In this episode of SaaS Unscripted, host Nick van Eeten talks with Martijn Terpstra — who went from Sales Development Representative to Chief Revenue Officer in SaaS, and has now taken the leap into entrepreneurship with his own startup, FRANQ. Raised in Friesland and shaped by early call-center work, Martijn shares his path through Meltwater and InSided (including expanding to New York), the financial journey from a €24K starting salary to a CRO package, and why he left it all to build something from scratch while raising two kids.
Nick: Welcome to the show, Martijn. We’ve known each other for several years now, and I’m very excited to have you on. You have an incredible journey in the SaaS industry — from SDR up to CRO, and now even entrepreneur. Before we dive into your story, can you tell us about your youth — how did you grow up?
Martijn: I grew up in Friesland — for people who don’t know it, it’s a tiny province of the Netherlands, I think probably 200,000 people or so. I grew up in two very small villages, one probably 500 people, the other 5,000. Relatively quiet, easygoing life. I grew up only with my mom — my parents divorced even before I was born — as a single child. Not a typical youth, I guess, but very easygoing. Around 18 I decided — I’ve always had this passion for entrepreneurship and bigger cities, I was always traveling to the bigger cities around where I was living — to make the leap and move to Amsterdam and live by myself.
Nick: As a single kid with a single mom, what were pivotal moments that led you to work in sales?
Martijn: It’s funny — I started working quite quickly. I think I was 13 when I started my first paper route, bringing around commercial folders door to door. Together with my mom we’d pick up 10 batches of folders, fold them into one package, and I’d bring them through the door. After that I worked as a dishwasher in a Mexican restaurant, one of the jobs I really enjoyed — a lot of hard work, I’d put the music on, four hours of hard work, and afterwards you’d sit at the bar, have some Mexican food and a beer. What leads me to sales is that, as a student, in the place where I was born there are a lot of contact centers and call centers, always looking for young people. I thought, I’m not sure I’m good at it, but let’s give it a try. I started working in sales there — selling energy subscriptions, SIM cards, lottery tickets. One thing I really remember is that there was a software system that made the calls for you, an auto-dialer: you’d call somebody, do your pitch, they’d buy or not buy or hang up, and then it was five, four, three, two, one, and the next call, for four hours straight. That’s where I really got into sales, because there was a culture I really enjoyed — a lot of young, outgoing people, all around performance and celebrating successes. If you hit your target within three hours, you’d get the last hour off. Very performance-driven, and I really enjoyed that.
Nick: You started working very early — paper round, dishwasher, even a factory. How old were you in the call center?
Martijn: Probably towards the end of high school, around 16 or 17.
Nick: We always look for the best salespeople, and call-center experience is usually a very good starting point for a sales career — you ticked all the boxes before you even started in sales.
Martijn: It was kind of a traditional route. It’s funny, because when I actually transitioned into a sales role — at Meltwater, which we’ll talk about — I made all the basic mistakes. I thought, this is the same job I did at the call center: make a lot of cold calls and just pitch, pitch, pitch. But nothing converted to a client, so I had to learn to ask really good questions, build rapport with your prospect. I wasn’t afraid to pick up the phone and have high output and activity, but I definitely had to learn a lot about business-to-business sales.
Nick: What from the call-center experience do you still use today?
Martijn: The hard work — the desire to work hard for something you really want. And I’m not afraid to do the dirty work; I actually enjoy it. My last job before I started FRANQ was CRO of a 35-million-ARR company, but I’d still occasionally clean up the CRM or build target account lists, because I enjoy it — and I enjoy it again now that I’m setting up my own business, doing exactly the same things a BDR or account executive does. The third thing is the passion for sales, but also what sales can bring to your own personal development. I truly believe that if you can sell things — even if you’re an HR person or a product person — you need to sell your ideas, your thoughts, convince other people. Those sales skills have come along with me not only in professional life, but in internal meetings and personal situations as well.
“I’m not afraid to do the dirty work — I actually enjoy it. As a CRO of a 35-million company I’d still occasionally clean up the CRM or build target account lists.”
Nick: Have you ever considered something else than SaaS?
Martijn: Sometimes — and everybody recognizes this — you have lows in sales. You have a couple of quarters where it doesn’t work out, or one deal that’s not happening, and you start thinking, should I consider a career switch? Then I think, what would give me the same energy as sales does, and I can’t really think of anything. Maybe something closely tied to sales, like customer success. But I’ve always really enjoyed sales, and when you start thinking those thoughts, you realize, okay, this is just a shitty period I’m in, I need to work hard to get out of it, focus on the basics again and get out of the slump.
Nick: How did you go into software sales?
Martijn: I’d just graduated, I was 22. At public transport stations they’d distribute free newspapers like Metro and Spits, and right around my graduation I saw an ad: “International Management Traineeship.” I thought, ideally I want to travel a bit — I hadn’t traveled much, I went to Turkey once with a girlfriend at the time, that was about it. But I saw that ad: international sounds interesting, management sounds interesting, traineeship sounds interesting — let me apply. It was the only application I did. I got a call the same day or the next, and they said, can you come to Amsterdam for an interview tomorrow? I was still living in Friesland, in the north, and I thought, why not. The interview was at the Amstel Hotel — one of the most expensive hotels in Amsterdam — and I walked in and there were 20 or 30 other candidates. It was a group interview where you had to do mini presentations, and from that group of 30 they’d pick six, seven, eight people for a second day, a panel interview. That went okay, because I got invited for the second day — a panel of five people at the Amstel Hotel — and then the next day they offered me a job. So within three days I went from application to job offer. I loved Amsterdam already, so I thought, let’s give it a try, and if it doesn’t work out I can always go back home or travel. That’s how I started at Meltwater. Only after maybe three years did I realize Meltwater is a SaaS company — I didn’t even know what SaaS was. We were just selling a product people could access online with a username and password.
Nick: You started working in SaaS before it was cool.
Martijn: Maybe it was cool and there were a lot of SaaS companies already, I just didn’t realize it. I was 22, I’d never heard of business-to-business software, let alone software as a service. I just thought it was a cool product, the company had a lot of success, an interesting career trajectory. It was kind of impulsive — I just decided, let’s move to Amsterdam, find a place to live, start this job, and see where it leads.
Nick: Looking back now, with years of hiring-manager experience, why do you think you were hired?
Martijn: It has to do with that previous experience. For somebody who’s 22, probably 90% of the people they were interviewing didn’t have sales experience — that was their strategy, they looked for really talented, smart people, and sales experience wasn’t a requirement, but it was a plus for me. They saw somebody young, eager and driven, trying to sell himself — maybe not in the right way, but at least they saw it. The hiring manager who hired me said at some point he’s like a diamond in the rough — not great yet, but a lot of potential, we just need to shave the edges off. And I think that was true.
Nick: So you didn’t even know you were applying for a proper sales job?
Martijn: Not really. I only realized in the second interview, or even when I started working there — a sales director and sales manager from the UK setting up the office, going through sales training. That’s where you realize, this is going to be a sales role, which was fine because I had that experience. But for a lot of people who didn’t expect that, it was more of a challenge to accept. It wasn’t a chill role with a lot of business development and marketing, a traineeship where you get experience in different departments — no, it was: build a pipeline, this is your target this month, an even higher target next month, and in month three even higher, and this is what you need to do, which involved a lot of cold calling.
Nick: Why should people who graduate and want a commercial role in tech join sales as their first step?
Martijn: If you’re very commercially minded and you like growing businesses and contributing to that in the most direct way, making an impact, it’s really interesting. And let’s face it, money is part of it — you’d be surprised what my salary was when I joined Meltwater, probably half of what a BDR salary is nowadays.
Nick: What was it?
Martijn: If I remember correctly, 24K per year. Nowadays, even for entry-level positions you can get a really good salary as a base, and if you perform well you can get half on top, sometimes double, and that only grows when you get promoted to AE or enterprise account executive. So if money is important to you, it’s an interesting position. And third, career growth — I don’t think there are many functions where, if you do well and you’re ambitious, you can make next steps so quickly. I’ve seen many people go from starting at 22 or 23 in an entry-level position to being a team lead managing four or five people after one year, growing into a director or VP role three, four, five years down the line. Because sales is so apparent when it comes to performance, if you do really well, companies are more inclined to give you a promotion, because it’s so clear whether you’re doing well or not.
Nick: From your time after Meltwater, what are the achievements you’re really proud of?
Martijn: At InSided, for instance, it was a company that only had Dutch customers, and the challenge was: how can we scale this internationally? Initially I did that within the European market, and by the end of two years, instead of only being in the Netherlands, we had customers in 12 or 15 different countries. I was flying once or twice every week to all kinds of countries doing sales presentations, and occasionally Wouter, the CTO and co-founder, would join me. After that, InSided raised a Series A and we used part of the money to set up an office in New York, so I moved to New York to do the same thing there. That was a fantastic experience — it was always one of my ambitions to sell in America, because if you look at sales, the Champions League is enterprise sales, and maybe enterprise sales in America. I joined InSided when there were only one or one and a half million ARR, a handful of customers in the Netherlands, and together with the team we scaled it internationally, raised the Series A, moved to the US — a really exciting journey, especially when you’re 27, 28.
Nick: Besides work, how did your life look? Did you have a girlfriend?
Martijn: Two different girlfriends during my InSided time, and then with my current girlfriend we actually moved together to New York, which was fantastic. Luckily she was working at a company that made it easy to transfer to New York — otherwise it’s really difficult to bring your partner, because you either need to get married or a company needs to sponsor a visa. Living in New York was a fantastic experience — that first year, outside of work, just feels like a big holiday, exploring everything, and it gave us the opportunity to see more of America: California, the South, the northeast, Canada. A great adventure — professionally, setting something up from scratch in a completely new market with new competitors, a different customer profile, a different type of team, and Americans are different from Europeans in many ways. And outside of work, the energy you feel in that city is fantastic, 24 hours a day.
Nick: You started as a BDR, moved into sales manager, VP sales, eventually CRO of a US company, and now you start your own company. Do you have tips for BDRs who join a company, take their first step, and aren’t happy or making sales? High-potential people sometimes stop after one bad experience.
Martijn: It’s tough — and this is now 15 years later, but I still remember those weeks where I felt like, this sucks, other people are more successful than me. A couple of things you need to do: one, create a plan, maybe together with your manager if you have a good one. Don’t make it complex — what are the one or two things we need to do now that will make the biggest impact? Early in your career there are probably 10 or 15 things you can improve, but what are the one or two that will make such a big impact that results will come in? That could be activity, but also how you build rapport, your messaging, a different way of reaching out, or whether you’re targeting the right people and accounts. Then consistently improve on that over a couple of weeks or months. The other thing to realize is that motivation comes and goes — you can’t influence it that much. What you can influence is your daily habits: I’m going to make sure I reach out to X amount of people, have X amount of really good phone conversations, do X amount of new tests with my messaging every week. Be very consistent, because there are hundreds of thousands of BDRs across the world who are successful — it’s sort of like a science. And get help: there are communities now, the SDR newsletter, BDR summits and meetups, previous BDRs in your organization who are successful, AEs who were BDRs before — learn from them.
“Motivation comes and goes — you can’t influence it much. What you can influence is your daily habits.”
Nick: After 15 years and several roles, you started your own company, FRANQ, while raising two small kids — great timing.
Martijn: Exactly. I’ve thought about it for a long time. I’ve always had this desire to be an entrepreneur, to build something from scratch, which I really enjoyed in those previous roles too. My education was small business and retail management, focused a lot on entrepreneurship, and I told you the story about selling my mom’s old stuff in front of the supermarket — that entrepreneurial spirit. I just never really dared to do it in the past 15 years; my career was going well, and I always had an excuse: it’s not the right timing, I don’t have a good idea. At the start of this year I really thought about what I’d do next. I thought, am I going to do another VP of sales or CRO role somewhere — exciting, but likely a commitment of another three to six-plus years — or is now the right time to give this a try? Whether it’s the right timing or not, maybe it never is. It’s a situation where I have two young kids, we actually have a double mortgage because we’re waiting for a new house, so a lot of expenses, and you’re looking for security — but I’m also looking for energy and excitement, and this is what gave me a lot of excitement. I’m not very impulsive, so I really thought it through: how much personal runway do I have, how am I going to combine this with family life, does it fit with my girlfriend’s ambitions? I thought about it for two, three, four months, and every time I thought about it or read books about entrepreneurs, it gave me so much energy. So I decided, I need to give this a try, because otherwise I’ll probably regret it — and if it’s not now, when? When I’m in my early 40s? It already feels kind of late to do it at 37.
Nick: What was the moment you really decided?
Martijn: There are two moments. There’s a Paris-based company called Lemlist, and their founder wrote a book on how he started and scaled the business to around 150 million — it’s called “The $150 Million Exit.” I was reading that book on a plane, and it gave me a lot of goosebumps and energy. Then I had conversations with people who asked really good questions: what really drives you, what gives you energy now? That’s when you realize what a comfortable position you’re in to say goodbye — not to your career, but for a little while — and to the security around salary, bonuses, working hours, and knowing exactly what to do, versus starting your own business and running into situations you’ve never experienced. It was a really tough decision, and whenever I make a tough decision it consumes my mind constantly. At some point I knew I just needed to make a decision, because it was getting ridiculous — I could think about it for another two or three months. That moment on the plane was definitely one of those where I felt, I need to do this.
Nick: How did the conversation go with your girlfriend?
Martijn: We talked about it for months. She’s really supportive and excited about the idea, so it was a relatively easy conversation. We had a lot of conversations about how we’re going to do it in terms of costs and income, and I came up with a plan. It’s not one moment where you say “now we’re doing it” — it’s more gradual towards finally deciding, okay, I’m going to quit my job and do this.
Nick: With a double mortgage and two kids. You started at 24K per year at Meltwater — just to give aspiring salespeople an insight into salaries, what were you on at your last company before you founded FRANQ?
Martijn: It was close to 400K including bonuses.
Nick: So you started at 24K annually, and 15 years later, over 400K total compensation. Should that also be a reason to go into SaaS?
Martijn: If that’s important to you, absolutely. I can’t imagine you have a lifestyle where you need 400K — what it essentially meant is I was saving a lot, which allows me now to take this journey with FRANQ. There’s a decent amount of people who get into sales simply because they enjoy it and are performance-focused, but also enjoy the benefits: the monetary benefits, the status, the President’s Club trips. That’s not for everybody, but for aspiring salespeople it’s something you might want.
Nick: You’re five months in as an entrepreneur. What are the initial challenges?
Martijn: It’s basically going back to what I did when I was 22 — building target account lists, figuring out my ideal customer profile, booking meetings, having introductory conversations, tweaking my pitch, trying to provide value. It’s a lot of going back to the basics. With any starting company, you’re trying to figure out: what problems am I exactly solving, and how am I going to solve them?
Nick: What are those problems for FRANQ?
Martijn: The problem I always saw as a VP of sales or CRO, especially with a larger team where you’re not in every deal anymore: as a sales manager with two or three salespeople you’re always involved in later-stage deals, so you understand why you win or lose. But VPs of sales and CROs with teams of 30, 40, 50 up to 100 people find it a challenge to really understand why they’re losing sales opportunities or losing customers to churn. The information you typically have is in the CRM — a drop-down menu with maybe eight options selected by the sales rep, and a short note. If you want to analyze the top three or four reasons you’re losing deals, or losing to a specific competitor, or in specific new markets or segments, that’s not enough. The pivotal moment was at my last company, where the past couple of years have been more difficult for SaaS companies and we were seeing quite a lot of churn, and we had no idea why churn was suddenly doubling. The information from the CRM and the reps was very unclear. So we set up a win-loss program, speaking directly to buyers about why they made their decision, and that led to a lot of interesting insights — product, sales performance, marketing, positioning, and competitive intelligence. I thought, if my company is struggling with this, a lot of other companies probably are too. A lot of conversations in my network confirmed it: this is a blind spot, we just don’t know and would like to understand better. That gave me the confidence to start FRANQ.
Nick: So you experienced that a lot of sales leaders had the same problem — the black box of lost opportunities. How’s it going now?
Martijn: It’s still early days, about three and a half months. There are two things I’m focusing on: one, getting companies to experience what I can do for them; and two, when they commit, making them very successful and giving them insights they feel are super valuable. It goes with ups and downs. When you’re a VP of sales and you see a new meeting come in from a BDR, you’re happy — but when you’re a founder and you see that first meeting come in, you’re jumping up and down the room, like it’s your first booked meeting as a BDR again. That energy and excitement is really cool, and those are the highs — your first pilot, your first trial, whatever small success gets you excited. But there are a lot of lows too: people not responding, saying it’s not interesting, or “we’re already doing something like this,” or not getting enough traction, or — in my situation — the customers of my customers not responding, because I depend on them to have interviews with me. It’s a lot of experimentation again. Whenever people say entrepreneurship is a roller coaster, I always thought it was a cliché, but it’s definitely true. As a VP of sales there are ups and downs, but the waves are less big; as an entrepreneur the waves are really big, because at this phase you’re trying to prove if this works, and you want it to work. It almost feels like it’s your child you’re raising.
Nick: Your third child — and now you’re the BDR, sales manager, VP sales, and client manager all in one.
Martijn: That’s right. And there are things I really have to develop myself in — I’ve always worked closely with marketing leaders and teams, but now I have to do it myself. I did a Google Ads experiment to see if it would deliver interesting inbound — it didn’t, I spent two or three thousand euros over six weeks and stopped it because it delivered zero results. Now I’m going to a couple of events in the coming months to experiment with whether that’s a good way to get in front of my audience and have quality conversations. That’s also one of the reasons I decided to do this — I felt I needed something new to develop myself again, a new challenge. Even though it’s sometimes frustrating, when you get across that hurdle and understand new things that are working, it’s really exciting again.
Nick: How did having kids impact your work-life balance?
Martijn: I always thought it wouldn’t, but it definitely does. When you don’t have kids you still have a lot of free time — even if it doesn’t feel like it, every evening and weekend you can decide what to do. That’s not the case anymore, because kids consume your time, which is great and gives me a lot of energy, but it’s less time for yourself. During the day I can just focus on work, but 90 to 95% of the time I want to be home when my kids are home, so I try not to do work things then unless necessary, and plan around it. They typically go to bed around 7 or 7:30, so afterwards I still have two, two and a half hours for work, or some work while they nap during the weekend. It’s whatever you prioritize, and I really want to be involved and there when they’re home. As a result, you have less time for yourself, so you really start to appreciate those moments — going out for dinner with your partner or friends — which become a bit more scarce.
Nick: What would you advise aspiring entrepreneurs?
Martijn: Making my own decision around this, you hear how many people are actually thinking about doing something for themselves, but a lot of people don’t take the step, for a lot of different reasons. Every situation is different — look at your and my situation: I’m starting my entrepreneurial journey probably 10 years later than you did, with different challenges and doubts. There will always be doubts, but for your personal situation, can you find a way where, instead of thinking about all the things that might go wrong, you think about what would actually work, and what feeling, excitement, energy and pride that would give you? I always think about the worst-case scenario, but I also think about the best case: if I succeed, what would be so great about this, and what impact would it make on how I feel? The second thing, very practical: there’s a lot you can do during your working career to find out if this is a path for you. If you have an idea, you can speak to your potential market, audience or prospects already — I was having a drink with the VP of sales of a big Amsterdam SaaS company to understand: this pain I had and I’m seeing, do you have it too, how important is it to solve, what impact would it make? You can have 10 or 15 of those chats to give yourself more security that your idea might work. The third thing, also practical, and why I chose this route: I see FRANQ eventually as a SaaS company where a lot of technology can help, but I’ve deliberately started as a service business, because it’s a very easy, low-cost, quick way to start having conversations around the proposition. My business costs are quite low — a couple of hundred euros per month, the biggest expense being the co-working space. The downside of a service model is it’s typically not very scalable, but at this stage that doesn’t matter — just have conversations and prove value, even if it requires a lot of manual work. It allows me to quickly understand what works and what doesn’t, and test things in a very low-cost, efficient way. The other route I sometimes see is making a really big bet — finding a technical co-founder or building an MVP that costs 100, 200, 300K — and then they go to market and realize their audience expected something else, and they have to make tweaks again. So it’s very important to quickly test your proposition in the market and see if you can get some customers on board where you deliver a lot of value. I’ve got important goals for myself in that first year — if I don’t achieve them, maybe it’s a business that doesn’t have a lot of potential, but at least I figured it out quickly and efficiently.
“Instead of thinking about all the things that might go wrong, think: what are the things that would make it work, and what excitement and pride would that give me?”
Nick: Great tips — not only looking at what can go wrong, but how life would look if you succeed. And while you’re still in your job, try to speak to as many ICP clients and prospects as possible to validate your idea.
Martijn: I don’t want to promote doing that during work hours — that’s your own responsibility — but you can still meet people for lunch, or quickly after work. In my first weeks, before the final decision, I had a goal for myself to speak to three people who’d fit my target audience, inviting them for lunch, coffee, or a drink, and that really helped shape the direction I wanted to take.
Nick: I love the conversation, Martijn — it’s been an incredible journey of discovery today. Thank you for sharing your personal story on SaaS Unscripted.
Martijn: Thanks so much — it was a great, first-time experience for me as well, but I really enjoyed it.
Nick: Thanks for joining us on SaaS Unscripted. To explore the latest career opportunities, visit our website, nobelrecruitment.com, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave your review on your favorite podcast app. Until next time on SaaS Unscripted.
