Verbolia is a highly innovative Belgian company, which offers a unique SEO-as-a-service solution. Verbolia uses existing and archived content to attract the right traffic to websites and convert it, allowing its users to focus on their business. Headquartered in Edingen, Verbolia saw the light in 2018 and has already been able to establish a strong track record in its home market.
Extending the company’s reach
Founder & CEO of Verbolia is Pierre-Olivier Danhaive, a seasoned entrepreneur, with a very strong track record in web and mobile technologies. Danhaive decided that teaming up with a specialized, professional outsourced sales organization was the right approach to extend the company’s reach into Europe.
Danhaive: “I was introduced to Aexus by a common business acquaintance and immediately liked the business model Aexus proposed. Naturally, there was a fixed cost component, but the model was largely commission driven. Besides, Aexus was recommended warmly by several Belgian tech companies, for whom they had been able to sign up some big names. So I decided to give it a go.”
Fine tuning the go-to-market
It was a choice Danhaive did not regret. “For us, working with Aexus is significantly more cost efficient than hiring our own sales staff. It’s an easy calculation. More importantly, the Aexus business development manager that is working with us is very skilled. He understands what we do, which is not trivial, since our offering is quite complex. Thanks to this knowledge and experience in our specific field of business, he is also able to assist us in fine tuning our go-to-market. This is of strategic value to us and goes much further than operational sales support. Also, he brings a vast network of contacts and relations. He clearly has a good and extensive address book, which allowed him to immediately hit the field. On top of that he is able to identify the customer pains and provide arguments as to where Verbolia can be of help to them. As a result, we were able to quickly identify some low hanging fruit.”
Signing up sizeable organizations
In the meantime, Verbolia and Aexus have already signed up the first customers together. Danhaive: “Thanks to Aexus, we have been able to penetrate accounts in various verticals, across Europe, within a short period of time. We are now active together in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK and have jointly signed up several sizable organizations already.”
So, how does Danhaive see the future of Verbolia’s relationship with Aexus?
Danhaive: “We are not at the stage yet where our entire go-to-market has been crystallized. We are still trying various configurations, segments and countries and don’t want to limit ourselves by focusing on one area only. Our collaboration with Aexus allows us to experiment. They facilitate this very agile way of working and are able to scale with us if we see a need. We’ll certainly continue working together on this in the period to come! In the meantime, we are benefiting from the little booklet of sales techniques that the Aexus team has internalized: all the things you need to ask in a sales process, everything you need to focus on, all boxes that need to be checked. We really appreciate this combination of hands-on sales savviness and pragmatic strategic advice.”