In this episode, Vladan sits down with Rehman Abdur — co-founder at Saber and a sales veteran with over 15 years of experience across the globe, from Bahrain and Berlin to Amsterdam and Bucharest. Rehman was one of the first sales reps at MessageBird, climbed the ladder with six promotions in five years to become VP of Sales EMEA, and then founded Saber, a sales intelligence platform. He and Vladan met about five years ago, and Rehman has been a long-time ambassador of Nobel. Topics: the mindset that separates top performers, sales math and mentorship, learning leadership the hard way, hiring for hunger over logos, and how to do outbound in the age of AI.
Vladan: Welcome everyone to the Nobel Podcast — today we have a wonderful guest with us: Rehman Abdur. He has been in sales for over 15 years and he’s been quite on an adventure — he lived in Bahrain, in Berlin, in Amsterdam and in Bucharest. He started at MessageBird as one of the first sales reps, made six promotions, eventually became VP of Sales for EMEA, and then started his own company, Saber. We met each other somewhere along the way, about five years ago, and have always had great contact — he’s been a great ambassador of Nobel. So thanks a lot for that, and looking forward to diving a little deeper into your history and your story today.
Rehman: Absolutely. You guys have been the creator of the entire SaaS recruiting space in the Netherlands — so of course, great to be here and great to partner with you on this.
Vladan: That’s a very nice title, thanks. So let’s start with your international adventures — you have a very interesting story to tell.
Rehman: I’ve lived in some 10 or 12 countries. International school kid — dad used to work for an airline. I grew up in multiple places: in the Middle East, in Canada, in India, where my mom’s from. And I ended up moving to places like Bahrain, Brazil, Egypt, Romania, Germany, the Netherlands — spent some time in Portugal and some time in Southeast Asia. But the Netherlands is home, and Amsterdam is where the heart is.
Vladan: Nice. So you’re not planning to move anytime soon?
Rehman: I think life’s too short to say I’m not planning to move anywhere — but for now, I feel settled here.
Your quota is the floor, not the ceiling
Vladan: Speaking about Amsterdam — MessageBird is of course born out of Amsterdam, one of the Netherlands’ most successful tech companies. You started as one of the first sales reps and made six promotions in five years, all the way up to VP of Sales EMEA. My question is: what is your number one career tip for somebody who might be in the trenches now as an AE and wants to become that VP of Sales one day?
Rehman: I think the most important thing to know, if you’re in a sales career, is that growth can only come when you’re fully determined to do your current job exceptionally well, and make sure you’re the best of the best at what you do. A lot of times I see sales reps having a bit of an attitude, which ultimately ends with them being labeled as lazy salespeople. But once you’re determined that you’re going to go above and beyond, you start thinking about the job differently.
Everyone gets just 24 hours a day — that’s it. But some people are a hell of a lot more successful than others. The main reason is you need to have the drive — you need to take as many shots as possible. You can’t be satisfied with having your quota as your target. Your quota needs to be the floor you need to hit. Once you start thinking in that direction — what am I going to do to achieve 200%, 300%, 400% — you start making different kinds of decisions. You’re not working a bunch of SMB deals. Of course, if you’re starting early in your career, SMB is likely all you get to work with, and it’s important to excel in that role — but do your utmost best to graduate from that role as soon as possible. And the only way you can do that is by being really exceptional and proving to your leadership that you’re capable of more.
Once you get to that point, just focus on where the money comes from. Don’t treat the quota as your goal. If my quota for this year is 2.5 million, how do I end this year at 7.5 million? Then you make drastically different decisions. A bunch of salespeople are genuinely happy when they receive an inbound that’s a 100k opportunity, while they’re carrying a multi-million euro quota. That should not be a thing. You should be okay with saying no to certain opportunities, knowing the bigger money is down the line with companies A, B and C — and your full focus and energy needs to go towards those kinds of opportunities.
There are ups and downs — sales is a tough career, because everything is driven by what you’re able to achieve within a quarter. So you can’t completely lose sight of the goals and targets assigned to you; you need to work some smaller deals. But you can’t put 80% of your energy into those smaller deals. Most of your energy needs to go to your tier one accounts — and your tier one accounts cannot be more than ten accounts.
“Your quota needs to be the floor, not the ceiling.”
Mentors and sales math
Vladan: That’s an interesting answer — let’s unpack it a little. I always say the Pareto principle applies in sales: usually 20% of the reps account for 80% of the results. That’s also what you’re saying — don’t be one of the “lazy” 80%, make sure you really want to become the best of the best. So what’s your concrete tip? How do you develop yourself to become the best of the best?
Rehman: I was insanely lucky to work with some extraordinary salespeople. So I don’t know if I have a direct tip for someone without a mentor — but then the number one tip is going to be: find someone exceptional around you. It could be someone within the organization you’re working in, someone from a past job, someone you’ve seen on LinkedIn. There are many people who are going to be ready to support you through this journey — everyone who’s gone up through the ranks is going to be open to supporting someone who’s still trying to get up the ranks. That’s the first and most important tip.
The number two tip: learn to do math. It’s very important, because not many salespeople start their year, once their quota has been assigned, thinking: what is the exact amount of pipeline I need to generate to hit that quota? What is my win rate right now? Where exactly is my win rate dropping, and what skills and capabilities do I need to learn to shorten my sales cycle and ultimately close more of those deals that are exceptional for the company?
Vladan: I love that. So embrace the success metrics, make them your own, and understand what you need to do to become a better version of yourself.
Rehman: Absolutely.
Learning leadership the hard way
Vladan: And then once you get into that leadership role — how was that for you back then? I often hear that the best performers aren’t necessarily the best leaders. How was that for you? Did you need to learn a lot of new skills, or was it quite natural?
Rehman: It’s a funny story. My own self-reflection on my first sales role is that I absolutely sucked at my first sales role. So I wouldn’t necessarily say the best salespeople are not great sales leaders, or that they are — I just think it’s a skill to learn. And if you’re someone who’s come from the trenches, who’s learned how to go from SDR to account executive, from an SMB role to an enterprise role to a strategic role — you pretty much have the growth mindset. That’s the most important thing. You need to know there’s a lot you don’t know, and there’s a big delta you need to bridge. Once you have that, you’re going to recognize a bunch of your failures — and once you learn to recognize your failures, you’re going to improve.
A funny story around this: when I took over my first sales leadership job, little did I know I was assigned the territory that was, in the history of the business, the worst performing territory. As I took up the job, it continued to be the worst performing territory — and I did not know if it was because of me or because of the territory itself. Six to eight months passed, and the business was very forgiving in helping me grow into becoming a sales leader — in helping me understand that it’s a very different skill set: knowing which are the most important deals you need to win as a sales and business leader, versus coaching a team to get the same level of skills, capabilities and confidence so they can autonomously go out and do that.
After many months of trying and continuously failing, we had to rebuild the house from scratch — we had to get a whole new sales team. And when we got this entire new team, I decided to go against the traditional path. Some of my peers were looking at the biggest logos in the market: can I get a rep from Salesforce to come sell for us? Can I get a rep from Adobe? Which are amazing logos, and I’m sure they have great salespeople. But the main rubric I was driven by: does the salesperson have a chip on their shoulder? Are they hungry enough? Can they fight the fight, and are they determined to win? Once you have that, you can weaponize it. And then you’re able to build a really successful sales organization based on a bunch of values — whether it’s resilience, building an amazing culture, knowing how to share your failures, or ensuring the team is on a continuous path of learning and training through weekly activities.
Vladan: Love that. So basically, some of these soft skills are irreplaceable — drive, hunger, willingness to succeed — and those are maybe the most important characteristics of a great account executive or sales rep.
Rehman: I would go as far as saying those characteristics are universal in terms of what makes someone successful. Not only in a sales role, not only as a sales leader, not only as an entrepreneur — in absolutely any profession. You need to have that mindset, that hunger, that strive to win.
“Does the salesperson have a chip on their shoulder? Are they hungry enough? Once you have that, you can weaponize it.”
Hiring for hunger: the WhatsApp interviews
Vladan: I fully agree. Let’s translate that into hiring. When you interview somebody, everybody’s going to say “I have a lot of drive and I never give up.” How do you cut through the noise and select the person that really has that drive? Any specific tips?
Rehman: That’s a fantastic question. Like most other companies, we had a very structured interview process — an HR round, a round with peers, a round with hiring managers, et cetera. What I did: the moment a candidate had passed stage three of the interview process, when there was a bit more confidence across the team that this was going to be a good candidate — that’s when I would deviate from the process. I would connect with the candidate over WhatsApp. With absolutely everyone I’ve hired, I’ve had multiple multi-hour calls just to talk to them and understand their life background and what actually drives them.
These would be very non-conventional questions. I’d ask about their parents. I’d ask where they grew up. I’d ask how many times they’ve moved countries — and if they haven’t, why not. I’d ask about their biggest failures outside of the sales profession, how they felt, and what they did to overcome those failures. A bunch of experiences outside of their day-to-day job, to understand what kind of person they really are, what they do in the light of challenges, whether they have the capacity to keep pushing, whether they’re optimistic about life in general — and whether they’re going to fight another day in order to win.
Vladan: I love that. The process is the process — and I think a lot of people can learn from this. You don’t need to stick fully to the process; you can take your own interview stages into your own hands and ask all the questions you need. Because that one hour, or those two hours, can only give so many answers.
Rehman: Absolutely. And there’s another thing — everyone is smart, especially in the sales profession. We’re very good at interviewing, generally. People come prepared for their interviews; companies share in advance which topics are going to be covered, so everyone comes in their best shape. But when you take a call on WhatsApp and you’re talking about things which are non-traditional, people are caught off guard. In some cases they perform exceptionally well. In some cases they just open up and say, “the most important thing to me is closing my laptop at 5 p.m., and that is it.” Which is great for some companies — but that did not work for us. That was one of the rubrics I was looking at when hiring: can they go above and beyond, also when it comes to their time? Because the sales profession is not something that ends at 5 p.m. Whenever your clients are active, if you’re able to respond to them, you’re able to build more trust and eventually win that deal.
Vladan: Yeah, 100%. And when you take those WhatsApp calls, it does something else too — it builds rapport with the candidate you want to hire. Imagine the candidate is also talking to three other hiring managers in other processes, but you’re the person building this rapport for hours — that also puts you in a better position to actually hire your preferred candidate.
Rehman: An interview process is not very different from a sales process, is it? You’re trying to build the exact same trust with someone — except in an interview process you have very little time. So you need to do your best to build that trust. And as you said, there’s plenty of competition in the market: how do you stand out as the right company, and as the best sales leader that someone is willing to come work for?
Founding Saber: every sales cycle starts with a signal
Vladan: Super great point — take notes, everyone. And then, after your time at MessageBird, you decided to start your own company, Saber — a tool that helps other salespeople achieve their goals. How was that transition? You were working for a well-established company, then starting your own company, having to sell a product that’s not known to the public yet.
Rehman: When I joined MessageBird, we were a small company — we still operated out of a garage in De Baarsjes. During the early years we experienced an insane amount of growth, and during my entire time there we continued experiencing incredible growth. One of my partners in crime during my entire MessageBird experience — one of my close friends — was the VP of Product at MessageBird. We had some very healthy conflicts around how my team could go out and make even more money on the products his team was building. And one of the things we kept rubbing our heads against was the initial velocity in building pipeline, and identifying the best companies in the market to sell our solutions to. We ended up investing a lot of money in third-party solutions to help solve this problem. Unfortunately, none of them worked.
Towards the end of the MessageBird experience, this partner in crime — who’s now my co-founder and the CEO of our company, Saber — and I decided: the next thing we do is going to be solving this problem. The main problem we identified: you can hire a salesperson who is extremely skilled and extremely hungry, but most skilled, hungry, capable salespeople are not failing because they’re not doing their job well. They’re failing because they don’t know when to reach out to someone, whether someone’s actually in-market, exactly what to say about the challenges that person or company is facing, and how to translate all of that and connect it with the solution they’re selling.
So the main thesis we came up with: every successful salesperson and every successful sales cycle starts with a signal — a signal representative of change within the prospect organization. The entire offering of Saber revolves around giving sales reps the best signals that exist, helping them understand the exact needs and challenges at an account level and at a contact level, and then connecting all the dots to create messaging that doesn’t scream AI and doesn’t look like a template. So when they reach out, they have the highest chance of hearing back from their prospect — which ultimately leads to closing more of those big enterprise deals.
Vladan: Interesting. And did you then use your own tool to get your own new clients? How does your own sales process look?
Rehman: We 100% use our own tool.
Vladan: Eat your own dog food.
Rehman: A hundred percent. We’re early on — 18 months into our journey. Our sales process is completely outbound driven. We use our own tool to get the right signals, to build the right list of companies that have either recently hired a salesperson, hired a sales leader, or are out there looking for reps doing outbound. We use this intelligence, get a few more signals for those companies, and use our own tool to multi-thread into these companies, open opportunities and progress them.
“Until you have built your own point of view, you don’t have the right to reach out to the CMO.”
Outbound in 2025: research, point of view, then reach out
Vladan: That sounds quite sophisticated. Let’s translate that to the situation of a sales rep currently doing outbound. What is the number one tip for someone who may not have all these tools available? What’s your tip for doing outbound sales in 2025?
Rehman: Especially since the advent of AI tools — ChatGPT, et cetera — buyers are receiving more unsolicited messages than ever before. It has become extremely difficult for a salesperson to stand out. The best way to stand out is by building trust early on, and the only way to do that is to have really deep intelligence into what someone is going through.
Imagine you have absolutely no tools at your disposal — you’re working off a free LinkedIn account. All you can do is go on LinkedIn, look for a few companies, look for a few contacts. So be active on there. Keep searching every day, using a few keywords, to understand what changes are happening within the market. As an example: if you’re selling a martech solution, keep looking out for which companies are hiring a new CMO or a new VP of Marketing. What are the new tools they’re buying? Assess that based on the job descriptions on LinkedIn — most companies will mention it: we’re using Figma, or HubSpot Marketing Cloud, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You get to learn their tech stack, and their exact needs and priorities, also driven by the job descriptions. Get all of that into a Google Doc. Create your own point of view on what’s actually happening within that company. Once you have that, connect the dots to your own product.
When you do your first reach-out: do not pitch your product. If you’re reaching out to a large company, take paper and pen and draw the entire buying account map. Know who the CMO is, who the VP of Marketing is, who the Director of Marketing is. And when you do your first reach-out, do not ever, under any circumstances, reach out all the way at the top. First reach out to the first-line or second-line managers, and only do discovery with them. Your goal here is not to sell.
Vladan: Get information.
Rehman: Exactly — be an information gatherer. Keep building your point of view. Keep getting to a point where you’re able to send the CMO a message along the lines of: “I spoke with your Director of Marketing, Vlad, who mentioned challenges A, B, C. Do you also agree that these are the challenges you’re facing?” Until you get to that point, you don’t have the right to reach out to the CMO. Once you’ve done all your research, spoken with the first-line and second-line managers, and you have an entire point of view — then you’re able to create a message that’s impossible for the CMO to reject. Only then reach out, use your network, and you’re going to open doors with that company and that CMO.
Vladan: I love it. What percentage of sales reps is doing it this way, you think? Just an estimation.
Rehman: Based on the customers we’ve closed: a very low percentage of sales reps actually do this, even in the most successful sales organizations. I expected the Pareto principle to apply here — but I think I’ve seen under 10% of sales reps successfully do this. In the sales profession we tend to get too desperate. Sometimes we forget that our territories are limited — we have a list of 10, 20, 100 accounts we can reach out to, and there’s absolutely no way we can burn these accounts. These relationships need to be some of the most important relationships of our career. And we don’t necessarily behave that way when we send a 14-step sequence saying, “Hi, I hope you’re doing well.”
Vladan: Fair enough. And I think what you just mentioned is actually an advocacy for sales, right? If you’re starting out in sales and you compare this approach to the sequencing and random calling of people — this sounds so much cooler, so much more exciting and strategic. It’s actually a way to build your career in sales, as opposed to just blasting out messages and emails. Something to really think about.
Rehman: The best salespeople I’ve met are also content creators. By that I’m not referring to the podcast we’re doing right now — I’m referring to people creating videos to send across and get attention, audio notes to send across, or specific decks and documents tailored to the persona of that person. By doing that, they’re also showing: I have committed my time and invested in creating something especially for you that’s going to be a hell of a lot more useful to you. That is how trust is built early on. Especially in a marketplace — talking about martech again — where there are over 100,000 martech companies out there, you need to stand out against those.
Vladan: Nice. Thanks for all your great tips today, Rehman — and thank you for our partnership in general. Really looking forward to seeing Saber on the growth journey ahead, and I’m pretty sure you have a lot to offer to reps out there. If you’re interested in following Rehman, make sure to add him on LinkedIn — or give him an email. And if you want to hear more of this kind of content, make sure to follow this podcast; we have more guests lined up. Thanks again, and I wish you a great rest of your day.
Rehman: Thanks for having me here.
