AI in Go-To-Market: Building a Revenue System for 2026 — Jacco van der Kooij #005

Jacco van der Kooij has spent over a decade telling SaaS companies how to build revenue systems. His read on AI is not that it makes teams faster. It's that AI revealed what was already broken. Companies never trained their people properly, and their marketing and sales systems were built not to talk to each other. The tools didn't cause the problem. They exposed it. The conversation runs from why the knowledge gap between buyer and seller has flipped, to why incumbents can't copy AI-native companies without rebuilding their data layer, to why the channels most GTM teams lean on for pipeline, SEO, cold email, and LinkedIn, are all losing their pull at once. Jacco argues for building systems over hiring people or buying more tools, makes the case that a real-time data system is the single most urgent thing a company can build, and pushes back on revenue per employee as a number that means one thing to a VC and something else to whoever has to run the business. **Chapters** 00:00 — Intro: what a revenue system is 00:31 — Why AI hits the whole customer journey, not one tool 01:01 — The knowledge gap flipped: buyers now outknow sellers 02:41 — From people-led to system-led 05:09 — Why incumbents can't just switch: data and mentality 06:14 — When coolness beats brand, and when brand wins back 07:23 — Trust isn't relationships, and three channels are collapsing 10:21 — The rise of analog: a magazine with a paper route 13:54 — AI didn't make you faster, it revealed you never trained your people 20:04 — The most urgent build: a real-time data system 23:57 — Revenue per employee: VC metric or operating one? 26:43 — What stays the same: customers, systems, data **Guest** Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaccovanderkooij/ Winning by Design: https://winningbydesign.com/ **About the show** Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AIinstead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027. More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ **About the host** Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/ X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris