In the Cockpit
Marco has a technical background but entered the field through account management and sales training. Today, he guides organizations in the Netherlands and beyond with methods such as Clients for Life, Value Based Partnerships, and Fresh Eyes Reviews. His starting point: customer expectations define value. That’s what you need to gain grip on.
Belgium – Netherlands: Two Airspaces
We quickly noticed the cultural differences. In Belgium, sales management often remains informal, sometimes even amateurish in its approach. In the Netherlands, the maturity is clearly higher: more structure, more professionalism.
Still, both markets face the same issue: how do you ensure sales and account management are not just an individual trick, but an organizational capability (Workman et al., 2003).
Methodologies That Provide a Handhold
Clients for Life: Originally developed in the U.S. for large enterprises with complex stakeholder structures. Workshops in which both teams make expectations explicit and set priorities.
Value Based Partnerships: A derivative for SMEs and less complex customer relationships. Here a one-on-one conversation suffices, but the principle remains: value starts with explicitly stated expectations.
Both models align with academic research emphasizing that customer expectations are dynamic and must be managed proactively to retain loyalty (Homburg et al., 2010).
Fresh Eyes Reviews – Looking Through the Customer’s Lens
Marco elaborated on the Fresh Eyes Reviews: qualitative customer interviews at senior level, often with strategically important clients. They go further than NPS scores or standard satisfaction surveys. Here, the customer decides what matters.
The insights are often confronting: sometimes it turns out decision-makers hardly have contact with their supplier, or that expectations were never explicitly discussed. The result: concrete improvement actions and a sharper picture of what is truly valuable in the collaboration.
Christensen’s “Jobs to be Done” theory resonates strongly here: customers “hire” a supplier to make progress in their own context (Christensen et al., 2016). Only by explicitly understanding those jobs can a supplier sustainably add value.
AI as Co-Pilot
Innovation was also on the table. Marco is currently developing CCO Insights, an AI-driven tool that collects feedback on won and lost proposals through short chat conversations.
The data is translated into dashboards with patterns and recommendations. This ties in with my own experience: AI accelerates the analysis of conversations and reports. It makes commercial learning not only faster but also more objective.
Research shows that AI in account management mainly adds value in analysis and decision-making tasks, as long as human interpretation and relationships remain central (Davenport et al., 2020).
Conclusion – Setting Course with Tenacity
Tenacity lives up to its name: persistently working on customer relationships, not with loose tips & tricks, but through processes that make expectations measurable and discussable. From the cockpit, I see the same focus I apply at Add Business: strengthening human relationships by systematically working on trust, value, and control.
And at the same time, I keep learning. Because alongside my role at Add Business, as co-founder of Companyonwise and the NBB HUB, I see the value of combining methodologies and tools. Marco and I may start from different angles, but we land at the same destination: helping organizations grow sustainably—with grip on what truly matters.
References
Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K., & Duncan, D. S. (2016). Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. Harper Business.
Davenport, T. H., Guha, A., Grewal, D., & Bressgott, T. (2020). How artificial intelligence will change the future of marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(1), 24–42.
Homburg, C., Müller, M., & Klarmann, M. (2010). When should the customer really be king? On the optimum level of salesperson customer orientation in sales encounters. Journal of Marketing, 74(2), 55–74.
Workman, J. P., Homburg, C., & Jensen, O. (2003). Intraorganizational determinants of key account management effectiveness. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 31(1), 3–21.