Episode #245: 

Willem Hendrickx, Chief Revenue Officer at Vectra AI, shares how customer insight becomes the foundation for strong strategy and lasting momentum. He shows how a clear ICP sharpens focus and accelerates growth. Willem connects culture, leadership, and the voice of the customer into one unified system. He highlights how internal alignment transforms customer evidence into predictable, scalable success.

“The customer should be at the center of gravity. The customer is the one who pays the bill, and the customer is the one who defines your overall strategy. You need to make sure you are very clear about putting that customer first.” – Willem Hendrickx

This episode explores how aligning leadership, data-driven ICP targeting, and customer advocacy builds a reliable growth engine. Willem shows how companies can strengthen retention, reduce internal friction, and scale faster by grounding every decision in customer evidence and shared accountability.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a really interesting guest and a lively conversation. I guarantee you we’re gonna talk today with Willem Hendrickx. And Willem, you’ve not always taken the easy route in your career, which has been on the sales side and you’re currently a Chief Revenue Officer and had many, many global positions.

[00:00:30] Steve MacDonald: One of the favorite parts of the story about you and I when we were talking about your background is at one point you were, within a year and a half, you were the sixth country manager, and you actually came in to give everybody t shirts that say number six, and it’s basically, if I’m not here in a little bit, at least there’s something I left behind for you.

[00:00:49] Willem Hendrickx: Actually, I signed all my letters in the beginning with number six to all employees.

[00:00:54] Steve MacDonald: I love it. But the big point of that is that it leads into what we’re gonna be talking about today, and people and culture are huge. Customer is huge. And we’re gonna talk about a customer led advantage, right? And how do we actually create reliable, predictable growth engines.

[00:01:09] Steve MacDonald: We’re all here to help scale our businesses. Right. And so you’re very focused on the people on both sides internally and externally. But what I would love to do is I would love to have you maybe, if you wouldn’t mind, just take a minute or two here and explain a little bit more about your background before we dig in.

[00:01:26] Willem Hendrickx: Sure. Well, thank you for having me, Steve, right. So basically Willem Hendrickx. I’m actually Belgium from origin. I’ve been working for small companies, always in sales and large companies. I ran global channels for EMC. I ran Al Lucian business, which was about 4 billion.

[00:01:42] Willem Hendrickx: I had my own company. Worked with smaller companies as well. I went into telco, I went into, you know, blockchain, and now I do cybersecurity built on my own cloud. So, you know, a lot of different things, Steve. But that’s because of my curiosity, I guess, and also learning. And I think, you know, when you do that and you take different steps and you try to work with different people, you also get a better human being.

[00:02:07] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, I run another podcast that’s in the HR and talent acquisition industry. And so we spend a lot of time, I mean a lot of time, talking about culture and culture can be one of those things in terms of growth. It can be one of those things like mission, values, culture. It can be a page on the website, it can be a plaque on the wall, right.

[00:02:30] Steve MacDonald: Why is it so much more important to you when you think about creating a culture, and obviously you came into a culture at that point in your career that was very toxic, right? You’re the fifth leader of that country in, you know, or sixth leader in a year and a half. Talk about upheaval, right. And Matt, you mentioned, what was your customer satisfaction score at that point?

[00:02:52] Willem Hendrickx: Below 30. Also employee satisfaction was of course, what do you expect, right. When that happens. So, but the good news is the only way you can go up, right? So you just do that. But no, I listen, I think it’s for me, you know, super important, right.

[00:03:02] Willem Hendrickx: Because I think it’s all about that. If you hire the right folks who have the same passion and you show them, you know, why you are doing something with regards to a strategy and everyone gets aligned to it, you know, then it’s the nicest thing that you can have.

[00:03:16] Willem Hendrickx: But if you hire someone wrong, it’s very toxic to your point, right. So, I mean, if you have a huge organization, you need to make sure that, in my view, you hire great people, but it’s not only on the management suite, right. I mean, the first thing that you need to do is of course assess your leadership style and your leadership and make some changes if that’s needed.

[00:03:36] Willem Hendrickx: But always think that your first line management is the most crucial part of every single company. Because they define the strategy, because they define the culture, because they are the ones that are in touch with the customer. They are the ones that are hiring the people. And so when they are really, really good, the company normally does really well.

[00:03:55] Willem Hendrickx: And then the third thing for me is that, you know, you need to make sure you bring some younger people into the organization who are passionate, who are, you know, driven, because that always balances certain things. So I think I would say, when you hire, try to hire in three levels, your leadership, your first line management, and bring some young people to the organization to change the culture that you currently have for the better.

[00:04:18] Steve MacDonald: So I want to dive into that just a little bit more because in your positions and where you are today, you don’t have time to do things that aren’t gonna contribute to the bottom line. You’re accountable to a board and I guarantee you one of the first things on the agenda in your board meetings is like, how is this quarter’s quota doing, and how’s next quarter’s.

[00:04:36] Steve MacDonald: Right? So, I mean, you’ve gotta be ruthless about how you prioritize where you spend time and resources and how you build that culture and how important that is. So there’s the people, the culture you just talked about. I mean, we all know high performance teams are what are, you know, that’s why VCs and PE companies, they invest in people first and the idea second.

[00:04:59] Steve MacDonald: Because no matter what, we need that high performance team. So this focus on the people. I love that you have an internal and an external focus and you talk a lot about customer led advantage and I just wanted to, what is your philosophy on that? What does that mean to you?

[00:05:17] Willem Hendrickx: I mean, the customer should be in the center of gravity, right Steve? You know, I mean, the customer is the one that pays the bill. The customer is the one that defines your overall strategy. So you need to make sure that you’re very clear about putting that customer straight.

[00:05:32] Willem Hendrickx: If you want to grow, I always say that you win through evidence, not objectives. You know, customers. I think there are a couple of things. First, it is really important that you have the right customer. Right. I mean, narrow your ICP because you can also have customers who drag you down, where basically you need to do so much from an engineering work that is not repeatable and that is not a good thing.

[00:05:55] Willem Hendrickx: So, you know, work with the customers who truly, really feel the pain, right? And so that you can make that repeatable. That’s number one. The second thing which we should not forget is operationalize the value. You know, when you do that, making sure there is continuously value so that they’re happy.

[00:06:09] Willem Hendrickx: And then, if you do that, you can actually turn champions into megaphones, right? That’s your, the sum, you know, when they are really going out by themselves and talking to peers to say this is the best. That’s actually the way you need to run it. That’s the perfect scenario.

[00:06:23] Willem Hendrickx: Now that’s not always the case, but you need to push it. So when you come to the sales team or even my channel team or the channel organization outside, I think it’s very, very crucial that you build use cases based upon those customers. You know, that you force prospects to talk to those customers and that they can actually deliver the message that you want to deliver and show the value that you have created for them, which is repeatable.

[00:06:49] Willem Hendrickx: And the reality is, and I learned that through my PTC times, you need to make sure that when you’re talking to a bank that you have a story of a bank and that you have a regional customer, that you have a regional success story, right? It needs to resonate. Of course, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. But that’s, for me, it’s all about the customer. And if you do this right, you will scale accordingly.

[00:07:10] Steve MacDonald: So let me ask you this, ’cause I want to get to the go to market. I want to get to ICP, but you said so many interesting things in there that I want to ask some questions about. You started out and you said this. You said the customer defines our strategy. And it was an interesting way to put it because we all got to be C-suite executives in our companies, not because we weren’t intelligent, right?

[00:07:32] Steve MacDonald: We know how to make decisions. We can make decisions on our own. We can, you know, in fact, McKinsey had a big study and they’re like, only truly 15% of companies are customer led and actually execute on the voice of the customer. The very first sentence you started out with, the answer to the question there on what is customer led advantage, was that the customer defines our strategy. Tell me more about that.

[00:08:00] Willem Hendrickx: I mean, at the end of the day, you create a product for someone to buy, right? And so if that particular customer and you narrow your ICP in a way that is really clear, then of course it’s the customer that defines how you’re going to go to market, how you deliver the solution, how you maintain the value through the cycle so you can make it repeatable.

[00:08:18] Willem Hendrickx: I think a lot of companies are too much focused internally. There’s too much internal stuff happening, and sometimes we forget that we need to talk to our customer about A, are you happy? B, what is the roadmap? What do you need to do so you can improve yourself every single time, but also change your go to market effectively as well. And it also means sometimes making hard choices, right? Because if the right customer is the right customer, it also means sometimes you don’t have the right customers. And then what do you do with those not right customers? And are you gonna continue to gain the non-right customers?

[00:08:57] Willem Hendrickx: Because if you do that, it drags you down and does not help you move forward. So again, when I’m talking about the strategy needing to be around the customer, it needs to be very, very clear. It needs to be on the right customers where you as a company can give the most value to.

[00:09:15] Steve MacDonald: These seem like basic questions, right? But they really aren’t. Like how do you know who your right customer is? Like defining that ICP because you just brought something up. It’s very easy to say, here’s our ICP, but I got this deal and this deal that we can bring in, right? And revenue we can bring in and I could hit my numbers and, you know.

[00:09:36] Steve MacDonald: But you talked about, it’s like they can drag the business down, right? If we’re not set up to handle a customer that isn’t really defined as our core ICP, then we waste time, we waste resources, right? They’re the ones that are gonna churn the fastest, and expanding customer revenue is the number one way we’re supposed to grow our businesses.

[00:09:58] Steve MacDonald: So what’s your point of view, and how do we define that ICP, really define it?

[00:10:03] Willem Hendrickx: Well, you define it by data, right? I mean, at the end of the day, you look at data, and you need to do it continuously. But I mean, if you look at who is buying what, to your point, in which kind of segment it is, is that a vertical segment or a customer segment?

[00:10:17] Willem Hendrickx: B, which are the customers who are buying the multi products? If you sell multi products, you know, what is your overall cost of sale in that particular segment? So you look at that particular data, and when you narrow it down like that, you get to a pretty good conclusion.

[00:10:31] Willem Hendrickx: And then you also, which is important, talk to those customers to see, okay, is the value realization there? And this is not easy because to your point, every single rep, but all of the rest of the companies sometimes do: oh, but there’s another thing that we can go after, which is also important. And that’s true, but it basically reduces opportunity and it drags everyone down because think about it, right?

[00:10:53] Willem Hendrickx: If you’re very clear and narrow about what your scope needs to be—now again, that scope can be very flexible depending on which products you sell—but it’s way more easy to create a package for your sales guys to go after. It’s also way more easy for marketing to have the right messaging.

[00:11:10] Willem Hendrickx: It’s way more easy for engineering to deliver the right products. So it’s end to end that you make things better. And if you don’t do that, you drag the whole company with you. Don’t forget that one deal can also basically look good on paper, but it might drag the whole company because we have to create a new feature and the other customers have to wait on all of the other features that we promised.

[00:11:31] Willem Hendrickx: You know, sometimes marketing says, oh, this is really cool. Maybe we should make it repeatable, which is not the case. So just be hard on it. But that’s not easy. It’s not easy. And walk away from deals. I mean, not easy for a rep to say, walk away from deals. Qualify the hell out of it because, and the smaller you are, Steve, the more you even have to do that.

[00:11:50] Willem Hendrickx: I learned that if you’re a large company, you can afford that. If you’re a very small company, you need to be way more tough in your choices.

[00:11:57] Steve MacDonald: That’s really good because when you’re smaller is when you’re most susceptible to that, right? And the majority of companies, like a lot of the audience here, right, we’re in the middle.

[00:12:07] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s like the really large enterprise companies, the startup companies, the large part here. We might be a company that’s a hundred, 200, 300, 400 people, right? And you’re defining growth. You’re defining the next level. And it’s so tempting. It’s so tempting to take in the deals, to fill the pipeline, to close to meet the expectations, that we’re constantly pushed in a direction that keeps us from staying on the course. It’s easier to do that, right? How do you stay on course?

[00:12:41] Willem Hendrickx: It’s hard, right? But I think in my opinion, and everyone makes mistakes on it, right? And we have done as well. But you know, I think it’s all about giving clarity to the organization on where you’re gonna focus yourself on and stick to it. And it basically also means that when you look at the different divisions, the different divisions need to have the same KPIs or the alignment of the KPIs needs to be the same.

[00:13:04] Willem Hendrickx: Because if you don’t have that, then you have an issue. You know, because if, for example, marketing, it doesn’t matter where the leads are coming from, the large company or small company, while we decided the midsize companies are our ICP, I mean, we have a problem here. So you need to make sure that you have a full alignment.

[00:13:20] Willem Hendrickx: And then the other thing is, if you wanna scale, you need to make sure there’s an accountability in the system for each division to do what they need to do. And then that’s how you stick to it. And then, don’t forget everything is about success, Steve, right? So when you basically win those particular deals in that ICP and you show them, you know, man, this is another great deal with multi products that you can sell, celebrate those particular deals.

[00:13:43] Willem Hendrickx: Because again, it shows that this is the right trajectory, this is the right strategy. But sometimes it’s, you know, everyone has picked up a deal that is outside of the ICP because yeah, end of the quarter you need to do it. So everyone is doing that. But then you need to qualify that as well to make sure that you’re not diluting from it.

[00:14:00] Steve MacDonald: What you’ve done is like you’ve painted this really vivid picture because you talked about marketing and sales and product and customer success and the consistency of messaging internally.

[00:14:12] Steve MacDonald: So I just recorded a podcast yesterday, and we spent probably 80% of the time talking about how we’re really good at messaging outside of our company, but we’re typically really bad at messaging inside our company, right? And staying in alignment inside of our company. And the more that we stray away from our ICP, the more—and we didn’t even get into this in this 80% of the conversation yesterday—but here’s what I’m getting from you.

[00:14:42] Steve MacDonald: It’s the harder and harder it is to keep alignment internally and message internally and have everybody know what we’re doing and what our mission is, right? What’s right, what’s wrong, and are we consistent if we’re not consistent in the customers that we bring in?

[00:14:59] Willem Hendrickx: It’s very easy when everything goes well. It’s not easy when you miss a quarter and you say, guys, we need to stick together because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the same with the partner strategy, right? A partner strategy is not built for a quarter. You don’t make a business plan with a partner for a quarter.

[00:15:17] Willem Hendrickx: You do it for the long run. And so it’s super important that everyone is aligned. That you are not here to do a quarter, you’re aligned to run a business. And the board needs to understand that as well, that, you know, in the long run, this will be better. And yeah, it’s— but you need to be strong about it. It’s not always easy to be clear. Not always.

[00:15:37] Steve MacDonald: So one of the things that you had said in an earlier conversation we had is that—and you brought it up here—you want to have your customers be a megaphone for you. But a lot of us, we’re hesitant to actually push that and be proactive and have people actually talk to our customers because we’re always worried, okay, well what are they gonna say?

[00:15:57] Steve MacDonald: Right? Even the best relationships, you just, that kind of like, it feels like less control. But you’ve brought it up here. You’ve brought it up before. The opportunity for the customer megaphone. And what’s your recommendation on that? Like, because we tend to be hesitant, right?

[00:16:12] Willem Hendrickx: I mean, here’s a good thing, right? A lot of prospects right now are asking for reference calls, so it makes it already easier, but it should be part of your playbook, in my opinion. Right? And then even, you say, here’s a couple of references that you can call, Mr. Customer or Mr. Prospect, right? I mean, maybe they even call, but just that you give that to them, you know, provides you the trust that is needed.

[00:16:32] Willem Hendrickx: That’s one side. The second side, which in my opinion is so interesting: every time on our website, we are often not talking to our customer about, give me other names of people that I can call on your behalf. Right? Because I mean, again, most of those, if it’s a CSO or a CIO and you ask them like, hey,

[00:16:50] Willem Hendrickx: Do we have anyone else in my area that I can call to, would you recommend? It’s a very important question, you know, for two reasons. One, if he says yes, then you basically know that he’s super happy about your product and what you do. If he says no, then there’s a maybe. Okay. Then you have to dig a little bit deeper.

[00:17:07] Willem Hendrickx: Either he doesn’t want to be referenced, it’s just not part of the culture of the company, or there is a problem. And then at least you know, and you can fix it. So I just think you need to be really proactive with all your customers about it and ask them to speak at an event or whatever.

[00:17:21] Willem Hendrickx: And good customers tend to do that. It’s a partnership. At the end of the day, you need to create a partnership with your customer, a trusted relationship. It takes time for the partner, for the customer, but also for us. But you have to spend time with them to make sure that you earn the trust of them. That’s what it’s all about.

[00:17:40] Steve MacDonald: So let’s dig into that a little bit. There was a gentleman, a four-time B2B CRO that was on the podcast about a month ago, and he said, Steve, we all have to spend time with our customers, right? And so we were talking about that and he said, I gotta stop you. And he said, and this isn’t inside of a sales conversation.

[00:18:01] Steve MacDonald: So this is outside of a sales conversation. Like, how would you reflect on that? Like you just started talking about how important it is to talk with customers.

[00:18:11] Willem Hendrickx: It’s true, right? I mean, again, I think you can have, like for example, I’ll give you an example. You can have two types of product management.

[00:18:16] Willem Hendrickx: You can have a product management that is very much internally focused or product management on the road all the time and talking to the customer, understanding what they need to go back to engineering and say, this is what I need to develop. So he’s right. I mean, in that regard, you should. I also think marketing should talk to customers to say, hey, what is your need?

[00:18:32] Willem Hendrickx: Talking about the more you talk to the customer about how they are using your product, the better it is. The better you will become as an organization and also it allows you to get internal alignment because when you then talk about the need of the customer, all of those other functions understand that because they have been talking to the customers as well.

[00:18:50] Willem Hendrickx: So he is spot on. Now, again, that’s not a DNA thing sometimes, as you know, sales function, but you know, it’s definitely something that you need to try to push. And this is also why I think in the leadership teams, we need to make sure that everyone feels comfortable talking to customers. I think it’s super important, right?

[00:19:09] Willem Hendrickx: And it’s not always easy, but everyone needs to do a little bit of an effort on it. And that’s why you can actually start with, for example, executive relationships that everyone owns. So every exec on the C-suite owns like ten relationships as an exec. These kinds of things help to cultivate that kind of culture.

[00:19:29] Willem Hendrickx: But it also helps both the customer and also the different divisions to understand what is really going on and take ownership as well. It cannot only be sales, it cannot be.

[00:19:38] Steve MacDonald: So that begs another question, which is, because you’ve clearly defined how important the customer is, it defines our overall strategy, right?

[00:19:45] Steve MacDonald: How do we go to market and how every department operates? Who owns the voice of the customer? It’s so important. Who owns it?

[00:19:55] Willem Hendrickx: Yeah. This is interesting. I think it’s everyone, right? At one moment in time with Vectra, I had a person reporting to me and he called himself the Voice of the Customer because I wanted him to be the liaison between engineering and everyone.

[00:20:08] Willem Hendrickx: So just like, hey, he represented the field, he represented the customer, making sure that all of the, I would say, recommendations or things were streamlined so we can talk collectively as a group about what is really meant as voice of the customer. And I really like that because it basically streamlines everything.

[00:20:25] Willem Hendrickx: And because it’s easy to say everyone owns it. But you know as well as I do, when you say that, nobody is accountable for it.

[00:20:32] Steve MacDonald: That’s why I asked the question, right? Like you’ve spent time in B2C and B2B. B2C companies have titles like Chief Customer Officer or Chief Experience Officer.

[00:20:44] Steve MacDonald: Right? There’s a defined role in there, and one thing that we’ve been forced to learn is that there are more and more and more B2C expectations that are being put onto our B2B relationships, right?

[00:20:59] Willem Hendrickx: Because I think that every organization has a Chief Customer Officer from a certain size.

[00:21:04] Willem Hendrickx: And that’s great. And I think this is really, really important. And I think, again, this comes back to the value realization. This comes back to making sure that you know when the customer buys, it’s clearly what the pain point is. What are we solving for? And through the cycle, can we make sure we keep on having that proof?

[00:21:23] Willem Hendrickx: And so a hundred percent, a super important function. If this is the voice of the customer, that could be. I just think that also from a CRO perspective, I feel that I’m responsible for the voice of the customer. I’m sure that, you know, engineering says, oh no, I’m also responsible for the voice of the customer.

[00:21:39] Willem Hendrickx: Marketing will say. So I think we need to own that collectively in that regard. That is my philosophy around it. But definitely, a Chief Customer Officer is super critical to making sure that all of the post-sales activities are done in the right way, and the customer is healthy and happy.

[00:21:54] Steve MacDonald: I loved what you talked about, at least having someone, right, where they actually put it in their title or whatever. But that is there to collect the voice of the customer and interpret and coordinate internally between all the different departments. Because right now we do not really have that.

[00:22:14] Steve MacDonald: And I think that’s probably one of the biggest reasons that McKinsey study that said less than 15 percent of companies actually execute on a voice of the customer. Because if we just all kinda have it in our heads, we know it’s important, but we haven’t operationalized voice of the customer into our go-to-market.

[00:22:34] Steve MacDonald: And really made it be very diligent about that. Then we’re just leaving opportunity on the table.

[00:22:41] Willem Hendrickx: I hundred percent agree with that. So that’s why I said like, when we had someone like that in that particular role, that was great because again, it’s collecting data, collecting information, and then it’s not only about that. It’s making sure that that person is also respected across the different organizations and knows what he is talking about. So we can collectively think about what is needed. It is more the voice of the customer that has to do with the roadmap in my opinion a lot of times.

[00:23:07] Willem Hendrickx: But at the same token, you can also use the voice of the customer for messaging and everything else. So I think you’re right.

[00:23:12] Steve MacDonald: I see this a lot on this podcast. Like there’s not a company out there that says, no, we are not customer obsessed. We are not customer first, right? We all are, but it really is to the degree that we execute on that.

[00:23:28] Willem Hendrickx: Yeah. But again, it’s like with everything else, right? Words do not mean anything until you act. And that comes back to the culture, right? I mean, there’s a problem.

[00:23:37] Willem Hendrickx: Listen, every product has a problem. It’s the way you, when there’s a problem, how do you act toward that customer? Do you pick up the phone on the weekend? Can you call and say, hey, we’re going to solve it and be there and be responsive? And I think that’s the same. If you bring that culture to the organization, I think you’re good.

[00:23:53] Willem Hendrickx: But that’s not easy. It comes back to people having the same philosophy and mantra to make sure that they understand if we do right with the customer, we’re going to scale this business moving forward.

[00:24:02] Steve MacDonald: I wanna make sure, we have gone down some really cool lines of conversation here, but I wanna make sure that of everything that we have talked about here, or maybe something we have not talked about yet, but if you could say, hey.

[00:24:17] Steve MacDonald: For everyone listening here, all the C-suite executives, VPs in sales and marketing, customer success, if there is one thing that you would want them to take away from our conversation, what would that one thing be?

[00:24:31] Willem Hendrickx: I think the one thing would be that, you know, again, make sure, in my opinion, and probably a lot of people do, that you have as well an external and an internal communication on why things are important, and over communicate internally about, you know, the overall obsessiveness and make sure that it sticks to everyone.

[00:24:52] Willem Hendrickx: I think that is for me the key area. The second area, again, what I am gonna say, Steve, is people. Because we can always say, this is what we are gonna do, but if certain people in the C-suite or other people are not doing it, then it drags you as a company down. And you need to make sure that you hire the same caliber of people with the same culture that are obsessed about customers.

[00:25:12] Willem Hendrickx: And to your point, it is not about talking, but when shit hits the fan, the people are there and they are picking up the phone. And by the way, the customer has their mobile phone, so they can call them. I mean, that is what I call being there for customers.

[00:25:24] Steve MacDonald: I love it. I gotta tell you, here is my one takeaway from everything here. Maybe it is an observation, not a takeaway. Every single thing that we have talked about here is 100 percent internally under our own control.

[00:25:41] Willem Hendrickx: A hundred percent. Everything is internal and under you. That is always the case. It is always the case. Customers are always right. Do not forget that.

[00:25:48] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, but our focus on them, right? Our internal alignment, how we talk internally, how we set our own culture, how we hire, right? Everything that you have talked about here today has nothing to do with, like, you think about like the traditional SWOT analysis or something like that, and what is gonna keep us from scaling and growing?

[00:26:10] Steve MacDonald: That was in the title. You know, like most reliable growth engine, customer-led advantage, that was our title here today. We did not talk about anything external. It was all internal.

[00:26:20] Willem Hendrickx: Yeah. I mean, you know, again, I think external is, of course, important because you have to have the drive, the numbers, right?

[00:26:25] Willem Hendrickx: I mean, external is, you know, you need to make sure that you are internally set up in order to make sure you deliver the right message and stuff like that, right? Because again, what we did not talk about is basically enabling, right? Enabling the sales folks and stuff like that to make sure that the pitch is right, that they can understand the pain of the customer, that they can deliver the value proposition to the customer and make results.

[00:26:47] Willem Hendrickx: What we did not discuss is the overall go-to-market strategy of how you scale a company, not only by hiring people, but how you do that with an ecosystem of partners. That could be SSPs, channel distribution, you know, OEM partners, which is dear to my heart because again, I mean, if you look at the segmentation of a market, it could be that although it is not in your ICP, you know, but it could be that you can actually serve a certain segment of the market through certain other alliances that you create or other relationships that you build on the channel side or the partner side.

[00:27:18] Willem Hendrickx: And that comes back to also, I think, you all first collect data, right? I mean, a data junkie. And when you have the data, then you can put the strategy together and execute upon it.

[00:27:33] Steve MacDonald: We might need another podcast on that whole go-to-market plan because you are right. That was a big part of what we wanted to talk about today. I would just love to say that the mission of this podcast is to bring C-suite perspectives, insights, experiences, points of view together so that we can all learn.

[00:27:54] Steve MacDonald: And if we share, and we do that, and we learn from each other, that is the rising tide that lifts all boats, right? And you were an amazing part of that rising tide today. Willem, I just wanna say thank you for coming on.

[00:28:05] Willem Hendrickx: Well, thank you very much, Steve. It was a pleasure. So thank you very much for having me.