Strategic Sales Engineering Productivity Advisor 2024 – Now

As the lead for non-technical enablement within the Solution Engineering team in EMEA, I drive training initiatives and collaborate across functions to boost SE productivity. Adept in coaching, content development, and relationship management, I advocate for global Sales Engineering needs. My analytical approach informs impactful enablement strategies, ensuring our Sales Engineering practitioners excel in the field.

Sr. Sales Engineering Manager, 2021 – 2024

When becoming manager of my peers (team of 4), it happened quite naturally. I have been a mentor for a lot of colleagues for many years and I felt recognized being a ‘leader’.

Main achievements:

  • During the 5 years in the Belux region, I contributed to multiplying the Annual Recurring Revenue by 4.
  • Development and execution of a Trusted Advisor Program for Sales Engineers, focusing on non-technical skills
  • Bringing more structure in processes, data sources and reporting for the territory
  • When the RSD left, I help reorganizing and structuring the BeLux region in close co-operation with the new RSD
  • Hired 2 junior SE’s, who I coached and mentored to give them direction both at Splunk and in their professional career progression
  • Gave presentations at customer events both from Splunk and External Organizations
  • Organized & ran the Splunk Employee Kickoff BeNeLux2022 (Content wise)
  • Helped organizing and hosted several customer briefings in the EMEA HQ
  • Kept on actively supporting the Business at customers in BeLux and North Region with customer visits & presentations at the largest accounts (EU, KBC, Proximus, EIB, Euroclear, Swift, Nokia, Heineken, S-Group, Rabobank…)
  • Setting up a video knowledge sharing platform. This was not a succes, but I learned a lot from it.

In his role as Staff Sales Engineer at Splunk Pieter-Jan showed his technical skills and combined this with a business consultant focus. Always engaged and looking for what it really is that a customer needs. I promoted Pieter-Jan to Senior Sales Engineering Manager Belgium at Splunk and he proved it to be the right decision. He leads, mentors and coaches his team of Sales Engineers, whatever is best in each situation. He works in close collaboration with the Sales AVP and his team. Pieter-Jan’s focus on the bigger picture is why he is always looking to improve our ways of working to become more effective and efficient. His creativity is a true skill and powerful when thinking outside of the box to innovate. It is a pleasure to be working with such a talented and respectful person like Pieter-Jan.

In the five years as a presales at Splunk, we were able to multiply the Annual Recurring Revenue by 4. (due to confidentiality reasons, exact numbers can’t be published)

Staff Sales Engineer, 2018-2021

In this job, it was my goal to become a trusted advisor for IT Operations teams & leaders, by combining the experience from my former jobs around ITSM, AI-Ops and Observability with a lot of new insights & knowledge I learned at Splunk

Achievements:

  • Specialized in IT Service Intelligence: a helicopter view on customer’s operations by combining Business, Application & Infrastructure Services with underlying KPI’s into a real Top-Down/Left-Right overview. I supported customers by helping them painting a vision on how to augment or replace their existing monitoring landscape, ITSM and automation tools into a real end-to-end visibility.
  • I ran >20 Proof of Concepts resulting in deals at Proximus, Post Lux, Euroclear, Cegeka and European Commission, among others.
  • I was involved in the Observability and IT/AIOps community, actively developing and sharing content.
  • At different internal and external events (live and on-line), I presented the value of Splunk for our customers and partners

I recorded some sessions in my expertise domain: “Where ITSM & Monitoring meets and complements” & “how to develop a true AIOPS strategy for your organisation”

2022 - Top Innovator Leader EMEA FY22 at Tech Summit, Splunk Las Vegas

“Pieter-Jan is the Belgium/Luxembourg SE Manager for less than a year, but he is instrumental in bringing the overall Belux team together. He continues to participate in customer meetings. He understands where support of the Sales org is needed by initiating an overview of implemented use cases at all our customers to pinpoint where Sales need to focus in FY23.
Pieter-Jan is also one of the leading forces behind the Trusted Advisor program in EMEA North.
His most important initiative is the development and launch of the Splunk Demo & Learn Kiosk to help with adoption, which is being rolled out to the whole village in EMEA. Now an EMEA initiative, but AMER showed interest to use this as well.”

Atanu Roy,  GVP  EMEA Sales Engineering

2022 - Spirits Of EMEA Award, Splunk Virtual Sales Kick Off FY2023

We know that it takes a village to get incredible results. The most successful teams are ones that understand how to collaborate, to leverage their talents and get ahead together.  We represent many functions and countries but are one team. Nominated Teams who are better together can built strong partnerships, collaborated across functions and learnt to maximize the potential for the organisation.

2019 - Best Fast Starter, Splunk Sales Kick Off Las Vegas

Sr. Solution Consultant, 2015 – 2018

  • When joining ServiceNow in 2015 the company’s footprint in Belgium was growing from 2 to 7 people. Despite a fast-rotating Sales team, we were able to grow respectively 68%, 38% and 69% year over year in Net New ACV.
  • As a Solution Consultant, I was not only responsible to drive the technical win at prospects, also the ROI and business value analysis were part of my responsibilities. Therefore, the counterparts at the customer side could be found at all levels in the organization from IT Operations managers up to C-level.
  • Belgium is a small country and since the European organization was not that extended at that time, I was not only covering the ITSM portfolio, but also the ITOM, IT Business Management (from Ideation to Demand & Portfolio Management, Project Management and Test Management), HR Service Delivery and Customer Service Management. This broadened my view from being pure technical to more business oriented: next to technology also processes and business value outcomes, I learned to sell a solution with added value for customer rather than products.
  • Together with the Sales team we won deals at large Belgian organizations like Euroclear, Swift, Proximus, European institutions, almost all FOD’s, Bpost, Toyota Motor Europe…
  • When I joined ServiceNow, the partner landscape was not developed yet. I invested a lot of time in partners like Fujitsu, CTG and Plat4mation, driving mutual successes.

APM Consultant / Team Lead, 2008-2015

  • When joining Compuware in 2008, I specialised in Real User Monitoring solutions. After the split of Compuware to Dynatrace, the focus was on Application Performance Management, which was considered a greenfield in Belgium
  • Dynatrace Belgium, created 65+ new customers in a span of three years (2012-2015), making Dynatrace the market leader for APM in Belgium. The Benelux pre-sales team boasted the highest license revenue per consultant rate for the EMEA region during that period.
  • Demonstrated leadership capabilities by leading the Benelux Pre-Sales team during the final years at Dynatrace, showcasing the ability to drive and manage a successful pre-sales team.
  • Motivated APM solutions through value-oriented, solution-based presentations, demonstrations, and proof of concepts for prospective clients.
  • Conducted comprehensive interviews with all application stakeholders, including end-users, application development, networking, and operations teams, as well as IT management during proof of concepts. This approach ensured a thorough translation of business needs into technical metrics.

EMEA Sales Kick Off, Barcelona 2014, Best EMEA pre-sales consultant

Business Development / Networking architect -2006-2008

It was my job to design LAN and MAN networks, used in video surveillance projects. I designed architectures for Brussels traffic cameras and Oosterweelverbinding… using Cisco, Enterasys or Hirschmann network components. I was responsible for building and writing solutions proposals for Video-over-IP networks.

Tein Telecom was at that time looking for new markets in the command-and-control domain. As a business developer, I analyzed the market by meeting 35+ vendors, prospects, existing customers and integrators. A first success was a contract for integrated Voice with Tetra and Radio at Harbour Ghent.

Solution Consultant / Application Integrator – 2000-2006

After winning the Siemens Studentenkreis for promising students, I started within the implementation team of Multimedia Contact Centers and matured quickly towards (pre-sales) consultancy and application integration, designing
full telecommunication infrastructures (Voice & Data networks). During this period, I visited more than 250 small and medium enterprises (renewing and new business).