Vladan: Hello and welcome everyone to the Nobel Podcast. Today we have Koen in the studio. Koen and I met a few years ago when you were still at RocketX — you had the ambition to go to America, I remember correctly. But that didn’t happen, and you joined a company called WP SEO AI — let’s call it SEO AI moving forward — as a sales leader, which turned out to be a great career move. Maybe let’s start there. How has your journey at SEO AI been?
Koen: Thanks for asking, and thanks for having me. It’s been an amazing ride. I remember when I took the opportunity to start here — it was just me on the kitchen table at home. Now we are with 120 people in the Amsterdam office. It has been an absolutely crazy ride so far.
Vladan: It’s definitely one of the fastest growing companies I’ve come across in recent years in the Netherlands. Really interesting that you’ve played such a pivotal part in that. But how was it for you in the beginning, moving from a consultancy sales role at RocketX to a software sales role?
Koen: It’s a good question. At RocketX we were targeting mainly B2B SaaS companies, so I spent quite some time talking to founders and C-level about different aspects of the business — sometimes capital, sometimes people, sometimes the customer side of things. I did get quite a lot of insight into how SaaS businesses work. But the moment you actually start working for one, some things are new and you need to figure them out. It was quite a big shift, but the understanding I’d built up at RocketX was really helpful.
Vladan: And when you joined, how much revenue was there at the time?
Koen: When I joined there was only Finland. I was the first person to start in Amsterdam, so in the Netherlands there was zero revenue. In Finland they were doing around 150K a month.
Vladan: 150K ARR basically.
Koen: No, net new business — 150K every month. But they had only been around for four or five months at that point.
Building from zero: cold calls, friends, and commission-only freelancers
Vladan: Looking back at that first period — what did you do and how did the growth kickstart?
Koen: When I joined, one of the first things I did was map my network — figure out who I know, who I can contact, who I can reach out to. Then it was just me standing in my kitchen doing 150 cold calls a day, trying to get in front of people. I started particularly with friends and people I knew well, with a simple message: hey, I work for this new company, I’m the first boots on the ground — is it okay if I pitch my story to you? My main goal is not to sell you something, but to learn, because you’ll probably ask me questions I don’t know the answers to. And with you, that’s fine. And if it happens that you want to buy, that’s a nice win too.
So I had a lot of those conversations. In that first month two of my friends bought, which really helped. From there we kept building — hired more people, initially freelance and commission-only, and we started from there.
Vladan: That’s also an interesting model. Would you recommend it? What are the upsides and downsides?
Koen: I think especially in the beginning it’s really helpful, because you get to hire quite experienced people. If you’re a freelancer jumping onto a new journey on commission only, you have to be very convinced in yourself that you can actually do it. Those people don’t join if there’s no strong product, no traction, if they don’t believe in what the company can actually do. What I heard from those freelancers early on was that they believed in the vision — and particularly in the fast growth, because it took us about four months to hit the first million ARR from Finland. That really helped in getting the freelancers on board.
Vladan: So they saw the potential for their own earnings and success. And what led to that early success — first million in four months is something a lot of companies would be jealous of.
Koen: The first four months I wasn’t really part of — that was Finland. But the reason we were founded is because our CEO experienced the problem himself. He had a competitor with one of his former businesses that was way smaller but everywhere outranking him on Google. He thought: how can that happen? He found out they had way more content. So he developed this product basically for himself, to be able to compete and rank against his competitor. And because it was founded on a problem someone experienced themselves, there were a lot of other people with the same problem. If you develop a solution that solves your own problem and that problem is shared widely — then it’s way easier to sell.
Vladan: Fully understood. You’re convicted, you stand behind the product, you’re a real advocate. And if you add on top of that the ability to hire good salespeople with barely any financial risk because there are no salaries to pay — in your case that was a really good recipe for the first year, year and a half.
Koen: Exactly.
How the sales motion evolved
Vladan: How does your sales motion work — then and now?
Koen: Let’s start with then and morph into now. When I started, late February 2024, it was just me, then a couple of months later a few freelancers — everybody doing 360 sales. Cold calling your own network, finding your own leads, doing everything through to closing yourself. Then last year in September, Maze joined — an epic hire, done by you guys. When Maze joined, things changed big time because we finally had a BDR producing meetings, and he was producing them in large quantities. The month after, three more BDRs joined, then three more. In December we did our first 100K ARR month with the Netherlands team.
When money comes in and people are immediately producing cash, you get to hire more and more. Now we have around 25 BDRs in the Netherlands, 10 in Germany, one in the UK. They’re producing around 1,200 SQLs every month, feeding the AEs, and the AEs follow up from there.
Vladan: That’s crazy. And your average deal size is around 12 to 13K, right? I see a lot of sales organisations moving away from the SDR/AE model, especially at that deal size. But it seems to work really well for you. Is there a secret behind it?
Koen: I think if your deal value is around our mark, I understand why a lot of companies move away from this motion. In our case though, the velocity is really fast — it takes around 25 days in Germany and 30 days in the Netherlands to close a deal. Win rates are also relatively high compared to B2B SaaS in general. If your win rates are good and your velocity is good, this motion can be the right one for you.
“We don’t hire leaders from abroad — we promote from within. We’ve been saying that from day one and we’ve never hired any manager externally.”
Hiring young talent and building a culture of growth
Vladan: You’ve hired a lot of young sales talent. There are typically two approaches — hire young and develop them in-house, or buy experienced talent from outside. You’ve clearly gone one route. What’s behind the success there?
Koen: One of the core elements of our philosophy is that we don’t hire leaders from abroad — we promote from within. We’ve been saying that from day one, and we’ve never hired any manager externally. I think that gives people confidence: I can actually grow here. If you live up to your word on that, it motivates people to go the extra mile and put in the work. And the culture we have allows for a lot of freedom, but is also built on trust that people will give it everything. Those ingredients really help.
Vladan: And are there any specific things you’ve done that make it relatively easy to attract young sales talent?
Koen: The growth we have really helps, and we emphasize that throughout the whole recruitment process. One thing we also did was choose our office very deliberately. We started in my kitchen, then someone else’s kitchen because they lived somewhere a bit bigger. Then we got a tiny budget for our first office, and my business partner Mika and I looked at it and thought: that’s not going to give us the office we want. We were five people, it was going up and down, and I had doubts whether people would believe it was actually working here given the lack of traction in the Netherlands at that point. So we decided to chip in some of our own money, go beyond the budget, and that’s when we got our first office at Mindspace — a really nice co-working space. People would come in and see this great office with a tiny team, and I think that really helped with hiring.
Vladan: I remember one thing that stood out about your approach — with every candidate on the verge of signing, you’d send a super detailed email, sometimes a full page, with all the reasons why you think they should join. Really selling the opportunity. I don’t see a lot of people doing that, but it always led to a great response.
Koen: I always see it like closing a deal. The moment you send out an offer, you don’t just sit there and wait and hope the person has some positive internal conversations and signs. With hiring, if you send someone an offer, you pick up the phone, you think hard about: if I really want this person, how do I make them sign? What doubts might they have? What did they mention as reasons to join? You call them, walk through it, then send it over email too — because you know they’ll talk to their partner, their friends, maybe their parents. Everything you tell them over the phone, they’ll lose some of the detail. But if they have it over email as well, they’ll go back to it.
Compensation: how to structure BDR, AE and CS incentives
Vladan: Let’s talk compensation. How do you structure it correctly across BDRs, AEs and CS?
Koen: It’s always been a bit of a topic. For BDRs — you want to reward them for booking meetings, and specifically meetings that actually happen. But if you solely reward on the number of meetings booked, you just get meetings. You trust your people, but you allow for a potential way of gaming the system. So we went with a hybrid model. There are brackets: you need to book a minimum number of meetings — say 20 — to be eligible at all. Between 20 and 30 you get X percentage, 30 to 40 you get higher, and so on. But you only get paid on the deals that actually close from your meetings. So if your meetings produce no revenue, you don’t get rewarded. If they do produce revenue and you booked a lot of meetings, you get a higher percentage.
Vladan: And for AEs?
Koen: Closed-won deals. A percentage on every deal, with a threshold — the first 10K per month there’s no commission, and after that commission kicks in.
Vladan: And you’re happy with that model?
Koen: It works for now. We pay out AE commissions when customers pay, not when they sign — otherwise we’re frontloading a lot of money every month, which isn’t sustainable as a business.
Vladan: What about CS?
Koen: CS has base salaries. But we have a model where if an AE brings a CS person into a meeting to provide deeper product insights, that CS person gets a fixed bonus if the deal closes. And sometimes we incentivize specific things the business needs at that moment — for example, customer reviews or reference calls — so there’s a way for CS to earn bonuses on those things too.
“The moment you send out an offer, you don’t just sit there and wait. You think: if I really want this person, how do I make them sign?”
The sales process: from WordPress list to closed deal in 27 days
Vladan: On your sales process — 27 days from lead to close sounds very efficient. How does that flow look?
Koen: For us the main element is that our prospects are on WordPress. So we pull large lists of companies using WordPress, enrich them via Clay, and load them into the BDR sequence. We track how many accounts each BDR burns through over the last four weeks, and every Wednesday that BDR gets a new batch of accounts into a five-step sequence. They call, book the meeting. We know close rates go up the shorter the time frame between booking and the meeting, so the meeting needs to happen within two weeks or it doesn’t count as an SQL. It also needs to be accepted in the calendar.
The BDR then sends a handover email to the prospect, introducing the AE. The AE does some research — also using AI — to understand the prospect’s situation and what we can find about how they’re currently doing with SEO. Then the AE does a pre-call — not just to excite the prospect but to make sure they show up, and to prime them. It’s almost a commitment call. We let them know this is potentially a really interesting conversation, because if your competitors are getting found and you’re not, and there’s a first-mover advantage in new search engines right now, you should take this seriously. It’s a bit of a hype call. We also tell them we’re going to seriously prepare for this conversation, ask them some questions upfront, so they come in prepared too.
Vladan: And then?
Koen: Sometimes they sign in the first meeting, sometimes a second or third is needed. But it usually all moves quite quickly.
Vladan: So to summarize — you buy lists of WordPress companies, enrich with Clay, and call them. Good old-fashioned outbound.
Koen: That part, yes. Stone-age outbound. It works.
From individual contributor to sales leader
Vladan: You made the step from individual contributor to manager. How was that and was it what you expected?
Koen: I think I rolled into it. It wasn’t suddenly: here you go, here’s a team of 20 or 30 AEs — that would have probably been a disaster. It started really granularly. First it was just me, then one other person I needed to help get on track, then the second joined, the third, the fourth, the fifth. And then at some point I noticed I was spending more time in meetings with others and still trying to push my own pipeline. Then the BDRs came in and I took on responsibility for managing them while also managing some of the AEs and still doing my own pipeline. I really rolled into it. If I’d been given a team of 10 or 15 people immediately, without management experience, it would not have worked the way it did.
Vladan: That’s a good career tip in general — you do the work first and then you get the title. Some people think it’s the other way around.
Koen: That’s not how it happened with me personally, but it is how we promote almost everyone within the company. You get the title when you already are it. If you want to know when you’re ready, just ask — and make sure your colleagues vouch for you.
“You get the title when you already are it.”
What’s next
Vladan: Final question — what can we expect from you in the future?
Koen: Besides becoming a father soon — I want to build this business big. Becoming the number one player in GEO in Europe, and beyond. Then let’s see where the company ends up and where I end up long-term. I would love, if everything works out, to get into angel investing and sitting on boards with startups and scale-ups — while still doing some of the dirty work myself. Because I think in order to have that kind of board role and give clear guidance on how to move a company, you need to stay in the field too. You can’t lose touch with reality. And the US is still on the roadmap — the moment the company goes there, me and my wife will pack our bags.
Vladan: Makes sense. Thanks for the inspiring talk. If you want to follow Koen, you can find him on LinkedIn. And if you like this type of content, please like or subscribe to the podcast. See you next time.
