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Jacco van der Kooij / Fernando Pizarro

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Jacco van der Kooij and Fernando Pizarro

Biographical Context

Jacco van der Kooij is the founder of Winning by Design, a revenue architecture consultancy and training firm that has worked with hundreds of SaaS companies globally, including Zoom, Stripe, and Zendesk. He spent his early career in enterprise sales in Europe before moving to Silicon Valley, where he developed the frameworks in this book by observing the structural differences between SaaS and traditional software sales. Fernando Pizarro is a revenue leader and trainer affiliated with Winning by Design. Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization is part of the Sales Blueprints series and is written for operators building or scaling B2B SaaS sales organizations. It is one of the most referenced practical guides for SaaS revenue architecture.

Key Ideas and Intellectual Contributions

Van der Kooij and Pizarro’s central argument is that SaaS fundamentally breaks the assumptions underlying traditional sales organizations—and most companies fail to update their organizational design to reflect this. The key insight: in SaaS, the sale is not the finish line. Revenue is recurring; value accrues over the customer lifetime; and therefore the entire sales organization must be designed around customer success, not deal closure.

The SaaS Inversion

Traditional sales: revenue at the time of sale = success. The incentive structure, organizational structure, and skill sets all optimize for closing deals.

SaaS sales: the initial sale is often unprofitable. The real profits come from renewal, expansion, and reduced churn over months and years. “No longer can salespeople be incentivized on the sale. They have to be incentivized based on the customer’s ongoing consumption and satisfaction of—and with—the product.”

This inversion has radical implications for organizational design, hiring, compensation, content, and metrics. Companies that miss this shift optimize for the wrong outcomes.

The Customer-Centric Sales Design Principle

“The question to ask is not ‘how are we going to sell it?’ but rather ‘how is the customer going to buy it?’ Once you have figured that out, then you can plan against it.”

The customer journey drives the sales organization design, not the other way around. This requires mapping every stage of the customer’s buying process—from problem recognition through evaluation, purchase, onboarding, adoption, and expansion—and then building teams, tools, content, and compensation to support each stage.

The Segmentation Imperative

Van der Kooij and Pizarro argue strenuously against building a single sales motion for all customer segments. The optimal structure depends on the intersection of deal size, volume, and cost to serve:

  • High-volume, low-value segments → Low-cost online/inside sales teams, self-service options
  • Mid-market segments → Inside sales, SDR-to-AE handoffs, product-led growth assists
  • Enterprise segments → Field sales, longer cycles, solution engineers, professional services

The companies with the highest SaaS valuations tend to succeed in the SMB space first. Enterprise-first companies often find themselves “circling the drain” because enterprise deals require integration-focused development that sacrifices product innovation.

The Two SaaS Models

Model 1 — Application Service: Low-value, month-to-month, easy to sell, network-effect-driven growth (up to 100x). Examples: Dropbox, Slack. Growth from peer-to-peer reference selling; upsell/cross-sell focus.

Model 2 — Platform Service: Higher value, annual contract, complex initial sale, difficult migration. Examples: Salesforce, HubSpot. Critical to business operations; growth capped to renewal plus price increases; churn prevention focus.

The distinction matters for organizational design: application services need volume-oriented sales motions; platform services need consultative sales with strong post-sale customer success.

The Economics of SaaS: The Number 78

A practical insight for growth planning: if you acquire one new customer per month and never lose one, by December you will have gathered 78 months of revenue (1+2+3…+12). This number allows SaaS leaders to back-calculate how much MRR to acquire per month to hit annual targets.

The ratio of Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to Customer Retention Cost (CRC) is a key efficiency metric. Since retaining is 6x cheaper than acquiring, the organizational investment split should reflect this reality.

Revenue as Flow, Not Snapshot

Traditional sales measures pipeline as a point-in-time snapshot. Van der Kooij argues SaaS sales must be measured as flows: the continuous movement of prospects through stages, the rate of conversion at each stage, and the velocity at which MRR accumulates. The minimum dashboard: Suspects, MQLs, SQLs, Commits, Live accounts, and MRR—tracked as rates, not totals.

The SDR-to-AE Workflow

Van der Kooij documents a specific outbound workflow for SDRs:

  1. Receive top-50 account target list from AE
  2. Research and find contact details; load into CRM
  3. Reach out via email, LinkedIn, and phone with insight-driven messaging
  4. Upon engagement, act immediately with a brief, relevant pitch
  5. Diagnose the client’s situation and qualify
  6. Schedule discovery/demo meeting with AE
  7. Send professional invitation (clients use it to brief internal stakeholders)
  8. Re-confirm one hour before the meeting
  9. Open the call for handoff to the AE

Content as the New Rainmaker

“The new rainmakers are sales professionals who are knowledgeable on their topic and share their valuable insights online to attract those in need. They personally generate quality leads by providing fantastic content.”

In SaaS, buyers research independently before engaging a salesperson. Every large SaaS deal begins online. Content must be produced for every stage of the customer journey—not just awareness—and educational content at the research stage is as important as branded content at the consideration stage.

Organizational Culture Details

Van der Kooij is unusually specific about the physical and cultural environment of high-performance SaaS sales teams: standing meetings of maximum 15 minutes, peer-to-peer teaching structures, shared meals (a “farmers table” where teams eat together daily), a visible “work floor” background on sales calls to signal activity, and clear career progression paths at 3-month intervals for entry-level sales personnel.

Book Summary: Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization

The book is organized as a design guide—blueprints—for the major architectural decisions in building a SaaS sales organization: segmentation, team structure, compensation, content strategy, technology stack, and metrics. It is designed for founders and revenue leaders making these decisions for the first time or restructuring an existing organization.

“Success in SaaS depends on having a carefully designed, customer-centric sales organization that balances skills, processes, and tools.”

The book’s most durable contribution is its insistence on designing the sales organization from the customer’s buying journey backward—a seemingly obvious principle that most sales organizations violate by designing from the seller’s process forward.

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