Insight · Commentary · On an outcome-based world
Jacco van der Kooij — the founder of Winning by Design and the man who gave us the bow tie — posted a list on LinkedIn this week that is going to end up in board decks for years. His argument: as B2B moves into an outcome-based world, there is nothing meaningful left to “close.” The contract becomes the starting line, and the commercial relationship must be earned through results — adoption, consumption, measurable impact. He walks through a dozen from→to shifts: pricing from seats toward consumption, forecasting from what will close toward what customers will adopt and expand, qualification from “will they buy” toward “will they grow,” compensation from contracts signed toward value consumed, the operating model from funnel to full bow tie.
Much of the reaction focuses on pricing and comp. But one row in his list should have every enablement professional sitting up, because it names them directly: the influencers of the commercial system shift from “RevOps and Enablement” to RevOps, Enablement, plus the CFO and FP&A.
Read that again. In the outcome-based world, enablement doesn’t get displaced. It gets promoted — into a room where finance sits at the same table. The real question: what do we bring into that room?
The model transforms in a slide. The organization transforms in quarters.
Every row on that list changes what people must do. No row — no list, anywhere — changes whether the organization can absorb it. A pricing page can move from seats to consumption in a sprint. But the sellers who must now qualify on “will they grow the business,” the CS teams who inherit a relationship where every failed deployment burns money, the managers who must forecast adoption instead of signatures — they are all still running on the vocabulary, processes, and habits of the closing era.
That absorption gap is enablement’s home turf. It always was. We just called it smaller things: onboarding, content, training. The outcome-based transition is the moment those smaller things reveal themselves as one big thing — organizational readiness — and the moment enablement either claims it or watches a consultancy invoice for it.
If the transformation is that big, where does a resource-constrained enablement team begin? Not with a platform. With a page.
Consider what the outcome-based world does to your commercial vocabulary. “Closed” used to be the best-defined word in the building — it had a signature attached. Now the words that matter are adopted, consumed, outcome milestone, expansion signal, healthy account. Ask five people what “adopted” means and you get five answers — which means every adoption forecast, every consumption-based comp plan, and every renewal conversation is being built on words nobody has defined.
We know what defining the words is worth. Jordan and Kelly’s research in Harvard Business Review found an 18 percent revenue-growth gap between companies that clearly defined their sales process and those that didn’t. Forrester has long estimated that 60 to 70 percent of B2B sales content goes unused — not because it’s bad, but because nobody agreed which stage or situation it maps to. Both findings come from the closing era. Add Jacco’s point that in an outcome model every failed deployment consumes people, inference, and advocacy — and undefined language stops being an efficiency leak and becomes a direct cost driver.
The starting artifact is a Commercial Dictionary: one page, owned and versioned like a product. Maximum 15 terms, one sentence each. Stage transitions defined by evidence that is customer-verifiable, never seller-declared — a discipline that matters double in an outcome world, because outcomes are by definition customer-verified. “The customer’s usage crossed the agreed health threshold” is evidence. “The account feels sticky” is the new “they loved the demo.” (The dictionary format comes from the Language pillar of this framework, open source under CC BY-SA 4.0.)
The outcome-era twist: your dictionary’s second version matters more than its first. A dictionary that defines lead, MQL, and commit but not adopted, consumed, and outcome milestone is a closing-era document. Versioning it forward is how enablement makes the transformation concrete while everyone else is still debating the pricing model.
One more consequence of “the contract is the starting line” lands squarely in enablement’s lap: the Sales→CS handover just became the most expensive handover in the company.
In the closing era, a sloppy handover cost some goodwill and a bumpy onboarding. In the outcome era — where revenue only exists if deployment succeeds — a sloppy handover burns the deal after you’ve paid to win it. The fix is not a better handover email. It’s a handover contract: what is handed over, what evidence is attached (the success criteria the customer confirmed during the sale, not a summary the AE wrote from memory), what the acceptance criteria are, and — the part every organization omits — the return path when CS rejects the handover. If CS can’t reject a handover, the contract is theater.
Who designs, documents, and trains that contract? Look around the room. It’s us.
I’d genuinely like to know where practitioners land, so let me end with the questions rather than the answers:
The outcome-based world is coming whether our organizations are ready or not. The model will arrive in a slide deck. Whether it survives contact with the organization — that part is on us.
SOURCES
Jacco van der Kooij (Winning by Design), LinkedIn, August 2026. Jordan & Kelly, “Companies with a Formal Sales Process Generate More Revenue,” Harvard Business Review, 2015. Forrester Research on B2B sales content utilization. The One-Team Growth Engine maturity model is open source under CC BY-SA 4.0.