REVENUE ACADEMY COURSES: Enroll in upcoming courses across the Bowtie
RESEARCH: The New Letters of Growth — K, C, and A
The funnel was never designed to compound. Last week at Impact Summit in San Francisco, Jacco van der Kooij named the structural problem behind slowing growth at SaaS companies everywhere: funnelism. The industry built its GTM motion around a one-way flow — lead to opportunity to close — and optimized every part of it. The problem is that the model front-loads all risk on acquisition, treats revenue as a destination rather than a system, and has no mechanism to feed itself. More than half of all public SaaS companies are now above the $2B ARR mark, meaning the easy expansion era is over. Organic search is compressed by AI Overviews. Email open rates continue to fall. Seat-based pricing is collapsing as agents replace human users. The old motion is not dying slowly. It is hitting a structural ceiling. There is also a buyer-side reason funnelism is failing. Customers no longer trust promises of value without the realization of impact. A motion built on persuasion and pipeline velocity — without genuine delivery on the other side — is losing its grip. Buyers are fatigued. They want control, accuracy, and on-demand answers, not gatekeeping and nurture sequences. The framework Jacco presented at the Summit reorients the entire model. Unstoppable growth is defined as: growth that creates growth — because customers stay, expand, and happily spread the word as they achieve meaningful, recurring impact. That definition is mathematical, not aspirational. When acquisition, retention, and expansion are properly connected, the system feeds itself. The acquisition side of that system now runs on three distinct loops: The K-factor (Viral) measures how effectively your product spreads through customer networks. High-fit customers who achieve real impact mention you to peers. That referral becomes a new customer, who becomes a new referral source. The loop only works if the impact is real and recurring — manufactured virality decays. The C-factor (Community) captures growth driven by shared identity and collective knowledge. When customers build something together — content, norms, a professional identity — the community becomes a gravitational force that pulls new members in. This is a structural advantage, not a marketing tactic. The A-factor (Advocacy) reflects the degree to which your customers actively champion you in decisions they do not control. Advocacy from a satisfied customer reaches rooms your sales team will never enter. It is the highest-quality acquisition signal that exists, and it is largely invisible to systems built around pipeline stage. Together, these three factors drive acquisition that costs less and converts higher than anything a paid funnel can produce because the growth is earned from impact, not manufactured from spend. Combined with strong Gross Revenue Retention and Net Revenue Retention on the right side of the Bowtie, you get a system that does not just grow. It accelerates. – Bottom Line – The K, C, and A factors are not growth hacks. They are the architectural signature of companies that have stopped buying growth and started designing for it. Understanding which of the three your business has and which it is missing is one of the most important diagnostic questions a growth leader can ask right now. These insights are drawn from research presented by Jacco van der Kooij, CEO of Winning by Design, at Impact Summit 2026. Related research and frameworks are published in the Growth Journal - subscribe here(or read here if already subscribed).
Figure 1: The Unstoppable Growth framework maps the five factors that drive a self-compounding revenue system — viral (k-factor), community (c-factor), and advocacy (a-factor) on the acquisition side, paired with gross revenue retention and net revenue retention on the right. When all five are working, growth feeds itself.
IN PRACTICE: How Intercom Refounded Itself at 4% Growth
There is a version of this story that never gets told: the moment a leadership team looks at the numbers, acknowledges that the current trajectory is not a temporary dip, and makes the decision to rebuild. We told it openly about Intercom at Impact Summit. In 2021, Intercom was growing at 37%. By 2023, that number had fallen to 4%. The decline was not caused by execution failure. It was caused by a lifecycle transition. The company had been built for a SaaS world that was entering its consolidation phase, and growth built on that model was not going to recover — not through more effort, not through incremental adjustment. What Intercom did next is what makes this story instructive. They did not optimize. They refounded. A change in leadership set the direction. The team made a deliberate bet that the relevant lifecycle was not SaaS consolidation — it was the AI lifecycle, which was entering its own explosive growth phase. They launched Fin.AI, Intercom's AI-native support agent, as the centerpiece of a repositioned product and company narrative. By 2025, Intercom was growing at 24%. The broader SaaS benchmark for comparable companies was 16%. The lesson is not about AI as a silver bullet. Plenty of companies have added AI features and seen no meaningful change. The lesson is about lifecycle awareness and the willingness to act on it. Intercom's leadership recognized that sustaining growth required entering a different curve entirely, not pushing harder on the one that was flattening. That recognition, and the structural commitment it prompted, is what separated their trajectory from the benchmark. For revenue leaders, the implication is direct: growth stall is not always a signal to execute harder. Sometimes it is a signal to redesign the system. – Bottom Line – Intercom's recovery from 4% to 24% growth was not a turnaround story. It was a refounding — a deliberate decision to exit one lifecycle stage and compete for the next one. The companies that will outperform through the AI transition are not the ones that do more of what worked before. They are the ones willing to ask which game they should be playing.
Figure 2: Intercom's growth rate fell from 37% to 4% before a deliberate refounding — a leadership change and the launch of Fin.AI — restarted the engine and drove recovery to 24% growth by 2025, outpacing the SaaS benchmark. The AED on the chart is apt: this was a resuscitation, not a turnaround.
EVENTS: From one Impact Summit to the Next
- IMPACT SUMMIT 2026 | SAN FRANCISCO | MAY 12, 2026 / Last week, we brought together CROs, CEOs, and GTM operators in San Francisco for a full day of research, real-world stories, and honest conversation about what it actually takes to build growth systems that compound.
The energy in the room was something else. Great people, great connections, and a day's worth of ideas that are already making their way into how teams operate.
Thank you to all of you that chose to spend the day with us. For those unable to attend, see what we have coming up below!
⭐ IMPACT SUMMIT 2026 VIRTUAL | MAY 28, 2026 | VIA ZOOM/ Missed San Francisco or want to go deeper on what was covered? Impact Summit Virtual is happening May 28 on Zoom, and the agenda is built to extend the live event — not just recap it. Jacco opens with the Unstoppable Growth keynote, Growth Institute members share their live Summit takeaways, and the afternoon goes hands-on with sessions on growth governance, revenue strategy and operations alignment, SPICED AI coaching, and a dedicated deep-dive on growth loops with Kris Snyder of Ninety.io. No cost to attend. Register here.
2026 GROWTH AWARDS: Recognizing GTM Excellence at Impact Summit 2026
Last week in San Francisco, WbD and a panel of judges from Insight Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Owner.com, Experity, and Winning by Design recognized three practitioners who have done the hard work of turning frameworks into measurable outcomes. 🏆 Bowtie for Growth Momentum — Ran Haimoff, Senior Director of GTM Strategy and Sales Operations, Tipalti Ran led a Bowtie-driven GTM redesign across Tipalti's global organization in 2025 — covering ICP prioritization, funnel diagnostics, and LTV/CAC governance — reversing the company's growth rate mid-year, driving a 74% increase in ARR per FTE, and finishing Q4 at 150% of plan. 🏆 SPICED for Growth Acceleration — Nida Ateeq, Senior Revenue Architect, Lyra Technology Group Nida embedded SPICED across a decentralized portfolio of 100+ companies in under six months, replacing fragmented qualification standards with a unified pipeline governance system that grew pipeline from $2M to $8.8M in two quarters and cut reporting time by 70%. 🏆 AI Innovator — Lisa Sharapata, VP of AI and GTM Strategy, Metadata.io When inaccurate intent signals were degrading pipeline quality and wasting spend, Lisa rebuilt the demand generation engine around an agentic AI platform that automated campaign execution and optimization — delivering a 9x return on investment, a 177% increase in influenced revenue, and campaign build time down from 3.5 weeks to under 10 minutes. Congratulations to all three winners, and to the full class of finalists recognized on stage. The complete book of innovation stories from the Growth Awards is available for download here.
PAY-PER-IMPACT: Sales Training Has Not Changed in 100 Years. It’s Time For a Change.
Sales training has run on the same pricing model for decades. You buy seats. You get certificates. The CRO pays whether behavior changes or not. We think that should change. Prior to Impact Summit 2026, we introduced Pay-Per-Impact — a new optional pricing model for WbD training that aligns what you pay with what actually happens in the field. The mechanics are straightforward. Training is delivered at cost, with no margin on the license. Each quarter, we set a working estimate based on agreed impact targets. Then we measure what actually changed — win rate, cycle time, revenue per lead — and the number adjusts to reflect reality. When impact is achieved, we share in it. When it is not, there is nothing to pay for. This is not a pilot. Across tens of thousands of calls, we have measured a 59% revenue increase from the same leads when sellers identify and sell to the impact a buyer wants to achieve, rather than the pain they are experiencing. Same sellers. Same pipeline. Measurably better results. That is what behavior change looks like when it is measured rather than assumed. Every training company claims outcomes. Pay-Per-Impact is how we underwrite ours. Read the full announcement or reach out at marketing@winningbydesign.com to learn more.
KEY RESOURCE: Latest Issue of the Growth Journal Published
The May issue of the WbD Growth Journal is here, and it picks up exactly where Impact Summit left off. Issue #03 is built around a single thesis: AI is not extending the SaaS era. It is replacing the economics that powered it. The companies that come out ahead will not be the ones that bolt AI onto existing products. They will be the ones that rewire their growth systems before the SaaS curve bends too far. The issue covers the frameworks and leadership conversations that matter most right now, including:
Unstoppable Growth — Jacco van der Kooij on how to stack curves, rewire the business, and govern growth as a system
Who Owns the GTM System? — Jonathan Moss on how Revenue Operations is evolving into the architect of the entire growth engine
Growth Governance — Dr. Dan Patterson on replacing single-outcome forecasting with probability-based planning
CEO Interview: Amanda Kahlow — on why executive teams must stop managing performance and start governing the systems that produce it
CMO Interview: Radhika Tandon — on building growth systems resilient enough to scale with AI
Managing AI Coworkers — Hiten Shah on how feedback cycles compressing from days into minutes change the structure of work itself
The Science of Scaling — Mark Roberge on rediscovering product-market fit and go-to-market fit as you grow
This is the research and thinking that serious growth leaders are using to orient their next move. The complete issue is available to subscribers – subscribe here(or read here if already subscribed). The print edition of the Growth Journal is included in Growth Institute membership. If you're leading a team, it's worth a look.
REVENUE ACADEMY COURSES: Uplevel your skills across the GTM
Sign up for Revenue Academy Open Courses — next cohorts are kicking off on May 26th (with more scheduled throughout Q2 and Q3 courses to be scheduled soon).
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