Ep. 184 - Why Traditional SaaS GTM Collapses in a Self-Service World

Guest: Dave Boyce, Executive Chairman & EVP of Product at Winning by Design 

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Most SaaS companies are still built to sell. Today’s buyers want to activate, experience value, and decide on their own.

In this episode, Dave Boyce, Executive Chairman and EVP of Product at Winning by Design, joins host Ken Lempit to explain why SaaS GTM is shifting from lead handoffs to self-service activation, AI-driven automation, and system-based growth.

Dave shares why PLG isn’t about removing humans, but focusing them on higher-value work — while usage-based pricing and automation blur the line between acquisition, onboarding, and expansion. He also challenges traditional planning models, arguing that people don’t scale, systems do.

Key takeaways:

• Activation is replacing lead handoffs in SaaS growth
• PLG and AI redefine when humans should engage
• Usage-based pricing lowers friction and builds habit
• Systems, not headcount, unlock scale

If you’re a SaaS leader rethinking GTM for an AI-driven, self-service world, this episode delivers a practical, no-hype perspective.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CEOs and go to market leaders, accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Dave Boyce, executive chairman and EVP of Product at Winning By Design, a leading growth advisory firm for scaling businesses.

From diagnostic insights to system design and deployment, its experts work with the world's most prominent brands to architect compounding growth. Hey, Dave, welcome to the podcast.

Dave Boyce: Yeah, Ken, let's, let's get it, I guess let's get it SaaS backwards today, right?

Ken Lempit: Let's get it right.

Dave Boyce: Let's get it right. It might be the opposite of that.

Ken Lempit: Before we dig in on the episode, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your company Winning by Design?

Dave Boyce: Yeah, sure. I'd love to. I, I don't need to spend a ton of time on it, but Ken, I built my career in, in SaaS. So I think we're both in the same podcast right now. I helped build and sell as an operator, five SaaS companies, and then as an investor and advisor a few more. And even before the word SaaS existed you know, we were hosting, we had.

Application service providers. We were hosting software in the cloud and even machine learning stuff. And so that goes back, you know, for me to the the early two thousands. But, you know, we've had a great couple years. We've seen some ups and downs, and Winning by Design is a place where. A lot of us kind of operators have started taking kind of the patterns, like the pattern recognition and trying to distill that into frameworks and first principles that can be used by operators to say, you know, basically save time and benefit from, first principle thinking as you're planning for the next stage of growth, the next stage of growth and the next stage of growth, you don't wanna be surprised at what's around the next corner. We don't have to be anymore because, you know, this industry's been around for a while. That being said, and I'm sure we'll get into this, AI has changed a lot.

So like now we're just speeding up our learning cycles. And so winning by designs, like you said, as advisory firm, we publish research, we, we work on an advisory basis with kind of companies from, usually from 50 million in ARR up to about 2 billion. There's a lot of tricky growth kind of transitions in that during that time.

Ken Lempit: Well, really excited to have you here, and as, we discussed previously big fan of the. some of the research work that you were associated with in prior jobs with insidesales.com. Maybe we'll highlight the research you're doing at Winning by Design right here now.

Dave Boyce: Yeah, for sure. Well we talked about it right before we went live, but this is let's see. This is a journal. It's designed to be kind of the Harvard Business Review for Growth Executives and it comes out quarterly full of research. This is literally the first edition or the first issue Ken came out in October.

Second one will come out this January, and it's free to subscribe to not in this form. This form costs, I think 120 bucks. It's not expensive, but, but the digital form is free and it's called growth. And I think I, I believe every growth executive should be plugged into this.

Ken Lempit: Well, I was happy to publicize it only 'cause I'm a big believer in research based thought leadership. Happy to see you investing in that again. And I just think it's really important. So let's dig in a little bit. You've said that we are in the middle of a major shift from what I probably would think of as traditional marketing led acquisition to self-service and AI led .

Activation. So what's changing in SaaS GTM and. Why can't we rely on the marketing hands off, leads to sales model anymore?

Dave Boyce: Ooh. Yeah. You know, as with everything, it's a balance. But we are in the middle of a major shift, and I think it started. Three decades ago, and I think it's gonna go three decades from now if we can even see that far into the future. But, you know, there are so many transactions now that are unmediated by a human, you know, started with e e-commerce, where, you know, we didn't think we you could buy anything without a human.

Oh, I guess you could buy a book, I guess you could buy a cd. Wait, but you'd never buy clothes. And now we're buying everything, like we're buying clothes and vehicles and homes. And now, and then we went from e-commerce to kind of the cloud. Then we started hosting kind of software in the cloud and went, like we were talking about from hosting providers to SaaS.

Then a good kind of push down to our mobile. Now we, you know, we make all sorts of purchases now via mobile. We're making business purchases, we're making personal purchases. And then SaaS kind of evolved to the point where it could be automated, in like a PLG way, product led growth. So now I can make a, you know, I can purchase applications like Dropbox, Canva, DocuSign and I never even think about it, but it is software and some of those evolve into big million dollar contracts.

And now we've got AI thats even taking more, you know, even handling more complexity so I can, I could purchase even more or configure even more complex things without a human involvement. So I think it's just a long-term trend towards self-service buying. And I was just in London with with Forrester a couple months ago and they released some new research, says two thirds, I think they actually said 70% of.

B2B buyers today are either Gen Z or Millennial. So if you think about that, Gen Z and Millennial, and then you start thinking about like what's in their head. Like how do they make decisions? And the CEO of Forrester said, so how many of us are willing to put our CEO in a short form TikTok video?

How many of us are willing to feature our ad in a, you know, in Fortnite? And those are of course. That's a little extreme, but decision making is different for Gen Z and Millennial. They're relying on peers, they're relying on self-service. They're relying on try before you buy. So these are all things that we have to enable if we wanna meet buyers where they are.

That's a long answer to a short question. I'm sure we'll get into more of it.

Ken Lempit: You know, there's every generation, there's a generational shift, right? And we always have talked about the. Over under sale, as I call it. So there's like the executive that has to sign, but there's the people they rely on to tell them what they should do and buy.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Ken Lempit: And so those people keep getting younger as we keep getting older.

And we have to definitely meet them where they are, create experiences that are consistent with their expectations and support the way they wanna make decisions. Right? So, that's all up for grabs. 

Dave Boyce: I think it is up for grabs and you know, so, you know, we went from push based marketing to pull based marketing or you know, HubSpot kind of revolutionized the inbound marketing and content marketing. Got it. And then, you know, we saw a lot of, you know, lot. And HubSpot actually at that point was listening to there like, hang on a second.

Is inbound marketing the thing or is Shopify the thing? 'cause they're selling their software. Without a human involved at all. It's more than inbound marketing. It's like inbound trialing or inbound purchasing. So they were like, could we do that? And they actually made a really impressive push into PLG themselves.

So yeah, we're all listening. We're wa you know, we're meeting people where they are. Like way you said that.

Ken Lempit: Totally. We are I remember by the way, I was at the inbound. A conference, I guess it was about six or seven years ago when HubSpot announced its ads software. Like, you know, it was almost like irreligious that HubSpot would have an advertising component to the software. So, I think we all have to meet the market where the market actually is, if we want to get the revenue that the market has to offer.

So, uh, I, I think that's a great place to, to leave that thought. But actually I wanna dig a little deeper. In the prep that you did with Jason, my colleague, you mentioned that if one company is handing off leads, kind of the old model, like, you know, a lead M-Q-L-S-Q-L kind of business and another competitor is activating customers.

GTM, the one that's activating is gonna win. So how should marketing, sales and product teams rethink collaboration when activation is where acquisition happens?

Dave Boyce: Yeah, so that's what's at stake, Ken, like I'm competing. You know, I've fine tuned my acquisition model. I've got a really cool kind of inbound marketing funnel that goes to a two stage qualification and, you know, SDR to AE handoff, it's all kind of finely tuned. And then I look over my shoulder and somebody else has none of that.

My competitor has none of that. They're just saying, try for free. It's like, what? Like. That's completely different. And then you think then you, and then you flip it. Like we were talking about, you put yourself in the shoes of the person who's trying to make a decision about solution A or solution B.

Solution A says schedule an appointment and our SDR will talk to you and you know. Unspoken subtext, qualify whether you're worthy to speak with or not, and then they'll hand you off to an ae. In other words, it's a form, and then solution B is like, Hey, just get your hands on it, see if it might work for you.

Which one would you do and 9 times outta 10, we're gonna say, you know what? If it's easy enough, let me just get my hands on it and see if it's gonna work for me. So we see all sorts of industries being disrupted by that because it just matches the buying behavior that's expected by today's B2B buyers.

And if we are in the, in kind of column A and we're watching column B, disrupt us, kind of shame on us, we gotta get out in front of that. It's a call to a, a new way of doing business.

Ken Lempit: I think it's a real rallying cry for the industry. And not even, it's not only the, sales infrastructure, like the barrier. And also there's a subtle message. I think if we don't show the software in action, we don't make it easy to activate on our own. It sort of says to me maybe that software isn't very easy to use, you know, if I've got.

Dave Boyce: might have been in one of those companies. I certainly have.

Ken Lempit: I don't know what you're talking about, but um, certainly, you know, the perception is if you know, you give me the keys and let me do the test drive on my own, I'm gonna like it. Right?

Speaker 5: Totally.

Ken Lempit: If you make it really hard to get to the test drive, well, what is that about? So I.

Dave Boyce: Yeah, it just conveys confidence, like, yeah, here's the keys. Take a, take it for a test drive. Whoa, you must be really confident. Hey, why don't we go back in my office and we'll show you some brochures and I'll talk to you about how great it will be once you have the car. Wait, why can't you just let me drive it?

It's right over there. That's a lack of confidence.

Ken Lempit: Absolutely. So. So that's a big change though, right? And I guess a question is, if we're gonna adopt a PLG motion and we're gonna layer on AI, what do we have to rethink? You know, what's the changes we have to make and where's the, where are the potential obstacles to changing the mode?

Dave Boyce: So the first thing, like Ken, I work with teams all over the world on this very kind of issue. And AI is kind of even brought up even more to the forefront, right? Like, we're watching these. Crazy hyperscalers in the AI space, and we're realizing that Cursor and Lovable and Replit and Mistral, they're all going from 0 to a 100 to 500, you know, in some cases like OpenAI to, you know, 2 billion in revenue and when you go to their website, you're not filling out a form to be contacted by a salesperson. You're not. You're just signing up for their service, and you can get a decent amount of way forward into an enterprise license without talking to a human. Now at some point, all of these teams have sales teams.

When I work with teams around the world the first thing that we kind of just have to unlock is this doesn't mean that we don't have humans on the front lines speaking with customers. It does not mean that like, you know. Philanthropic and OpenAI and all of these companies, they actually have forward what they call forward deployed engineers, essentially CSMs, but very technical who are on the front lines, helping you understand and with sleeves rolled up helping you understand how to activate use cases within their software and drive more utilization.

Got it. So there, and there are enterprise salespeople at at Cursor, there are enterprise salespeople at Canva. Like all of these big kind of PLG companies, they have enterprise salespeople. But what we have to change is our thinking about where and when do we deploy it, one of our humans.

There's a woman named Joanna. I can't say her last name. She's Polish. She's an author or Polish.

She says, I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing. I don't want AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes. So we apply that to kind of how we think about rethinking our go to market. Do we really want our frontline salespeople processing renewals or training on the features of the software or running demos?

These are all extremely repeatable processes, like a demo can run itself now, especially with AI. Training can run itself as well. Renewals are literally just a click of the button. You already have the terms, you already have the contract. You already have the configuration. It's just like accept terms, go.

We don't need humans in all of those roles. That would be like laundry and dishes stuff. So if we can rethink what's automatable. And turn that over to the machines and elevate our humans to do the stuff that's not automateable, that's more human, which is like use case generation ROI like our like business case validation, stakeholder management.

That would be the ideal. Then we're running as fast as we can on the automatable stuff and we're being as human as we can on the, on the bespoke stuff.

Ken Lempit: I've also seen some firms actually take the forward deployed engineer model as either a revenue opportunity or a partner revenue opportunity. So either they take it in-house and they use it, you know, to ensure better experience so that they'll deploy them maybe free for a while than paid, or they'll put the partners in that role, which helps them with their adoption and the enterprise as well.

So I think there's a lot. To work through what the opportunities are once you really have a great PLG motion. You know, the other thing about the enterprise, you know, the PLG to enterprise is I think that there is a great opportunity for salespeople to accelerate their processes, right?

Because right now, like, like traditional enterprise sale takes a really long time. You have to find people willing to think about it. You know, there's an awful lot that goes into getting the sale off the ground. Whereas if it's grow from departmental or you know, disparate implementations to an enterprise sale, it's a lot easier to say to somebody, Hey, you got 300 people in 25 groups using the software.

Let's have a chat. That's a very different kind of conversation than, you know, trying to knock on a closed door, right?

Dave Boyce: Yeah, the club are knock on close. I love that. And I've never met Ken. I've never met. As scary as it sounds, I've never met a enterprise sales person who's gotten involved in that situation where they're helping scale impact versus knocking on closed doors. Never met an enterprise sales person that's joined a PLG company who will ever go back

Ken Lempit: Yeah.

Dave Boyce: to closed door knocking.

Yeah.

Ken Lempit: I mean, to me it's like the ultimate, you know, it's not even a warm lead anymore. This is, you know, hot stuff, you know, and you have, obviously you have offers to help grow the enterprise sale, right? you're using it, your users love it. Why isn't everybody doing this? You know, it's a very different life.

Dave Boyce: The CRO for um, he's not the CRO anymore, but he was until just I think a year and a half ago at Atlassian, a big PLG company. He used to say it this way, Ken. He used to say, I won't let my salespeople talk to non-customers. You're like, wait a second. How do you get new customers then exactly what you just described.

No, they're talking to existing customers who have, who self-serve their way into a certain amount of positive impact. And now when the salesperson shows up, and by the way, he doesn't even call 'em salespeople. He calls 'em customer advocates. But now when that person shows up, they're not, what can I sell you there?

How can I help you?

Ken Lempit: Yeah, very different life, lifestyle, corporate experience. It's really cool Um, I wanna dig a little bit more and. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to talk about some other thought leadership in your book Freemium. You kind of highlight that AI and usage-based pricing are removing friction from onboarding and haven't heard that before.

I've heard people trying to talk about the selling impact of usage-based pricing, like getting people's minds to kind of get over, get through that. But tell me about, how usage based pricing actually helps onboarding that's a new one to me and I'd love to understand what you're seeing.

Dave Boyce: First of all, I don't think we know enough. You know, we talked at the top of the show about first principles thinking and framework thinking. I don't think we have a working kind of universal kind of field theory about usage-based pricing. There are a lot of, there are a lot of people pushing the envelope right now.

I think MongoDB is doing a really good job. I think you know, a lot of these AI companies are doing a really good job, but what we've seen kind of from . Early and, and definitive forays into it is if I can just get my hands on something and I don't need to commit to a minimum of, you know, I'm making this up $15,000 a year, I can be deploying an enterprise kind of worthy use case.

That's just lower friction. So I'm gonna scale it down to kinda like, you know, personal use. Like you started using Claude, you didn't use it, you know, thinking that you were eventually gonna be on an enterprise license. You're just using it to solve problems. You find out that it can solve enterprise level problems.

You, you click up into the pro version, you might even click up into an enterprise version to get access to certain features. You might be using Claude code. And you might at some point say, you know what? This is robust enough that I could deploy this across all of my colleagues, and now I'm in a different conversation.

But if I had told you, Hey, our enterprise version of Claude, including Claud code and all this stuff that you're gonna want to use starts at $15,000 a year. That's just a different conversation. So it does blur the lines between sales and onboarding, but I've essentially onboarded myself into the use case into usage.

In PLG, we talk about developing habit, and in a very real way, if we can, we'll help you develop a habit around using our software. Or our product or our service to help you achieve impact in your company. We'll help you develop a habit even before we ask you for money and or maybe we're asking you for kind of usage based, but even before we ask you for an enterprise kind of down payment.

Ken Lempit: Like the money that's asked early on is it's sort of, we used to call it beer money, right? I mean, it's not really important money, right? I guess, you know, I was gonna ask you like, how do you like trial, test this motion? But it almost seems like it's too different to be able to like test the PLG motion if you're coming at it from a traditional model.

So, so how do, how does a SaaS leader approach, Hey I believe it. I think it would be right, but I'm living in the, you know, the seat based world. How do I get there?

Dave Boyce: Yeah. Well, Ken here's where you can, where your listeners can learn from my mistakes, 'cause I've done this wrong. In my opinion, if you wanna build whatever you're gonna be doing. So let's think, let's broaden our minds and PLGs great. It's a great thing to hold onto. I called my book Freemium 'cause it's a great thing to hold onto.

Both of those concepts are smaller than the general trend towards self-service or the general trend towards automating market. So let's just broaden our minds and think about automation. Now I'm in a SaaS company and I think to myself, what should I automate? I generally don't think the first thing I wanna automate is user acquisition and onboarding.

It's very hard to do. It takes a while. It takes one and a half to three years to get that right. And to your point, it's very hard to test that against sales. And I'm barely gonna see anything move on the ARR Y axis in time from, you know, before I lose interest. But what if I could automate something adjacent to what I'm doing?

Like in my current business, like what if I could automate, we use the example of renewals or what if I could automate expansion, like an expansion sale? Again, I have all the configuration done, all the, all the contract terms done. I just need to add new servers. Or seats or locations or whatever my kind of scale metric is.

That could be an automated kind of click click, accept terms. Now it sounds easy. You actually have to build that in. There's gotta be a portal, there's gotta be kind of permissioning. There's gotta be connections into your backend system. You gotta actually build the user interface so that it is intuitive.

You gotta build triggers so that you get it in front of the right people at the right time there. There is a lot that goes into that. But you've got a fighting chance of succeeding within a relatively short amount of time, and you can just automate pieces that you used to throw humans at. As soon as you get that right, you're gonna get addicted to it.

You're gonna start moving upstream and downstream and automating everything you can.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, we had, another podcast guest on his episode isn't even published yet. And he talked about two kinds of problems. He talked about salad problems and brownie problems. So the salad problem is one where if you get 80% of it right, it's still a salad. Right? if you don't put the anchovies in the Caesar salad, it could still be a Caesar salad. You know, hey, if you don't put the eggs in brownies that come out like bricks, right? 80% is not a good solution. Sounds to me like the upgrade, renewal expansion sale is kind of a salad problem. We could get, we could try part of it and get it right and get some muscles and build on our initial learnings.

And I think that's that's pretty exciting little observation. I really appreciate it. I wanna kind of move on, right? We said it was gonna be a little bit of a lightning round just 'cause we had so much to cover.

Dave Boyce: Lets do it, yeah.

Ken Lempit: So I, I wanna talk about, you know, AI content tools and, you know, what makes it possible to really lean in to AI based content generation.

And you've said that in your research, you found that really only works when ICP persona, corporate voice, and more are really deeply encoded, I think, within the organization as well as the tool. So how can we make sure that AI helps us scale high quality content rather than, you know, kind of slop.

Dave Boyce: I think you probably know way more about this world than I do, Ken. Cast your mind back to when we used to hire for content. I know we still do, but you hire agencies for content. You write a, you know, you write a brief, you get it to the agent, you get you know, concept proposals back.

You go back and forth. You look at it, you refine it. You come down to the one that you wanna lean into. It's a kind of weeks longer. Let's say weeks long process and then you do it again, and then you do it again. Okay, cool. In theory, AI can do that in a heartbeat. Like you just put a prompt into OpenAI or into ChatGPT, and you get some content, but there's no way you and I both know that

I don't want marketer A doing that with ChatGPT and marketer B doing that with Claude and marketer C doing that with you know, with Mistral and just having it kind like, accelerate volume but not ensure quality. There was a reason we wrote that brief when we handed it off to our agency there because we were thoughtful about it.

We had an ICP in mind. And so if I wanna scale, if I wanna get the benefits of kind of speed that come outta AI as well as the thoughtful benefits of like programming it, I gotta have some sort of, kind of guardrails in there. So there are solutions out there for AI content generation that allow you to do that strategy work.

And then let that strategy work be inherited by each subsequent products or project. So think about like the ICP that I defined is, you know, I can select that for project B and project C and project D, the voice that I defined. I can select that for subsequent projects. And then even though the form is different or the ask is different or the content is different, it's still gonna follow essentially like my brand guidelines.

And that's the difference between kind of ad hoc use of Gen AI for content generation and more systematic use of Gen AI for content generation at scale.

Ken Lempit: I think that's great explanation. I really appreciate it, and it's like the creative. Of brief was really training the agency, right? So you would have this whole training exercise when you onboarded an agency, you know, take a few months, right? You have to learn the brand voice, you have to learn the design constructs.

You have to meet the people that are running the programs and understand their preferences. So maybe what we could say here is we're kind of compressing the amount of time it takes to, train the, you know, the AI agency, right? It, it could become your agency at a prompt. So, so the fundamentals haven't changed, but maybe the tool set has.

Dave Boyce: The tool sets change, and it's the same with, you know, we think about an AI agent being a frontline salesperson. Okay, that doesn't mean you don't have to train and manage and coach it. Just 'cause it's a robot doesn't mean it doesn't need training, managing and coaching. Just 'cause your content agent is a robot doesn't mean it doesn't need training, managing and coaching.

It's not just magic, like you gotta actually program it and set the parameters. I love that.

Ken Lempit: So, all of this new world is awesome, but we still meet CROs and heads of sales and marketing who are being held to kind of previous era metrics. They've got the predictable revenue model metrics being asked for by their board or C-suite.

So how do GTM teams and their management. Change how they're measured. You know, I'm a big fan of Kyle Poer. I don't know if you read his stuff. But, you know, he's calling for a very different look at what that go to market looks like and is measured. How do you coach your clients to rethink what they're measuring and how they're gonna be able to predict their own success?

Dave Boyce: Yeah. Kyle's a great guy I love the way he thinks. I actually don't think the metrics. Need to change per se, Ken. I mean, Winning by Design has a, a pretty well known model called the Bow Tie model. It's a data model for how, you know, a customer moves through the various stages of consideration and, and purchase.

And then how it opens back up into the right, what we call the right hand side of the bow tie, which is you know, onboarding, adoption, retention and expansion. Those are the phases of a customer journey no matter what. Now, whether I'm doing a predictable revenue thing and handing off from an SDR to an AE in the front half of that journey, or whether I'm doing an inbound thing or whether I'm doing a PLG thing or whether I'm doing an enterprise thing, I can still measure it the same way.

But I think Ken, once we have that data model in place, we what we wanna measure. Is a go-to market motion against peer go-to market motion. So I think what Kyle often said, you know, he publishes PLG benchmarks. So I'm not comparing a PLG company to an SMB company or a enterprise company. I'm comparing a PLG company to a PLG company.

Those benchmarks weren't available before. They still follow basically those same phases, same conversion rates, kind of moving down the journey. But yeah, we gotta get out of this mindset where the board says, Hey, I'm used to seeing SQL, you know, MQL SQL opportunity close.

And I'm used to seeing them at these rates. Okay, got it. But we're running a different business. When I sat down with Kyle, he's like, you sit in a PLG board meeting, it feels so different than when you sit in an SLG board meeting. You sit in a sales led board meeting. It's all about how big is the pipeline?

How many, how much sales capacity do we have? How can we get these over the line? When you sit in a PLG board meeting, it's like, okay, well, if we hit what we said we were gonna hit, you know, we could, we could amp it if we want to goose marketing a little, or we don't have to goose marketing, but the flywheel is doing all the work.

So it's like a low stress hitting today. This quarter's number is a low stress activity, whereas hitting this quarter's number is a high stress activity in a sales led company.

Ken Lempit: I wanna go to the right side, I guess, of the bow tie with you.

And talk about, you know, lifestyle marketing, lifecycle marketing as a, maybe an overlooked growth lever. So how can we activate our users as an audience who could become advocates for us. You know, from your point of view, you know, what does a strong lifecycle marketing look like?

Dave Boyce: I know we're in lightning round mode, Ken, and we could spend all day on this, but you know, just if you just think about every one of your customers is a collection of users and every one of those users has experience with your product or service. And when we talk to, at the top of the show about Gen Z and Millennials consulting with their peer networks for advice on.

You know what the right solution would be. Guess who those peers are? They're the users of your solution. So if the users of your solution are sharing with their peers that's a good place to be. Then you've got wind in your sails and we talk, and that can drive compounding growth. If the users of your solution have been neglected or they're getting treated poorly or they don't actually even have the opportunity to share.

Those could all be things that basically just, you're just playing beneath your privilege. So what I like to do, Ken, is pave those natural paths that already exist, like I wanna make it easy for a happy user of the solution to share with her peers. So I want to get her on stage.

I wanna get her a platform. I wanna get her into a room with her peers. I want to actually show up where she is with her peers or get her the stories that she needs or get her the tools that she needs. Anything that would help her share the story or anything that would help new users see that cool kids are over there, people like me are over there.

I actually want to pave those paths and that again, it's. Same as what you said before, it's way different than knocking on a closed door at this point. It's literally using the momentum that I already have in my user base to go generate more users and pull them in on, in this case, on a warm basis, but not on a cold basis.

Ken Lempit: Yeah. That's great. Thank you. And you're right, we're skipping rocks over the pond here at this point. And I'm gonna give you the last one. So we're near the year end, so. SaaS leaders rethinking their go-to market as they're looking ahead to next year. What's the one change that you think would have the biggest impact for firms you might meet?

And I realize this is a really broad set of humanity that, that you might meet, but you know, where, what are you seeing for 2026? What's important?

Dave Boyce: Yeah, so we, we have to get ourselves in, in a systems thinking mindset because systems scale, people do not scale. Systems scale. So now I'm not literally saying, even though I think this is true, I'm not literally saying like, bits and bytes scale and you know, and cellular organisms don't scale. That's not what I'm saying.

But I'm saying even if you have a people based. Operation, you want it to be running on a system. You want it to be defined by defined processes, defined metrics, like you said before, defined and repeatable things. This does get to the kind of predictable revenue methodology, but I do wanna know if I'm running a people based operation, I want to know that it's running on a system. And then anywhere I can, Ken, I want to actually automate pieces of that. So once I have it defined, I wanna automate pieces of that. And I wanna think about this as a system. So in the past when we were doing 2026 planning, we might say, oh we need to hit X

revenue or bookings number. Therefore I need, you know, divide by ACV I need Y number of reps. We got Q number of reps right now, so that means I gotta hire these reps. They have a lead time. Boom, now solved. Right? No, there's so much more to it. How are, you know, what system are those reps running?

And does the system output produce better system input? The way you were talking about with lifecycle marketing, right? Like, so it's not just the left side of the bow tie, it's the left and the right side of the bow tie as a system, self-reinforcing that means I as a revenue leader have gotta kind of up my game into systems mindset and think about all aspects of it and not just the linear kind of sales capacity planning model.

Ken Lempit: That's awesome. Well, that's a great place to land our episode. Thank you so much. Dave Boyce for joining us. If people wanna learn more about

Winning by Design or reach out to you, how can they do that?

Dave Boyce: Amazing. Well, winningbydesign.com is easy. We give a lot of stuff away. You can, like I said, you can sign up for the journal and get involved in our Growth Institute. I am active on LinkedIn. You can find me there. I have a Substack. It's just Dave Boyce and I've got a newsletter and I'd love to connect with you there.

Ken Lempit: That's awesome. And if folks wanna reach me, I'm on Linkedin/in/kenlempit. My advertising and demand generation for software companies is Austin Lawrence Group. We're at austinlawrence.com and if Dave Boyce hasn't convinced you, you should be subscribing to the SaaS backwards podcast. I'm not sure who will.

Dave Boyce, thanks so much for being here.

Dave Boyce: Let's do it. Thank you so much.