TRIPLE Your Sales with This ONE Change

Folks, we better get ready because our customers want a different buying experience, and we are not catering to that right now. And the way we're using AI today is not doing anything better. We're just doing what we previously were doing, but we're doing it at a lower cost.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagine Podcast. We have a super special guest with us today. We have the founder and CEO of Winning by Design, Jao Vandercoy, who is an internationally renowned business and thought leader on all things revenue growth and strategy. We'll talk about this Revenue Architecture book that I have back here. An author of seven other bestselling books on drive and growth for SaaS companies, also a sales mentor across several VC firms where you help accelerate the development of sales teams across their portfolios. We are huge lovers of Winning by Design, huge lovers of spice. We're super excited to talk to you today, man. Thanks for joining us.

Oh, thank you. It is a pleasure and it is a treat as always. Thank you for letting me be part. And for those of you at home, wherever you may be listening, this welcome, welcome. It is the holiday season. All the best wishes for you all.

Yes, yes. All the revenue wishes in the world, right? Growth at the lowest cost, at the highest growth rate is my wish for you.

Yes, I love it. I love it. So we were talking earlier, and there's a term coined called the Revenue Factory. I think this would be a great jumping off point for the podcast. Talk a little bit about the Revenue Factory, what that means to you at Winning by Design, and potentially for people looking to generate a Revenue Factory.

Yeah, thank you for asking, Dale. So here's the thing. I am from a relatively small town—and by small town, as measured in a few thousand. When we go up to the next city that had 18,000, we would call it "the city." We would go to the city, right? That was the big city thing, that was 18,000 people. In those days, if you think about, you know, my family and they all relatively entrepreneurs having different kinds of businesses, if you would tell my family, if they would run a three to four million dollar operation, they would all think that they're running a factory, right?

And so with that mindset, I looked at the way many of the companies have problems with these days, the challenges that they have. And I looked at that, primarily because they were not looking at it from a factory perspective. And then if you start looking at AI and the role it plays, it's very similar to the way robots played in the 1960s. And you start to analyze and you go like, "Oh, what is what an agile software development do? What do all these forms of manufacturing processes—whether it's for software or hardware—what have they implemented?" You quickly start to realize that there's a lot of alignment. I'll start off with a simple one and I'll head it back.

So first, the first thing is to realize that a factory has three things that they focus on. They need to produce a lot. That's the nature of automation—to produce a lot. They need to do it efficiently, so cost needs to keep coming down. And the number three thing is if you only pay attention to the first two, then the third one leads to a lack of quality. So they have to implement a quality improvement to make sure that the first two don't become the primary focus.

So there you have your three goals: growth, cost, quality. They map perfectly to a recurring revenue business, right? I want to create growth, revenue growth. I want to do it sustainably because growth at all cost no longer works. And I need a form of quality, which in our world is recurring revenue, GRR, NRR as metrics. Those are fantastic for that.

Yeah, it's funny you say growth at all cost doesn't work. And it's actually not funny, but we still, Jao, to this day have founders who think that the answer to everything is go hire a bunch of people. More people multiplied by what you think the quota should be is going to equal more revenue. And that's just going to solve all problems. And there's no focus on churn. There's no focus on either GRR or NRR. It's just go hire a ton of people. How and why do you think people still have this mentality? Because we've been talking about growth at all costs is over for, I feel like, over a year now.

Yeah, yeah. Primarily, where it comes from, Adam, is the main thing here is that people are not educated on it. And so, you know, in our industry you don't go to a class where you get to be taught about how to create a recurring revenue growth machine. And as a result, you think you know, but what we find out is that most people really don't know, right?

They don't know that there's three areas of growth, not one—three areas. Most people don't know the mathematics behind it. They know, like, "Oh, it's compound, it's important," but they don't know about what compounds over time is versus compounding over frequency, right? Acquisition compounds over frequency: number of meetings, number of emails. Whereas expansion compounds over time: number of years, number of months, and so on.

So they don't understand the difference between that. And as a result, the analogy that I often use is that over the past decade we've been driving a motorcycle, but we've only pushed it into first gear. And we go like, right? We are running that motorcycle. We have no idea there's a second and a third gear. We know, you know, push down people like click twice down, and you have a whole set of new gears they're not familiar with.

That combined with the fact that most founders do not appreciate processes in go-to-market the same way they appreciate processes as part of what they're doing in their product. And so that mismatch, you know, leads to a lot of educated people running around on a motorcycle in first gear.

I love that analogy. Yeah, it's a really good analogy. And I think they're revving the RPMs and they're not getting anywhere. They're wondering why.

And I want to twist this around a little bit, go back a little bit to the Revenue Factory. And you were the first really consulting group, training organization that I ever saw really focus on customer success. You had the bowtie model, and everything was like top of funnel. Everything was like we're going to get people in, we're going to do these conversion rates, but no one really cared about the back end of the funnel actually having happy customers. How do you create customer success to be revenue generators? My big thing when I talk to a lot of founders now that are implementing a CS organization is let's create a revenue-generating customer success team. So on the back end, the bowtie, what are things companies can do today to become more of a revenue generator than a revenue-sucking organization?

And I think all of us are old enough that we can go back to our parents' time and know that we lived at a different age. When I go back to my parents, like, I'm the youngest of eight. So my parents have already moved on to the next gig that they're doing. But if I go back to the early days, right, we were running a French fries store. Think of it more as that food stand, food truck that you see parked in front of a Home Depot. That's kind of like what we have, right?

And if you grow your business at this—like, imagine using that as a base model, right? Look, how do you run a factory? How do you run something like that? Well, you need to make more money than you spent, right? And what one would hope, you probably want to. And in those days, soft serve became a new thing, and then we had Slush Puppies became a new thing. We had all these new things. You have to buy those machines, which you, by the way, lease, right? Okay, recurring revenue. And then you have to, in order to do that, you have to make an investment. Oh, you are having an acquisition. You acquire something, and you have to keep it. And then you come to the conclusion: where do my customers come from, right?

Like, how much do you actually billboard? Then you come very quickly to that end of the journey. You come to the conclusion: word of mouth. Word of mouth. Now this is where I'm going to go with this answer to your question.

What we are seeing today is that most of the channels that we have historically been communicating with customers are overwhelmed with noise. They become too noisy. So, link—if you go email, too noisy. Text messaging, cannot do that. High, you know, high fear factor. You know, high penalty of failure factor. LinkedIn, folks, within six to twelve months, LinkedIn is going to be too noisy as well, right? It's already noisy, but within six to twelve months, it's going to be too noisy.

So that is not going to work. And so where do these customers come from? These customers come from successful other customers who talk about you. And so more and more do we need to focus on letting our customers partake and become our marketing and sales organization. And that means that that right side of the funnel of the...

# Bow Tie is essentially the key part of the bow tie. Where did you come up with the bow tie framework in your head? Was it like, because you saw infinity signs? I used to work at Oracle. It was like infinity signs. Like, what sparked the bow tie in your head?

Yeah, actually there's an, you can still find it. The original is still on YouTube. You can Google "Joo Prey SAS" and you're going to get, I created a Prey. It was a predecessor to Canvas. I remember Prey. Yeah, Prey. And so I created the Prey and I wanted to create a circular motion because if you think that you see the bow tie, right? People say, "Oh, but it's not a growth loop." But essentially the right side and the left side of the bow tie are meant to connect in a circle. So if you see that and it connects in a circle, then you got the thing. Anyway, regardless, the other way you can see it is you can see it in three windows. But you know, where did it come from? I drew circles. I was drawing circles and then going, "Okay, I had this circular emotion because I felt like a customer got stuck in the awareness mode and they circle through that, and then they go to the education mode and they circle through that." And so I kept building these circles and I go, "Hey, there needs to be a whole new series of circles." But in that Prey, you see me literally explain that. You can almost see it on the fly how I came up with it.

Yeah, that's, and I think it was called something like, "Doesn't Make Sense How SAS Can Make Money," and I used Brightcove and Jive as examples on how they were building, you know, how they were getting, spending like ten million on growth while only acquiring like half a million dollars. And I go, "This doesn't make sense." People are like, right? I was hoping the bow tie had something to do with french fries, but I guess not.

No, there is a concept originally by a gentleman. Because when I came up with it, I needed to verify if I was the first one or something like that, and so I verified. And then I found there was a guy in the mid-1990s who came up with a similar concept and used a bow tie actually, a bow tie format for it, but related it to the selling of tickets and then luggage fees, upgrade fees, seat fees, and everything. He used it in form of a funnel and a bow tie concept. But I've been since trying to look for it and I've not been able to refind it. But anyway, that's where it's come from. But the key here is this: what the bow tie tells us is there's three places of growth, not one, right? Acquisition growth, expansion growth, and retention growth.

Acquisition, expansion, and retention. We often don't recognize retention growth, while it adheres to the same principles. It has a high win rate, it has a very high ACV within range, and it has a short and known sales cycle.

What amazes me and what I find fascinating is a lot of what you just said. But we talk about leveraging your customers, right? We talk about leveraging folks who are happy with the product and using the product and having them sell for you and embracing that. And this is now being thrown around as this new term called "go-to network" that everyone's coining as like this brand new thing, like use your customers and leverage your relationships. And like you were very much ahead of the curve, if you will. Where now this is super popular. I can tell you whether it's B2B SAS, whether it's a car, whether it's an oven in my house, like I don't think I've ever bought anything without checking with people I know who actually use the product to make sure that they like it and love it. It's why sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp and all these things exist, right? Because we want to talk to customers who have been there. Why do you think just now in going into 2025 this is finally becoming so popular of, "Oh, let's leverage our customers"?

Because the other side was too easy, too simple to think about. And it's not because people are ill-willed or anything, because you know, like entire systems have been set up. Simple question, and then I'll give you where the next one goes. Okay, so since we now know where we're going, I can tell you where a year to two years from now we will be as well. Um, so I want you to think about the concept of how much dollars do I spend on acquisition versus expansion or retention, right? And most companies who say like, "No, no, we have customer success," I go, "Yeah, but having a customer success person itself is not the solution." Most people look at customer success as saying, "Please don't lose the deal I just won." That's the mindset of customers, 100%, right? And that is a shortsighted approach to sales. Obviously, the tool vendors early on, the known tool vendors, really facilitated that conversation and we're never willing to take on the revenue profit nature of it, right? We wrote a paper two or three years ago and asked one of the well-known vendors if they wanted to do it with us. They like, "No, we don't believe in that," right? And it was a topic about growth as a profit center. Now I can tell you they are now talking about it all on their website now. It's all like, "Yeah, we knew that was there." But the topic here, you know, is that people misunderstand and they follow things blindly. And I could give you a point where they are going to be wrong again and why they're going to be wrong and why we believe that to be the case. And it now involves AI and the role that AI plays.

We today have a perception that, you know, in the future we will not, human beings will prefer, continue to prefer to buy from human beings. And I go, "That is an assumption." You know, if I apply that to taxis or to hotels and say, "Yeah, if I'm in a taxi I would never have thought of an Uber. And if I'm in a hotel I cannot see," neither of those industries were disrupted from within the industry. Both of them were disrupted from outside the industry.

So to the case here, and I'll give you an example, folks, we better get ready because our customers want a different buying experience and we are not catering to that right now. And the way we're using AI today is not doing anything better. We're just doing what we previously were doing but we're doing it at a lower cost, sure, at higher volume. And so we're not doing anything different. We think we're, we're just redesigning the taxi cab by installing a credit card. Remember that taxi cab? For the longest time it wouldn't accept credit cards. Okay, finally they installed a credit card machine. I can now pay with my Apple Pay. Fantastic. Folks, that doesn't make the cab any different of an experience, right?

Yeah.

And that is what we are currently surrendering to our customers with AI. So let's double-click on that a little bit, Joo. So in your opinion, where do you think AI is going as it relates to the bow tie? Top of funnel, back of funnel, where does AI have the biggest impact? Immediately, like in the next five years, and what do you think that looks like?

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Okay, fantastic question. So I'm going to give you the answer, give you the solution to that answer, and then you can apply that correctly, right? So I'm going to ask you at the back end, and now if you know that, how do you think it would change?

Now I'm going to use the story of my wife being stung by three wasps because she stepped on a wasp hive. And yes, her friend got stung ten times. But my wife had an allergic reaction and as she had that allergic reaction, including breathing constriction in her breathing, she had to see a doctor a few days later. But of course, as you know, like as many of us do, and her knowing, you know, particularly she went in and did extensive research on what is venom, how does it work, why breathing, and all that stuff. So we show up at the doctor, general doctor, and the experience was very underwhelming, right? Because you know, the doctor said, "Here's an EpiPen and always have an EpiPen. Have a second one with you," and this and that, right? But didn't know actually what was going on. And so my wife was pinging her, but how about this? And how...

About that, as we walk out, on one hand we were disappointed, but on the other hand, there's a waiting room with 20 other people who had something over the weekend. They too researched that topic and they too know a lot about that topic that a general practitioner can never know. Can never spend the time on all that.

What you'll see is that the knowledge gap has flipped. The knowledge gap previously favored us sellers. Now, when I was selling in the 1990s, you know, Phillips flew me around the world in order to sell impact to gear. I was an expert. I flew to that location and I was an expert. I knew the people in the industry. I knew every competitor. I knew where the market was going, the technology. And so the knowledge gap was very much in favor of me. That created a need for my customer to trust what I was saying. Hence, brand name super important. Trusted resource. Technology background. Right? That's why in-person visits were super important. Will this person be here for me when I buy?

That knowledge gap today, for various reasons in our industry, has flipped industrywide. Our customers that are buying SaaS products generally know more about their market, generally know more about their competitors, generally know more about your competitors. And it is not uncommon that they know more about the product that they are buying from the seller than the seller knows about their own product. And believe me, I've run this example a couple of times and everybody's shaking their head like, yes, right? The knowledge gap has flipped.

What AI is doing for the seller, it is also doing for the buyer. And that knowledge gap flip changes the acquisition process. It will affect all throughout that acquisition the same way. How when an Uber told me that I could see when the driver would be coming, how far away he was, and the same way how it changed the relationship between the volume of buyers and the volume of sellers and it created the marketplace that changed with the new technology called mobile GPS and cloud. Now AI is flipping the knowledge gap. And that means that it's changing the industry.

I would argue the knowledge gap was already flipping. AI has just accelerated it. So it's like it was already there. Now they can get data much faster and more efficiently.

So how do we as sellers close that gap? What should we be doing to close that? Because it's pendulums, right? I think every market is like a pendulum. They'll swing one way and then swing the other way. How do we swing it the other way?

I'll give you an example. Let's say I'm doing a practical example. We were selling a $400,000 software and services contract. I had written the contract out, and it was a high-profile name. I had written it myself and explained it carefully. It was about an eight to ten page proposal, a written proposal, not a deck, but a written proposal. Right? Now in this case, I had gone through the first discovery call, meetings, adjusted all that, but it's a $400,000 proposal. So I'm in deep enterprise sales territory. I'm not in SMB sales technique, which is, oh, you show a few things, you demo a few things.

So I'm running into the stakeholder meeting, and the executive that runs that is asking me, "Hey, give me the document so I can review it with the team, and then we'll have a stakeholder meeting next week." Okay, now that executive uploaded the document into Google NotebookLM, created a 25-minute podcast out of it, sent it to the rest of the team to review it. He calls me on Monday and says, "We can cancel the meeting. We're good to go." I kid you not, right? Why? Because Google NotebookLM has an ability to query it, and all the answers that everybody was playing with already answered the questions, right? This is a high-tech company. They know what they're up to, right? But as a result, we no longer—I kid you not—we no longer needed the stakeholder meeting. And the deal closed within, I think, within 24 hours after he sent me the message.

Something really quick: why? Because the information flow is different, right? Trust no longer comes just from me knowing my stuff. It comes from the brand. Which is the reason why I think that moving forward, new brand names, although they may be more innovative, are not as trusted, right? You want trusted brand names. You want people that, hey, you know, if we want to do consulting, we're going to go with Winning by Design because we know Jaco has been there for 12 years and he will be there for another 12 years, right? We know we can trust that brand. I think that is becoming the new trust factor. You're trusting a brand, no longer just people, because people change quickly these days.

So what does that mean for the future of sales? Because I agree with you 100%. I think it's been easier than ever to get information for years. I think buyers are showing up more educated than ever, oftentimes in the wrong way, where they think they know what they want but they don't, because they've read a Google article or, like, "doctored Google," as I call it in healthcare. But nonetheless, buyers are definitely more educated than ever, and they're coming to sales meetings that they likely don't want to have in order to check a box that the company says they have to have. And it's like, "Okay, Jaco, I did my research. This is what I want. This is the pricing I want to pay. I know that this customer is getting this pricing, so don't tell me you can't give it to me because I've done that myself."

What does this mean for the future of sales reps and sales as an industry?

Yeah, a few things. People no longer buy on budget with SaaS, and with the upcoming topic of outcome-based pricing, which is a whole topic separately and equally of interest, probably more popular than AI, I may add, probably more disruptive than AI itself, although they're both connected. But with this, you know, we're not based on budget, and we're not buying on ROI. Why not? Everybody has budget to buy a SaaS service. It doesn't matter how big you are. And everybody, every SaaS service or subscription service or whatever consumption service, folks, it is built from the get-go to have a 10x ROI. So like, and everybody else has also a 10x ROI. So like, what the heck are we doing? This whole ROI thing is the only thing you're now selling against is priority. Is this important right now?

Now, in order to pull on that thread of priority, you need to know what the customer is going through. So what this means, Adam, for what the world is, what it means to the sellers, is the following: we're going to see two groups. The one group is the one-third that will become experts and will continue to be experts. They will use AI to enable that expertise and they will move forward. The other two-thirds will not move forward. Of that other two-thirds, the bottom one-third can already almost discard it immediately. Their level of work and productivity is actually setting the entire group back. That middle one-third, some of them are, are, are, are will make it to the top one-third, and most of them will not.

This is not like, I don't want, is when you listen to this you go, "Oh my God, this is like what's happening, right?" Okay, I wanted, before we go there, I want I need to finish this thought so that because people will right now start freaking out, like Jaco says, "70% of the sales team will be replaced by AI." Yes, something like that. Let me tell you why that is in context.

If I go back 200 years ago and I'm digging a hole, I'm going to need like 2,000 people to dig a hole for a castle that I'm willing to build, yeah? Okay, today I use four excavators. Nobody that stands there with a shovel in their hand is going to strike against the rival of the excavator because they go, "You know what, I really want to break my back manually shoveling this hole every year, right?" And so excavators replaced human labor, right? And that was a very natural thing. You see this, for example, in farming. In farming, we have replaced human labor in every evolution cycle, every new technology. You're not going to strike up against that. You're just moving along with that.

Now, people that previously were digging a hole are now doing something different. What we have, unlike any other trade in sales, we have a large volume of people who have not studied to sell. They're not using approved processes. They just show up every day and wing it. And you can, we can all kind of joke around at it, but we all know it's true. One-third of the group just wings it. Doesn't even enter anything in CRM. Hence the reason why we all focus that we need a CRM automation tool. No, you do not need a CRM automation tool. If people simply would enter key concepts of the call into the data, now it gets more accurate with annotation tools, I get that. But the fact that we needed tools in the first place was primarily due to the lack of skill set because people were simply showing up, doing the thing, and getting back home. They didn't study for it. They're not.

"Passionate about it. And many of them, when they get fired, they don't go back into a job in sales, okay. That one third will be out. The middle one third have to fight and become experts. We don't need the hundreds of sellers that we have right now. Like, it's ridiculous. Now, obviously, we have hosted those people and they will find a new job elsewhere in the next gig, and they will be extremely valuable in that role the same way that they were previously valuable in SDR, AE, and CSM roles. But let's not kid ourselves—none of these people studied for their job. And they did that. The experts of that, of course, you know, like I have friends, John Skags is like these are world-class sellers that I've learned from a lot. They made it. They embraced it. They studied it. They learned it. They lose the latest in technology. Like, of course they're going to continue to be successful in the job.

I almost want to have a separate conversation with you about outcome-based pricing because I think that is a super interesting topic. We won't be able to get to all the pieces of outcome-based pricing, and I do think it's challenging because it's hard for people to digest. Buyers think they want it, but when you actually start generating outcomes, the amount of money that they spend back on outcome-based pricing can be much higher. Then they get to a place of like, "Why am I paying you all this money?" It's like, "Well, look at the outcome that we drove for you." But we say this all the time in our world. People ask us, "Well, how many hours are in your monthly retainer? How many hours am I going to get, right? How many hours are we going to get?" And my response is a version of what you just said, Jao. It's: we don't trade time for money. We trade outcomes for money. If I could do it in one hour, you should be a ton happier because that's more hours than I'm spending to do other stuff for you than if it takes me 40 hours or 20 hours or whatever. So I love this idea. I don't think people know what to do with outcome-based pricing, or even how to structure it.

Okay, so let me just give you a taste before we start on that outcome-based pricing. If you think of a continuum, on the left we call it the monetization strategy. If on the left of the monetization strategy we pick upfront perpetual payment, we call it ownership. You buy something to own. In the middle, it's subscription. And on the right, you think of that continuum as consumption. As you move from the left to the right, every metric in data changes. For example, sales cycles—on ownership-based, long sales cycle. On consumption, low, short. Win rate—on the left, high. Why? On the continuum of ownership, why? Because buyers qualify themselves. If they are looking to spend $5 million paid up front, if you see win rate on the right, you can go all the way to freemium—infinite, meaning very bad conversion rates from freemium to paid. Very bad. And so what you would say is like, "Well, if we lower the price and we make it outcome-based, the win rate should go up." Now it has proven that it doesn't go up. Why? Because the amount of unqualified buyers that are jumping in because they want to start cheap actually brings the win rate far down.

So win rate: if you look at it from an ownership model, one in three. Win rate in a subscription model, one in five. Win rate in a consumption model, one in ten. And it can go all the way down to one in twenty if you go further down. You can go to one in 100. You enter the world of what they call insertion orders, where everything needs to constantly be renewed.

Okay, so in that world on the right, another unique difference is subscription is recurring. And what do I mean with recurring? The time frame that the new order comes in and the size of the new order is in context of a very predetermined time frame and a very well-known order in the 90 to 1.1 time range of the previous order. What we see with consumption is a reoccurring revenue stream, not recurring. Reoccurring. Time frame not known. Could come in a month, could come in two months, could come in a day, could come in 20 days. And the volume that it would come back in, we don't know. It could come back in a million. Could come back in $10,000.

So the nature of that is very different, right? So when you say Adam, "I feel very insecure," that's what you're responding to, right? You go like, "Okay, we're going from recurring to reoccurring. I don't have a secure time frame and I don't have a secure dollar figure." So I feel like, yeah, I know. Like, that's where that nature comes from.

Now, how we're going to solve for that, and it is being solved, in the past is we're going to see that the industry will move to pre-buy. It will say, "Oh, you have to pre-buy 50,000 leads, or you have to pre-buy 50 or 5,000 discovery calls, or you have to pre-buy half a million dollars of revenue that I'm generating." But you pre-commit to that, and that pre-commit needs to be taken over 12 months.

Now, why that is needed for the seller is because it has upfront cost. It needs to absorb, yeah, right? And so historically, the challenge is as follows: If I buy $5 million worth of Cisco routers, I, the buyer, have to amortize the cost over five years and write that off. If I now take on that risk, right, I have to commit to an annual commit. I have to commit to my whatever AI provider a certain amount of volume. I'm taken on all that risk. I need to amortize that too. And so I'm going to amortize that by based on the volume that you're committing to me, right. And then, you know, obviously on my end, I'm going to calculate what the risk factor is, what the chance of renewal is, and so on and so forth. And I can then come up with something meaningful.

That's where consumption-based pricing comes in, or outcome-based pricing comes in. Now, we call it PPX because it's price per impact, price per action, price per outcome, price per click. And so we go like, "Okay, forget all these PPs. You just make it PPX, right? Price per something." I could do a whole another show on this, and we likely need to.

Thank you for breaking that down. I'm a fan. I think that it will be where the industry goes. I'm excited to see when and how. But for today, we are just about out of time. And before we wrap, we would like to keep a tradition going and do some rapid fire with you. If you're game?

Yeah, let's. Here's what I want to point out to your audience—what you'll see in the way I reason is based on scientific frameworks. Creating a line with a continuum is creating revenue architecture. I have been told too often: "Sales is just something you do. You can do it or you can't. Revenue growth is just something—your product is dependent on product." And I go like, "No, I don't think of it that way. There's plenty of successful products that fail, and there's plenty of really bad products that succeed. So there is a difference, and that difference is in the go-to-market nature."

And I believe when I look at the go-to-market, similar to the way product can be engineered, product go-to-market can be engineered, designed, and architected. Will it be a guarantee of success? Absolutely not. But we can double, quadruple success rates of companies by creating that. That's what the book Revenue Architecture is about, right? That's the mindset. It's like, "Hey, and that's why there are frameworks and the things that I'm drawing from."

Thank you very much. Yeah, that's where I'm drawing from. I'm going like, "Look, as an engineer, I can engineer this." And yeah, some people believe in it, and others, yeah, do not. And they go, "Yeah, either way, you know, it's fine." But you're right, and I love the mindset. The days of "Oh, sales is just show up and figure it out" and "it's not a science" is wrong. Is there human nature? Absolutely. People buy from people they like. Make no mistake about it. But the most successful sales organizations that we've worked with are certainly the ones that put some science behind their sales process.

I like to refine that, but you're not wrong. When people buy product, they buy from people they like. When people need a product to save their lives, they buy from people they respect.

Oh, I love that. Respect is not equal. Like, I love that. I will use that moving forward.

All right, here we go, Jao. Early bird or night owl?

Early bird.

You are the youngest of eight children. What other profession from the other seven siblings would you have taken if you weren't a salesman?

Oh, easy enough. I used to be a carpenter. So we're all trades—painting, carpeting, roofing, electricians. I'm a carpenter.

Nice. What is the first app you check when you wake up?

LinkedIn. But it's getting way too noisy, so you're going to have to find a new one pretty soon.

So for me, why LinkedIn works is because I look up for mentions. So I quickly see if what you..."

Over the past days, I got the most interesting thing on that topic of consumption-based pricing. The article is going nuts, right? So every morning I go, "Wait, what did it do? I wonder what it did last night." I love it.

**One Tech Gadget You Can't Live Without**

iPhone is easy enough, but if I say that, I would have my van—my SpaceX-enabled van that I drive around California. That van that I work from almost every day. I've heard about it. I have heard about this van, and I find it very, very intriguing.

**Favorite Guilty Pleasure Snack**

Oh dude, say it with me, people. Say it with me. Red Bull. One a day, two on a hard day. One on an easy day. It gives you wings, right? Oh, it does. Like, those of you who know me, yes, it does absolutely give me wings.

**Dream Vacation Destination**

This is tough because you've been everywhere, but a vacation destination. Okay, let me describe to you this. This is actually a way of thinking about life. You can think about vacations, or you can think about experiences. I'll give you my dream experience. Blue sky, mid-80s for Europe—that is 20 degrees Celsius, mid-80 degrees Fahrenheit. Wind slightly blowing. Breathe through doors that are open. Like slightly, the moving of the curtains, right? You walk outside, you hear birds, and you see a lot of green. Food is delicious, and people who serve you don't serve you because you pay them to, but they serve you because they believe that's where they are the happiest in doing so. You're part of a culture where that is mutual, and then you feed them after they served you. You sit together and you have dinner. That's for me—Bali, Indonesia. Pretty much, right? What I just described, but that's kind of like the life. But other than that, here in California is pretty freaking awesome as well.

I love it. Thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure having you on the show. Folks can go to winningbydesign.com. I believe that's correct, right?

**Yep.**

And of course, you can find Joo and all of us on LinkedIn. Joo, thanks for joining us, man.

**Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. It was a treat.**

Thank you, Dale. Thank you, Adam. Have a fantastic holiday period.