Five gatherings in five days with the founder of Winning by Design, including a dinner at MeetRox. Three ideas that stuck with us about metrics, the sales cycle, and what the customer actually said.
For a week, the MeetRox team spent every day with Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design.
Five rooms in five days: the Impact Summit pre-launch dinner, Cortex Summit, Impact Summit, our dinner at MeetRox, and a breakfast at XP that turned into a masterclass.
The best moment wasn't on any agenda. At our dinner, after talking about AI and revenue architecture, the obvious next step would have been a Q&A. Instead, he sat down at every table and talked with each group.
Three ideas stuck with us.
Your system is talking to you. Are you listening?
Beyond a certain size, the operation communicates through metrics. He showed a real chart from a company doing US$1.14 billion in revenue where the growth rate still looked sustainable, while the second derivative showed compounding had stopped eight quarters earlier. Nobody had noticed. The CEO left three months later.
The sales cycle is made of the gaps, not the meetings
Five meetings over 90 days means about 22 days of silence between each one. Cut one meeting and you cut 22 days. And most of the time, it's the rep who slows the cycle down, not the customer. We hold meetings because we didn't get enough out of the last one.
What the customer said isn't what the rep remembers
A customer lists five pain points. The rep holds on to the third and fourth, because those are the ones they know how to solve. Three weeks later, that's all that survives, and that's what makes it into the CRM. The recording is the most faithful record of what really matters to the customer. Everything after it is a lossy copy.
“The recording is the most faithful record of what really matters to the customer. Everything after it is a lossy copy.”
That last one is the reason MeetRox was built. Hearing him reach that conclusion by a completely different path was worth the whole week.
What you won't find in books
He also told a room how AI cannibalized part of his own business two years ago. In public, no sugarcoating. Then he pointed to Chris Cornehl, MeetRox's CEO, and told everyone to try copying Chris into their product, and that it wouldn't be easy. We still don't know if it was a compliment or a challenge.
He's one of the most technical people in revenue we've ever met, and one of the least interested in looking technical. He's funny. He held the mic until his arm hurt and kept going. He ended one session by telling a room of founders he loved them, and the next morning flew to Stockholm.
And he's humble in a way that changes the room's behavior. People stop showing off and start asking real questions.
Thank you
Thank you, Jacco, for a week of extraordinary generosity.
Thank you, Renata Centurión. None of this happens without her. She opened the doors and has been our partner in bringing Winning by Design closer to revenue teams in Brazil.
And thanks to everyone who shared the table with us.
See MeetRox in action