn't only apply to SaaS sales, it applies to almost all sales. It is very rare that a company says they only need to sell to that customer.

Ulf Valentin: Absolutely, I would definitely underline that. And I think that makes the revenue architecture so interesting. Most of the principles are actually applicable, in my point of view. But before we go there, maybe you can just give a brief explanation for our listeners what revenue architecture basically is. Because for most of them, they think about it as kind of another framework, another concept. But what actually is it in a few words?

Jacco van der Kooij: Yeah, if you architect something, you don't architect everything from the ground up. So for example, if you build a house, you know how to build the foundation, you know how to build the frame that holds the house and so on and so forth. For example, if you build a bridge, a suspension bridge, then that bridge has really six elements. It has the pillars, it has the suspension cables, it has the anchors on both sides. Architecture does the same thing. It says like, what are the basic elements of any go-to-market motion? When we see that motion, we create that basic motion, create those six basic elements. Those elements are, number one, I need to know how I'm going to make revenue. We're going to call that the revenue model. Number two, I need to know how I'm going to measure the data. We're going to call that the data model. Number three, mathematics is different. So we're going to have a different mathematical model. Number four, need the operating model. For those of you who are operating factories, you have an operating model. Why does a 10 million, 100 million, $1 billion software company not have an operating model? Number five, I need a growth model. How do I establish growth? Number six, I need to have a go-to-market model. I need to make sure what I'm selling just to how the buyer is. Those are six models. Those six models, you can scale left and right, up and down, match what your specific business looks like. And although unique in every way, also the same in the six models.

Ulf Valentin: You talk about the revenue system as something that needs to be engineered like a machine, not like a team. So for a German industrial CEO whose top sales per person has carried out, all the customer relationship for years sounds a little bit abstract. Is there one metaphor or an image which makes it clear how this relates to the people actually acting?

Jacco van der Kooij: Yeah, most people create a buying system that is centered on how they wish to buy. That is wrong. And I'll give you a simple example. People hate being sold. Talk to anybody. Do you like to be sold? Nobody wants to be sold. But people love to buy. So simply put, you've got to create an engineering system that helps buyers to buy. Now, most of you do that naturally because when you listen to customers, you're going to naturally adapt to the way they want to buy. That's a human behavior. But that can be modeled. I can listen to a conversation. I can hear the customer wants to do this first and that second and that third. And that starts to become an operational procedure when you do it the right way. And what we learn is in that is often the earlier stages of the sales process provide way more importance. And the latter stages to closing, to getting the contract signed is actually for the customer perspective, the less importance. Where do we as sellers often put a lot of attention on the closing? Most sales processes that your organization's customers who are listening to this podcast today used to. Most often, their processes are nothing more than closing processes. They're not sales processes and they're certainly not customer centric. And that's what we're looking at. What happens if we create a quality process that follows how customers buy rather than how sellers wish to sell?

Ulf Valentin: I think you mentioned in your concept that there are two different kinds of complementary ways of selling. The one is the impact selling, what refers to most of the SaaS companies. So I have to create impact, the users to use more and to buy more. And we have the value selling. This is maybe referring to what most of the industrial companies are in because they have solutions for their customers. So maybe if we're looking at the solution selling or at the value selling part, when you think about implementing the revenue architecture for those companies, what is the most common mistake you see in...

Jacco van der Kooij: A minor note, you point and say this concept, this is not conceptual, right? This approach is being deployed by hundreds if not thousands of companies worldwide, including the largest and fastest growing company in the world. Point being is this is a well-known, well-established and well-trotted path that our customers walk on. And that path is based on you do not sell against pain that the customer expresses. You sell against the impact that that pain has for the customer. And let me explain to you the difference because it's a functional difference that changes the revenue model significantly. In other words, people who focus on the impact of a customer get about one and a half times more revenue than those who focus on the pain. When a customer says they have a pain, they often coat that or start with that. It's like I have this situation and this situation causes me this pain. And most sellers, when they hear that pain, they see that as a nail and they have the hammer and they immediately want to hit the hammer. Oh, you have that pain? I have this solution for you that will solve that pain. Problem is the pain itself is not what the ROI model runs against. The ROI model runs against what does that pain cause? That pain causes often financial pain or lacks an opportunity, right? Like it can either lower cost, improve revenue, something like that. That's the impact. Now what we want, we want to know what the impact is because we can sell whatever solution we're having, the product we're selling against that impact. Like if I'm saving you $5 million, then my machinery costs you $1 million. Okay, that's a positive ROI. Spend one, get five. But I need to know what that impact of that pain is. Most sellers stop the discovery process with a customer the moment they learn about what the pain is and they start selling the products and features. That is the foundational piece, second foundational piece. There's only two. One is customers by impact. Two is they buy it against a critical event, not a compelling event, a critical event. A critical event is so important that if you miss it, the negative impact. If you don't have that product in place, all hell breaks loose, right? Like things are missing, buildings are not being complete or like something big is happening. If you do not have that critical event against which you need the impact, then in generally sales becomes an iffy process and an unscientific process. Many customers cannot, when I ask them, what are the five different impacts you provide to a customer and what are the five critical events that you sell against? Most customers can barely get three or four out of the first question and will not be able to surrender effectively what are the critical events they sell against. And as a result, their sales process misses a functional element out of their operational model. They have no idea what are the critical events they commonly sell against.

Ulf Valentin: That reminds me on the spin selling concept, which goes into the same direction. And yeah, I think this is such a fundamental thing which needs to really be there as a foundation for selling. But when we now look to the revenue architecture idea and we go more to the system part, we have the industrial companies who are selling for years a solution. And now they are finding out because of market pressure, because of globalization, because of AI and digitalization, that they are not able to sell their product as they did 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years ago. And you talked about or one of the concepts or things you found out is like the S-curve model, which is applicable for many kind of companies. It takes a little while when you sell your product, you hit the market and then if you hit the market and you sell your product, it goes like a steep up. And then after a while, it could be a couple of years, reach a kind of plateau. That's like the S-model or S-curve model. I am somehow the impression that some of these companies are stuck in this plateau and they're struggling to find a way out. Maybe the architecture model could help them to find ways or ideas to overcome this plateau.

Jacco van der Kooij: The explanation in this is relatively simple, since most of your listeners actually work on this. I want you to think that the go-to-market motion is no different than a manufacturing line. It has inputs, it has outputs and it has throughput. That's the basic concept. Input, output, throughput. The more inputs I have leads, throughput to the system and a conversion lead to an output revenue. Input, throughput, leads to output. The throughput takes time. We call that the cycle, right? Sales cycle. So if you have a bigger product, you have a longer sales cycle. So your input turns into output taking a longer time. This model is exactly the same in sales. We can apply the same thing. Now, if I have a quality input, quality leads, then my throughput improves, right? Because I got quality materials in there for my output improves. Quality input, throughput improves, quality output. Same thing happens if I have the lack of input. If I have the lack of input, less quality, I start to put less and less into it. I often compare this here in America. You have a fantastic car in a Mercedes or a BMW and you put Octane 87 in it. Your engine is going to perform less, right? You may even ruin the engine. You put bad quality of inputs in, bad gasoline quality in a high performance engine that creates high throughput and you're going to get a bad quality of output. Same thing. If you think of your go-to-market motion, go-to-market being marketing sales and customer success, it adheres to manufacturing principles. It adheres to factory principles. We often refer to it as a revenue factory. And so if I have a problem because I don't generate enough output, right? I have to work on something. Your output follows an S-curve in most cases. Your output can follow a form of an S-curve that we know the trajectory. You grow, as you said, slow in the beginning, very fast at a certain stage. Then we flatten out a little bit and so on and so forth. I know where you are on an S-curve, what your market approximate should be allowing you. Based on that, I can trace your trajectory and say you're behind or ahead. And if you're behind, I can look at your process and determine where your throughput is the problem. Is your input a problem or is your throughput a problem? Now, if I look at it and see your input is a problem, a.k.a. I don't have enough leads, then I can look at your throughput. Are you doing enough with what you have? Most of the times, like I said a second ago, if you're not working with the right amount of customers, with the right kind of customer, the throughput is the problem. Almost every customer that we're dealing with, they have kind of enough input signals, leads. They're just treating them very badly, right? And as a result, like you don't get enough. Now, we all wish that we had more inputs. I get that, but the world has changed. And how has the world changed? We historically, over the past 15 years, lived in an economic revolution that essentially gave us an abundance of inbound. There was always enough, always people to buy. We think that this is the norm. This is not the norm. This was the exception. We are now returning to 15, 20 years ago and before, which essentially this heart to find leads, it's hard to sell. Our current sales organizations and go-to-market functions are not capable of thinking of that yet, because they have been raised and educated in a time of an abundance of inbound. So we simply are finding now, oh, was it this hard? Yes, it used to be this hard. And those of you who have little hair, as I do, or gray hair or wrinkles or any form of aging, you know how hard it was if you go 20, 25 years back. You can't reach people via email. There is no SEO. There is no social media. The only way to get it done is in the car, drive to the location, knock on the door and see if they want to meet with you. Place a phone call perhaps, right, in order to set up a meeting. Well, that's how it was and that's how we were again. So what we're seeing is the last 10 to 15 years were the exception. Again, all these things have a norm in place that can be perfectly explained why they are, how it is happening and how to counter it. But yeah, the problem is, most organizations are not treating GTM with the same level of professionalism and accuracy as they are building their products, whether that be hardware or software. I refuse to think of it that way. As an electrical engineer and as a well-trained engineer in the Dutch schooling system but deployed at Philips where it was nurtured and as only Philips can do that, as a manufacturer can do that, I look at like, we are not thinking about this the right way. We're just thinking that this is all shooting from the hip and we're hiring some sales person who has some magical skill. Folks, many intents and purposes, the way we're marketing in sales is like 500 years ago when we looked at medicine or 1,000 years ago when we looked at construction. We're building bridges every time from the start, not taking into account the thousands of bridges that have been built before us. And of course, all those bridges keep collapsing until we start learning from all those mistakes in order to learn from those mistakes. You got to build some form of recollective memory which we call models. We map the behavior of those models. You get revenue architecture. It's the same thing. And to see that through the lens of an engineer who has done this, to look at that, you go like, I have no idea why we have been able to do this all this long. And as a result, I throw my hands up in the air and go like, yeah, I'm sorry, I've been given a tool of engineering to solve this, so I'm going to solve this problem of the tools I've been given. It's an engineering problem to me.

Ulf Valentin: Yeah, it's very interesting. Because on one point you're saying sales happened maybe by accident because the market was there and people were eager to buy and we had the market, so I will absolutely agree because what I see is that many big sales organizations which are going from door to door find out that they actually have to do it and they somehow don't know how to do it anymore because they did not really need to do it because the customer was calling and I just, I even had not to ask something. I just had to place the order and this is a big problem on the other side.

Jacco van der Kooij: I'm fully with you. What we had is we had an abundance of inbound that created an inbound seller, not just an inbound seller. We then created inbound customer success and inbound account management as an expansion sales. We've become so used to the customer not coming to us with leads, with opportunities, with problems and with expansion opportunities that the entire model has become an inbound model, primarily driven by online behavior. You will come to me via our website. Tell me that you're interested. You will come to an event after I emailed you and then you will sign up on the website. You will come to me when you have an issue. I don't have to check. You will come to me when you want to expand. Yes, we do a little bit of that but considering how much opportunity that is and how much investment that is in those areas it is very, very marginal. Once that inbound stops you see that all these machines stop and grind to a halt. And again, I'm going like, what is your number one thing? Moving forward, all the drama about AI, this and AI, that. I get that. I want to give you a few simple principles. Look at what the constraint in your business is. Look at it. You're going to find now what you can do as a CEO. You write down this weekend, whenever you have a moment of opportunity, whether you're in the car, whether you're talking to your LLM like I am so often do, you identify six, seven, eight constraints. This is holding my business back right now. You're looking for pure constraints. And folks, this is theory of constraints from Goldratt all day long. We're looking at this theory of constraints. Pure manufacturing principles one on one. Identify the six or seven constraints. Ask your AI to create causality. What are the top two or three that cause all these constraints? AI is super good at that. Now apply AI and say like, how can I solve this in AI? You can do this on GTM. You can do this on your manufacturing line. You can do this anywhere. So now we deploy AI. That's one thing. Number two thing. I guarantee you your success on-term, mid-term and short-term comes from one thing and one thing only. Successful customers. That's it. You're going to grow if your customers are successful. So my focus is focus on your customers. Now, if I look at focus on your customers, I guarantee you most of your customers love to talk to human beings. They do not engage very well with AI systems. Not right now, not tomorrow, and not a week from now, not a year from now. They're elements that they want to talk to people. And that's for the next two years. Ten years from now, 100 years from now, who knows, can we just focus on what happens in the next two years and say, if we make it through successful to the next two years, then we'll see what's next. Over the next two years, we're going to see an AI backlash. Your customers want to talk to human beings. We know that this is going to happen. This is happening everywhere. So why don't we train our salespeople to go meet with customers, extract the impact, extract the critical event in a human conversation, and use AI as a supporting technology to find out and make sure that the right people are at the right spot, the right customer. That's it, right? We use AI not to replace the human interaction, to optimize the human interaction. Like, I'm sitting here most of the times and telling that to CEOs and they go, oh, this is brilliant. Like, folks, like, like, what's the brilliance in this is focus on what matters. The only thing that matters is your relationship with your customers. And that is based on you delivering them impact. Not you delivering them great products. Great products is the function of it. But what makes the products great is when they do what they were intended to do, which is deliver the impact that the customers were buying, right? Do that. You're going to be successful 10 years from now, 100 years from now. Jeff Bezos once said, in times of great change, you don't focus on the things that change. You focus on things that say the same. Customer success will be the same. Now, tomorrow, next week, next year, 10 years from now. Focus on that. But can we please, pretty please, with sugar on top, modernize or go to market processes, apply the best practices from manufacturing, actually. That is pure manufacturing principles. Think about input through, put an output. Think about how we create the throughput capability. You're going to be fine. Focus on those things that you're strong at. Train your salespeople in a modern way of selling using AI while focusing their efforts on human interaction. Boom. That's it. That's the simplicity of it. We can deploy that inside a SpaceX. We can deploy that in a Boston Dynamics. We can deploy that in all kinds of modern technologies, modern companies. And it has its effect, right? Like, it is pretty simple, but it takes away from, oh, we need to think about SaaS models or this and that. No, it's not the problem. The problem is you make more profit on your second and third sale than you did on your first. That's where you want. You need to focus on what the business model is.

Ulf Valentin: Yeah. And actually, that's what the business model of most of the industrial companies are because they have not so many new customers. They are profiting from their stable existing customer base. So they installed customer base. The machinery stands where they have a relationship for a couple of years, but they somehow mislearned how to attract new customers at the time. And the cost of sales proportionally grew as well. So you have a high cost selling system. I think what you're saying is absolutely right. Focusing on the customers. That's what we are doing actually in strategy projects, like trying to change the system of the customer acting as a product focused company, but being more user centered or customer centered. But one thing which always is a distraction is how to apply this in the organization. As you're telling me, it's completely clear and I think, like you said, most CEOs will say, look, absolutely, I understand. Let's do it. But they don't really know how to apply it in the organization. Who's responsible to identify what is to do. And the second thing I always see is that they are not able to look at the go to market as a kind of system. It's a model. It's like a marketing do me some sales materials. That's their go to market, right? So they don't know that this could be a kind of connected system. The question is, when you approach such companies, who do you put in charge in order to set up a kind of view or perspective?

Jacco van der Kooij: Yeah, let me make it as simple as possible. You cannot deliver a quality product if you don't implement the system. When you implement a quality product, when you build, you know, manufacturing, whether it is via a lathe or whether you are whatever you're creating. Entire manufacturing process is probably based on millimeter accurate work everywhere throughout. It is executed with discipline. You don't just replace a machine and go, you know what, we'll replace that machine, we'll put some people and see what happens. Like the entire work floor of a factory is a well planned executed thing. The machines are where they're supposed to be. The people are operating that. If not for anything, then it's for the security of the people that they don't get caught in dangerous situations. We can jump all day long about what that requires and what the CEO needs to do. You need to execute this with discipline. Since when do we think that a process without discipline delivers a certain output day in, day out? It won't. Now, if I say, how is the discipline executed? Yeah, I can tell you here's your training program to run a marathon six months from now. I'm good luck. I'll see you six months from now. That ain't going to work. Discipline and execution has taken place on factory floors over the past 200 years. In every element of it, if we think that a process that is so undisciplined is suddenly going to be disciplined by just me asking for it, it ain't going to happen. The CEO needs to get involved. The CEO needs to learn. Whoever is in charge needs to learn how that is. Now, the CEO may provide a person who's responsible for that. Look, every CEO during ISO 9000 and during the year 2000 bug, those two processes, every CEO knew about it. It's not that they were literally doing it. They knew about it. They implemented a group in it and said like, I want you to take care of this ISO 9000 compliancy and later on the year 2000 bug, right? There's a group that is responsible for this. Yeah, I'm sorry but yeah, that is needed today in a completely unregulated world. I want you to understand the following and this is me saying it like, my trade that of marketing and sales is not a professionalism at this. It's not at a professional level, right? It doesn't operate like a hospital does. It doesn't operate like doctors do. It is a completely unsanctioned role that anybody can go into with little to no education. That's the problem we're at. We have not established this as a proper trade with models, with accountability and so on and so forth. Revenue architecture is one of the very few first attempts to do that. We live in a world where everybody is a doctor. Everybody can become a doctor. There's no education for it. You can operate somebody on the side of a sidewalk, cut their leg off and call it like, good, like I solved the hangnail on his toe. Look at that. That's like, that's the and so if we think we're going to solve that by simply saying, oh, we're going to ask somebody to do it and hope they are doing it, no. So the CEO needs to establish, as they would do with ISO 9000, as the Y2K initiative to modernize sales, to establish a modern professional job, to get people certified, to understand how the model works, to understand where profit comes from so that we can act accordingly, where recurring revenue comes from. Once you do that, the entire organization, the executive team, operate and understand how sales works the same way they know oh, if my machine on manufacturing line 2 breaks, I'm going to have a problem. That same problem occurs in your sales organization, right? But you need to understand that. So I'm not saying that you need to jump in and start solving it. I just need you to understand how that business works, why that, why you can see issues occurring 6, 12 months from now. Once you do that, you can solve that to you today's problems and I'm telling you we think AI caused this problem. This is not the case. AI reveals is what the problem is and that is why we are so scared. We think AI has caused the problem. AI is only revealing the problem and it is offering a solution at the same time. This is fantastic. Now, again, I am not saying that we're going to replace sales people with AI, far from it. I think we're going to see a return more and more of in-person selling because that inbound has stopped. But I need my sellers to be top notch and I may need the 200 sales people. I may only need 100 to 120 sales people to do that as AI optimised that. But that allows me to optimise my best opportunities at the top 120 sellers in case of 200. That is what we're seeing. What we're seeing is less sales people employed. That is the case. We overuse human labour for far too long. There's no need that humans still keep lifting pallets full of weight while a forklift truck does it. It doesn't mean that we don't need humans. We need humans to drive the forklift truck. We just don't need them to lift weight every day, break their backs. I know that's a lot. I know, but I want you to understand your factory depends on your focus as a CEO on where the problem is occurring right now and that problem is marketing and sales. And if you don't solve that, then you can't expect your product to be the differentiator and people will continue to buy in a world where that supply is under threat of all kinds of forces, internal, external, political, military and so on and so forth. But you can focus on the marketing and sales efforts.

Ulf Valentin: When we talk about what is necessary to go into that kind of renewal or a new perspective in the marketing and sales era, what role plays digitalization because from what I perceive the revenue architecture model surely depends on the data model which only is accessible actually if you have the data. So maybe you can explain a little bit of what role digitalization plays into being able to control the go-to market.

Jacco van der Kooij: I'll give you an example of what goes wrong and how it goes right. If a seller sells a product to a solution to a buyer and the buyer says here are the five issues I'm having that I'm trying to solve. The seller automatically often hones on those the seller in that point of time in the communication feels are the determining issues. So out of the five they pick the two or three they go like oh I heard these five issues I'm going to focus on these two to three and in the process they will forget number four and five. Now imagine that this happens over three, four or five calls. What you're going to find is that human beings are really good at having the conversation. They're really good at extracting from the customer what these five issues are. They're really bad at remembering what was important to the customer. They only remember well what is important to them. With technology I can remember whether that is a transcribed call. I know that call recordings are illegal but transcription a note taken is super important. What was the customer saying? Once I learn over two to three calls what the customer's five biggest pain points are I won't only sell to the two or three that my seller told me. Based on technology I can now say what they really meant was X, Y, Z. That is where the key action lies. Understanding truly what the customer lies. Yes, you'll have a professional seller on your team. Your superstar knows how to do this. They don't need AI. I get that. Completely understand it. That's why they're a superstar. Male, female, they are the superstar for a reason. I'm trying to tell you how do you move the middle group the next 50% of the middle performers. Bottom performers are the bottom performers top performers are top performers. That middle group I need to move up. That's where the secret lies. In order to move that middle group up I need to use technology. I need to help from technology. How? I need to make sure that what I want them to do is instrument it in their CRM, in their tools that they're using. I want to make sure that there's a discipline and execution of what I'm asking to, making what I teach them stick, right? Adoption. AI is fantastic for that. And I want to make sure that they're coached at the moment they need it the most. You're going into this account. Here's your briefing. You came just from this account. Tell me what you learned so we can discuss it. That is where AI comes in. Everything that in the past created the weakness for adoption of new techniques can now today be resolved by AI. Not directly necessarily facing of the customers, behind the scene. That makes the seller the seller better. Look. There's a famous guy here in our industry called Marc Andreessen. He said that today 90% of all the code is written by AI. 90% of all the code that humans used to write are now written by AI. That makes the developer now a 10x developer. We have the same in marketing and sales. We can now do a large swath of the work behind the scenes by AI. What if we create a 2x or 3x seller? Not a 10x seller. But what if we create a 2x or 3x seller? And the 2x or 3x seller is based on using AI. It is deployed in a factory what we call a revenue factory and it follows processes and approaches and methodologies designed along to revenue architecture.

Ulf Valentin: Very interesting because I think I know this and there are some studies which say there is a lot of code generated by AI but if you're looking at and I think there was a study which looks at thousands of GitHub repositories that only 30% lead to shipped code actually. There is still a spread of quality in the end and I think that makes it very needful to have a kind of system where this AI is applied. So AI just for the sake of using AI doesn't make sense but it's kind of revenue system where you know what is actually happening and having a kind of feedback loop this makes it very important to go one further most of the industrial companies they're not even able to state where they have the actual problems within the funnel. I'm not talking about AI related sales training, I'm just talking about okay I have 10.000 offers which are still open and I don't know why they are open why they are not closed, right? So what's your take for that?

Jacco van der Kooij: Look, these are the problems that AI is designed to solve for, right? The rummage to thousands of opportunities and find the silver among them. It will do it well. Those are relatively simple and easy problems to solve. We just want to make sure that you look at it the right way. Process first, AI second. Do you have the right process? Do you know what good looks like? Do you know what the silver object looks like? If you know that then you can find it. If you don't know what you're looking for you ask AI go here's the 10.000 opportunities, find something for me that's going to lead to some form of results but not scalable. You're looking at your existing customers and you say like here's the past 10 customers create a profile of that. Okay then you compare that against your 10.000 samples like which are, you know, find a dozen more that are like these in these samples of 10.000. This is ideal for AI. Now today we do that manually right? We call it ICP we call it, you know, ideal customer profile and so on but you know like with AI we can do the behind the scenes in a fantastic way. These are the services we at Winning by Design offer up and down. We did this with Boston Dynamics and the robotics, the Spot Robotics the largest company in the world that I mentioned earlier. We do that with manufacturing we do it with software, we do it with services. It is the same thing understand who your real customer is compare that against the input signal and find the silver objects around the input signal so that when we deploy the sales team who at this point in time are well trained, very capable 100% focus on the right customers. Do that your efficiency go up, quality of your engine goes up, your throughput goes up you need less volume of input you need more quality of input which we use AI. We use AI to train your sales people better, right? All that and the customer gets a better human to human experience. How about that right? Like again, it's not it's not hard to do and we encourage CEO's to just take the same interest into this field and with the same level of discipline as they would look at how the manufacturing process work or what their supply line looks like or what the quality of the inputs is they will visit factories to secure that the quality of the input the main ingredients the raw material is in quality this requires the same thing. We can no longer just say that's complex I hand it over to Jennifer to John and they'll know what to do in most cases they don't most cases they are as amateur as I am today in other words we're all amateurs in marketing and sales.

Ulf Valentin: If you had to extract one part of the Revenue Code from your work the one insight that every B2B industrial company needs to understand right now what would it be?

Jacco van der Kooij: Recurring revenue is the result of recurring impact it's as simple as that if you don't deliver to your customer what they want you're not going to get any form of recurring revenue Second, your sales process should be based on how your customers are buying not on how you wish to sell customers love to buy they hate being sold create a fantastic buying process you'll be good. And then lastly process first, AI second people process first, AI second not the other way around.

Ulf Valentin: Jacco, thank you very much for being with me for everyone who wants to reach out to you I will post the winning by design website.

Jacco van der Kooij: If you have an opportunity give us a shot make us your first call we're here to help you we've done this before across sectors don't hesitate reach out to me via LinkedIn on my LinkedIn profile Jacco van der Kooij say that you listen to this podcast and that you love to learn more or that you want to attend we are doing a roadshow in upcoming months that roadshow will take us to multiple places among others Berlin Amsterdam, London, Stockholm and Ghent, Belgium so that all is in the second week of October I am San Francisco based but often travel I just came back from a trip from Europe so we are there frequently we are here and again manufacturing it sounds like we're SaaS but in most cases we help robotics firms we help all kinds of firms out there so do not hesitate do not feel like this doesn't apply to me what we do applies to everyone including the largest and fastest growing company on earth who loves to talk about input through input and outputs thank you very much.