Commercial leadership when it matters most.
I help technology businesses build, refocus and run their commercial activity, from founder-led firms finding their next stage of growth to enterprises facing a critical decision.
SanRemo Group is my independent practice. I’m Jan Cleeren, its founder, and I personally deliver every engagement.
I learned how nine-figure decisions get made inside EDS, HP and IBM. Since leaving the corporate world I have applied that mostly as an independent: turning round sales functions, steering major pursuits, opening new markets and building a company of my own. I work at board and executive level, to a defined brief, with a defined handover.
What I do
Sales governance and method
Most companies do not lack sales activity; they lack a way to tell which of it matters. Deals get qualified on confidence, forecasts on hope, and governance is either absent or so heavy the team works around it.
I assess how the company actually sells, then design and implement a sales governance framework fit for purpose: qualification standards, deal stages with evidence-based exits, an operating cadence and CRM discipline. It is sized to the sales motions in place: light where deals are standard, thorough only where they are not.
The playbook, the CRM set-up and the reports are yours, and within ninety days the cadence runs by your own people.
Sales organisation design
The portfolio and the sales motion have drifted apart: the team is selling the way it sold five years ago, into a market that has moved. Growth stalls and nobody can say precisely where.
I assess the portfolio against market segment and sales motion, match it against what the team can actually do, and realign the organisation around where it can win.
Assessment, target operating model, role definitions (including the split between winning new clients and growing existing ones), KPIs, and the transition run with you rather than handed over as a report.
Commercial due diligence
The growth plan says one thing. The sales engine underneath it may say another. Before an acquisition or an investment, someone has to test whether the commercial machine can deliver the number in the model.
An operator's challenge of the plan: sales-engine maturity, pipeline quality, portfolio maturity, organisation and leadership, delivery against ambition, and what a stronger owner could unlock.
For corporate development, transaction services teams, investors in IT services and software, and groups that acquire firms one after another.
Market entry and go-to-market
A firm has an offer that works at home and a market it has never sold into. A wrong first move costs a year and the references the next attempt depends on.
I assess the candidate markets, segment the buyers by how they actually buy, and test the findings with primary research at executive level. Then I design the route in: direct, partner-led or phased.
Market assessment, buyer segmentation, partner model (if applicable), and a costed phased entry plan with a revenue model.
Major-deal steering
Big deals are lost long before the bid. They are lost by qualifying in late, by shaping nothing, by discovering the price-to-win in the final week, and by governance that reviews slides instead of decisions.
I install a steering framework that starts before the RFP: qualification gates, a scorecard that bites, decision-unit mapping, price-to-win, win strategy and a close plan, and I chair it until your own people can.
Gate structure, scorecard, pursuit templates, two-layer governance, and the team trained to run it without me.
Credentials
I am glad to talk through any of these in detail.
A method that outlasts the mandate
Governance a team keeps running after I leave.
An empty funnel, explained
A solution-sales function had produced little pipeline in nine months. I found a different root cause in each of its three solution areas and realigned the function with management's backing. I designed the 2026 KPI and quota model, which was approved and implemented, and a major-deal governance framework for adoption across the group.
Introducing price-to-win
I introduced price-to-win at the company for the first time and applied it to a live tender after shortlisting. It set our price just below the incumbent and Atos as challenger, and gave the company a method for pricing its future major deals. Around it I installed the pursuit governance: win strategy, close plan and a biweekly executive dashboard.
Founder-led, little process yet
Firms where selling depends on a few people and the method is still in their heads.
From reseller to platform
While the firm moved from ERP reseller to its own platform, I managed the sales team, split it into new-business and account-management roles and produced a two-market expansion study.
Selling first, then building the team
I won the first clients myself, with no channel and no agency, then built the sales organisation. Five clients in three years, three of them expanding beyond the first scope, and a team of up to 20, partners and contractors included, across five countries.
Opening new markets
Entry strategies and first contracts.
A first global-enterprise contract
I opened a new enterprise segment in the Gulf for an operator whose base was mid-market, and landed its first contract with a global enterprise client: mission-critical connectivity across a dozen Middle East countries, modest in volume, a first reference in a new market.
Choosing how to enter
Nine months at CEO level. I assessed the candidate regions, segmented the market by how each group buys, ran primary research with Gulf state-owned energy, nuclear and aviation organisations, and designed a partner-led, phased entry plan.
Where the method was formed
Large pursuits at EDS, HP and IBM between 2005 and 2019, where I learned what a decision at this scale needs.
Global cloud transformation programme. A global agribusiness group asked for a three-year contract extension. I built a financial business case with early savings, based on migration to a standard private-cloud platform that cut resource provisioning from weeks to a fraction of that, run from data centres in the US and Europe for the group’s operations worldwide. I turned an extension opportunity into a seven-year strategic partnership.
Government outsourcing renewal. I took control of a major deal pursuit after a weak first submission, reset the strategy and rebuilt the core team. The final bid scored highest on solution, price and transition, and beat Atos and IBM, for an estate of 18,000 civil servants across 60 departments and agencies.
Government and defence sector. I designed and executed the growth strategy for a sector the firm had no position in, and made it the market leader for IT services in the segment within three years. Contracts ranged from $500K to $70M, including an HR and payroll contract across all thirteen ministries.
Digital infrastructure and cloud programmes. Two years of origination across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and South Africa, in a market where deals had to be shaped from scratch. I shaped pursuit strategies in the airline, financial-services and telecom sectors, and on a major airline group’s account identified $150M+ in new business and built a qualified pipeline of $50M+.
Publications
Fifty years of method have each added a question the seller must be able to answer. In B2B technology today, the binding constraint is no longer seller skill but whether leaders can see and steer the client’s decision while it is still being formed.
How I work
A brief, not a retainer
Every mandate starts with what has to be true at the end of it, and ends with a handover — a framework your people run, a team that knows its job, a decision made. I am not building a consultancy and I do not sell projects that extend themselves.
I work in Dutch, French, English and German, from Belgium and the UAE.