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.