S7E21 - How AI Will Rewrite SaaS GTM in 2026: Pricing, Efficiency & Sales Automation with Jacco van der Kooij

Joran Hofman: Welcome back to the Grow youw B2B SaaS podcast. Today I'm um, once again joined by Jako from the koi from Winning by Design. In this episode we dive into how AI native SaaS will reshape pricing freemium and go to market strategy in 2026. We discuss why usage based pricing isn't a silver bullet for AI products, how rising AI cost challenge premium models, and why subscription pricing remains essential but with smarter hybrid elements. Jaco also explains how AI will drive efficient growth, replace 70% of sales tasks, and why founders must rethink team structure, human expertise and the role of advocacy in generating pipeline. So if you're just starting out or scaling B2B SaaS like this episode and Thiago always gives like super clear insight and frameworks on how to actually go about it. So I would definitely listen to the episode. So let's just dive right in. Right. And welcome to the grow your B2B SaaS podcast. Well, welcome back. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you and what do you do? Jaakko.

Jaco van der Kooij: Hey, my name is Jaco Vanukoi M. I'm the founder of Winning by Design.

Joran Hofman: Quick intro. Well, let's dive in. We're going to talk about 2026. What do you think will separate the SaaS companies that successfully scale in 2026 versus ones that don't?

Jaco van der Kooij: One of the key differentiators, key characteristics of success are going to be the real time data based infrastructure that they have. And what do I mean of that? I mean the ability to analyze on a, all the way down to one user, what they use, uh, why are they successful and so on and so forth. Very plg like.

Joran Hofman: And do you mean, I guess, who shows the best intent to buy, to upgrade?

Jaco van der Kooij: We're looking for usage patterns. What is the output that they want, what is the outcome that they want to achieve and are they achieving that? And with that, what we notice that AI natives do really well is that they use that in order to generate new pipeline, those happy users. And where does that come from? Well, it cannot be a surprise that uh, all of us are overwhelmed with email and text messages and LinkedIn email messages and whatnot. So if you want to buy something, we really are not looking for giving somebody our phone number or email address. We are actually talking to our peers in the industry and in order to turn that into a business, uh, that's what the AI natives have natively done very well.

Joran Hofman: Yeah, yeah, because the buying journey is changing, right? I guess like going from checking uh, out a company to actually buying. Like what do you think? Like you mentioned, AI native companies are doing it differently and doing it well. What do they do differently and how do you see the journey changing in 2026?

Jaco van der Kooij: Yeah, what they do differently is that they are more responsive. One of the key challenges uh that SaaS companies have is that when they win um a deal they treat that as a customer logo. They don't treat that as a group of users. They hang the logo on the wall, they put it on their slide, they report it in the board meeting and they report back we have won this amount of customers. What's the average contract value? If you compare that to an AI native they think about usage patterns. What's the average revenue per user? Uh you know what is the logging patterns? Are they logging in every day? What are the habits that they have? That is a very different approach and that approach is way more successful than the approach. The way that I often compare SaaS natives, most of your buyers and champions and deciders are actually not the users of the product. Compare that to AI natives that most of the users actually are the deciders and the champions of the product. And that is a reason why we see so such an accelerated uh, level of uh, growth uh from AI natives.

Joran Hofman: Yeah and in the end like they help users to get to the outcome to the value a lot quicker. Often like there's AI native right where you minimize all the work you have to do within, within a tool. How do you then see pricing change? Like will it go more towards value based outcome based instead of I guess like team user based.

Jaco van der Kooij: Yeah, the pricing is still not set. I think that when you're a younger company earlier on in your development cycle, you know like usage pricing uh, is a fantastic way to disrespect uh, is a fantastic way to disrupt the market. I don't necessarily think that that is where bigger companies want to go. Um, they need that level of commitment, you know 12 month commitment. The level of churn that you're exposed to where to usage based contract is just too risky for a large scale company. Um and so yeah it doesn't mean that there's not some room for it occasionally or that there's a partial, uh, that there should be a partial a product that has an element to it. The bigger challenge that we see AI natives have in comparison is actually the result of that AI natives have what they call inference costs and the inference costs expose they are the Achilles heel. Like if you're an AI native and you have a giving away a Freemium product that is very risky because if you're, if it takes off, you can't afford it right now. If you have lots of money or funding, you can at least build that wave and then you have to turn monetization on later on. But as we all know, turning a freemium customer into a paid customer is the hardest conversion rate in the business.

Joran Hofman: Yeah, so that was going to be one of my questions, like will freemium still exist? I guess in 2026 with all the AI native tools coming out and the cost rising.

Jaco van der Kooij: It is a fair question and I don't think we have an answer for that yet.

Joran Hofman: No, like we heard before, uh, today already, like you might want to then limit the amount of things they can do within, within the app so they can't increase all the cost. Is that something like you would recommend so at least you can bring them in, give them some kind of value and then from there they can grow.

Jaco van der Kooij: What you want to see is the following. Okay, and look, the pricing. There's nothing new in usage based pricing or consumption, but we shouldn't treat it as something new, folks. We've been paying a quarter for our telephone for the longest time. Right. And after cell phones and minute plans and whatnot. Right. Which was popular for a long time, but as soon as the market got established, we're all back on subscription based pricing. Ah, you know, so, so let's not think that this is new and you know, like, no, this is not. That doesn't mean that there's not an application for it. But it's consumption based pricing is a highly specialized tool which only applies to a very, very few companies and shouldn't be used randomly. Subscription based pricing is still the better way to go, whether it serves an AI product, a SaaS product, or nowadays they are combined. So an AI SaaS product.

Joran Hofman: Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of like for example, the Intercom model where they have a subscription fee and they still charge for the resolutions done, uh, via their support, but exactly.

Jaco van der Kooij: Right. Well, what you'll. Where you see, for example, um, the other day, I'm driving through the, uh, car wash. I have a membership on a car wash. Right? And then whatever, let's say I pay $30 a month and you can get your car washed as often as you want. Like really practical example. Look, if you're a debt provider, do you really want to go back to, you know, paper per. You don't. Right, like, and so we need to be very thoughtful about what we want to do with the subscription based Pricing and where we're going and we to apply it accordingly. Still, there are exciting developments in consumption and usage based and outcome based pricing. There are exciting things of it, but it's part of the pricing strategy. It's not the entire strategy in itself.

Joran Hofman: Yeah, yeah. And when we look in 2026, like a lot of companies also talk about efficient efficiency, efficient growth, like how do you see the balance, I guess, like focusing on growth and efficiency in 2026.

Jaco van der Kooij: Yeah. Obviously we've been, uh, from early on a big proponent on efficient growth and we even have reported many times on what we call G efficiency, the amount of dollars required to generate $1 of growth. And just to give you an idea, um, SaaS, product consumption based pricing model, subscription based, it all comes down to this. The total amount of cost that you spend on acquisition, you need to have approximately five times that money back over the lifetime of a customer. Okay. So if you spend $2 to acquire a customer and the customer stays for three years, you need to make sure that you approximately, you know, do that times five, $2 times five, $10. You get that back. Well, it's consumption subscri. That in generally means that you need to retain your customer for quite a while. Okay. And in order to do that, um, you got to deliver outcome. Again, nothing new down here.

Joran Hofman: Okay.

Jaco van der Kooij: Like, um, if you start thinking about it all the time, what is an outdated model right now is that we go out, raise funds and we create a company that has a high valuation that then monetizes through some funding round or which is used to signal the alpha nature of the CEO of that company. Like that's gone.

Joran Hofman: Right.

Jaco van der Kooij: All the other things still apply. You got to make your customer successful.

Joran Hofman: It's exactly that. You need to build a business where people can actually get the, uh, outcome they want, get the value they want, and then from there you can grow however you want.

Jaco van der Kooij: Exactly right. What AI does really well helps us is what we should apply, what we should deploy AI.

Joran Hofman: Ah.

Jaco van der Kooij: And what it does really well is gather knowledge on what is the customer really like from our product, what do they want more of and where do I find more customers like it? It's as simple as that.

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Jaco van der Kooij: Both these things of course will happen. Both. Look, AI will replace people, is replacing people, has replaced people. This thought that it won't happen and ah, like no, no, no, folks, this is really going. This is undeniably impacting the workforce on a large scale. Undeniably. What I however like to think is that we should have made this adjustment a long time ago and we have for far too long have deployed human capacity in things that they were never meant to do. Like look, we built here in the Netherlands, we built the canal from Imaden to Amsterdam, right? That was done by hand. Most the documentary that was done by hand. Okay, like do we think that when we dig a new canal the same size, we're going to use human labor for that? Of course not. We're going to use machines. Like so yes, this is changing the industry people. But it's fine. We're going to get digging equipment. Look, also this is not the first time we run into this. We keep forgetting we have run into this, um, as a head of Technicolor digital sales with special effects, we ran into this special effect replaced actors. And I saw the other day I saw one of the famous movies, I uh, forgot what it was again. And a horse is jumping off a train, right? And Lawrence of Arabia, when in Lawrence of Arabia a horse jumps off a plane of a train, I'm telling you, there was a human being that sat on the horse that made them jump off. This is real, right? Yeah.

Joran Hofman: Today we don't.

Jaco van der Kooij: Wouldn't do that any longer. Right. Today would be special effects. So we lost a lot of actors in that role or sub. Right. And now we have a play. In those days we played it with special effects and a whole new industry, special effects industries. And then that's all sub industries. Okay. And they all went to work there. It's going to happen again.

Joran Hofman: Yeah. So there's a lot of changes coming and I guess with change also a lot of challenges will come. So when we look at I guess like having the new go to market motion With a lot of AI involved and maybe replacing like what do you think are going to be the challenges for SaaS companies?

Jaco van der Kooij: Okay, so I uh, go back to an earlier statement I made about a year ago and that said is that uh, in 2025 70% of the tasks would be questionable replaced by AI. Now why did I sometimes it got translated wrong that I said like 70% of the sellers would be replaced by AD. No, that will happen, but it will take more time. But 70% of the activities of a field salesperson, things such as entering your CRM data, uh, ah, expense reports, scheduling, follow through summaries like go down that list should never be performed by a human being in the first place. Right. Like taking a picture of your receipt, you know, like writing a code on it and stuff like that. Like that should all happen automatically. We have a tendency to focus on the 70% that gets replaced by AI and our nature to feel threatened by that. Okay, we should look at the 30% that we still need and what are the 30% human beings still want to meet with each other. Uh, when you meet with an expert, you still want to have expert advice. When you go to a restaurant, of course you can look up the 17 different kind of wines. Uh, and you can ask your AI system what is the best wine? You can get that. Okay, but when the waiter comes and says, hey, I see you know, you're eating a fish and you go like which one of, of um, the wines do you suggest to go with the fish? You're still going to listen to, you're going to listen to your AI system. Yes, but the waiter still gives the expert advice. As simple as that example is, we're going to see the same thing in business.

Joran Hofman: And it's interesting because we are an affiliate program and we for example turn users into advocates. So still I guess like people will buy on recommendations of others even though they have all the information available.

Jaco van der Kooij: That is exactly right. And so the role then is what is the human to human interaction needed for?

Joran Hofman: Right.

Jaco van der Kooij: And most of the time that interaction, we think it has to do something with trust it isn't. So let me give you an example why it isn't trust and why that is a misunderstanding. Trust. If trust is based on the accuracy of an answer, then that trust comes better from an AI system. If trust is coming from a comprehensive answer, then an AI system is going to win going down that list. So what is trust really trust comes down to? If this doesn't work out the way I hope it would, will you back me up and will you come and either give me my money back or help me make it work or something like that. That's what trust, that's what we mean with trust. And that is for that we want the human to human connection. We want to make sure like hey, will you bail me out if this doesn't, if this goes sideways on me? Yeah.

Joran Hofman: If you could rebuild a go to market motion for a company from scratch in 2026, what would you do?

Jaco van der Kooij: Fully automated with the experts, I would codify five or six key moments in the journey where I want the customer have a fantastic experience. One or two of them will be AI related, fantastic summary, instant response and so on and so forth. And some of them are codified around fantastic human behavior such as make in person human experiences part of the customer journey where today maybe inviting a customer to an event, it doesn't happen that uh automatically it should be codified in the journey. Uh what is of interest is that we see that today customers have very little problems attending a conference and meeting with their suppliers at their conference. That is not an issue. That's almost presumed normal and that allows uh, that gives us something uh, big to build on for the future.

Joran Hofman: Nice. We're going to start wrapping things up. Final three questions. What do you think is going to be one growth loop SaaS companies would definitely have to use within 2026 the

Jaco van der Kooij: user team, the understanding of the way how your customers are using their product and the use of those usage patterns to uh, secure a new pipeline.

Joran Hofman: And how would you do that? As in to secure a new pipeline? Like what do you mean with that?

Jaco van der Kooij: Word of mouth and advocacy are closely related down here. So we want to make sure that uh this is nothing new. It sounds like oh my God, this is new program. No folks, this is exactly how Marketo became successful in the years and, and you know Eloqua and whatnot. But we have lost it. So if I understand, if I explain to you what we've lost and therefore when I suggest what we do to recapture it seems to be a more natural thing. So what we've Lost is in 2012 and 13 we had naturally usage pattern based behavior. We naturally when we went to Eloqua, we went to Eloqua conferences and you know like uh Marketo conferences. And then we learned from other users what they did and so on post that we got the outreach sales lofts sequencing uh based which turned created the shortcut for several years on um to create pipeline. So we took that shortcut. If we had continued on the journey we would have been already in a sustainable and in a durable approach to gtm. But we took that sidecut and that sidecut was SEO is another part of that. Right. So we took all the, hey, just invest a little bit in SEO. Just deploy more SDRs powered by outreach, sales loft and whatnot tools and they will help you scale. We overdid that down and so we now need to correct that. And you know, that is where you'll see users need to talk to users. It can be at a user conference, can be an online conference. What Clay did the other day, you know, like in which people on LinkedIn are sharing their best practices of Clay. That is what I'm talking about.

Joran Hofman: Yeah, nice. Turning your users into advocates and creating pipeline.

Jaco van der Kooij: Yeah. And you know, like I'll uh, give you an example of an SDR. Instead of deploying SDRs on a nurtured database, why not deploy SDRs on users and help them become more successful and enable your customers to say great positive things about you.

Joran Hofman: Nice. Final two questions you answered, uh, these before already. What kind of advice would you give a SaaS founder who's just starting out and growing to 10k monthly recurring revenue?

Jaco van der Kooij: Built the data system in real. Build a real time data system. Make sure that you have that right because it's really costly and problematic to fix that later on.

Joran Hofman: Any recommendations? I guess because it sounds big, right? Like where do they start? Like what should they do As a

Jaco van der Kooij: minimum, get a real good infrastructure provider like something like Snowflake that provides from the get go a real time data lake. Nice.

Joran Hofman: Let's assume we passed 10k MRR and we're growing a big step towards 10 million ARR. What kind of advice would you give SaaS founders here?

Jaco van der Kooij: Understand that the way your team operates amongst each other is a reflection of the closed loops. If the people on the team are not communicating with each other, if they're, there's discrepancy. If marketing doesn't talk to sales, if customer success is not part of the customer journey, and so on and so forth. An integral part, Right? Not just show up on a meeting, but the way how your team operates is a reflection of how your system operates.

Joran Hofman: And is that then aligned to the goals you're going to set per team? Like how would you make sure that they will work together?

Jaco van der Kooij: They need to make sure that they understand the system they operate. Most of the time there's not a common understanding of how the system operates. We think they know, but they're not. Um, it is, let me Explain something like this when you come out of school. But you never had professional running training, right? You would expect that every human being would run the same because it's a natural gift that we've been given. It's not. As a former runner, I can tell you running needs to be trained. You need to be learning on track how to run. You need to learn form. We expect that everybody has received that training. Very few people have. And so who then says that they can interoperate with each other? They do not have a common understanding how recurring revenue works. Understanding recurring revenue is based on scientific principles. I can round up a thousand executives and I'll bet you that the lion's share and uh, I don't even want to embarrass the world that we live in, but the super large amount has a misperception of where growth comes from and how it works.

Joran Hofman: Buy your book. They can read a lot more about it. Thank you. If we want to get in contact with you, Jakob, what would be the

Jaco van der Kooij: best way in order to help people get educated? We launched what we call the Growth Institute and that's a 2002 and a half thousand dollars annual subscription. Sorry for the sales pitch, but it's because it is such a valid tool right now. It allows everybody that to, to get classes on the topic, to attend events on the topic, to be part of a community on the topic. And uh, what we just added this year as well as quarterly case studies where you get a uh, real hands on case study. Most executives today have only like one shot at learning how to do things at the current company. They need, they need more reps on that. And so we are adding four reps a year, four repetitions a year of uh, looking into other people's case studies and learning from that.

Joran Hofman: Where can they find it?

Jaco van der Kooij: Winningbydesign.com you know, you'll click on Growth, uh, Institute and it'll have all the answers and all the cool shots that you need.

Joran Hofman: Nice. Thanks for coming on, Jacob.

Jaco van der Kooij: You're most welcome. Thank you for having me. To the listeners out there, never forget it is a fantastic time in the life that we're living. Enjoy.

Joran Hofman: Thank you for watching this show of the Grow your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end. So I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, uh, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel if you like this content. Feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reddit, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.