Interim commercial leadership for enterprise IT services.
SanRemo Group is the independent practice of Jan Cleeren. I take scoped mandates — usually six to twelve months — with organisations that need a commercial engine built, rebuilt or refocused.
Twenty-five years in enterprise IT services, most of it in the Belgian market and the Gulf, in senior commercial roles at IBM, Hewlett-Packard and EDS. I work at board and executive level, to a defined brief, with a defined handover.
What I do
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 — separating business development from presales where that is the constraint.
Assessment, target operating model, role definitions, KPIs, and the transition run with you rather than handed over as a report.
Large-deal pursuit governance
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 pursuit 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.
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 and investors in IT services and software.
What this is built on
- $600M
- Global cloud transformation programme, converted from a three-year extension into a seven-year partnership.Hewlett-Packard
- $500M
- Government outsourcing renewal won against Atos and IBM, directing a pursuit team of more than fifty.Hewlett-Packard
- $150M
- Digital infrastructure and cloud programmes across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.IBM Middle East & Africa
- $120M
- A government and defence sector built from nothing in three years, including a payroll and HR contract across thirteen ministries.EDS Belgium
- €100M
- Pursuit governance for an IT services engagement, across sales, solution, finance and delivery.Econocom
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, and I am comfortable saying early that a brief is not a fit.