Every founder selling into the enterprise knows the pain: endless stakeholder loops, drawn-out security reviews, and months between verbal yes and signature. You celebrate a big logo, only to realize your average contract value hasn’t grown and your churn is rising.
Jochem van der Veer, Co-founder and CEO of TheyDo, learned that lesson the hard way. A designer turned CEO, he built TheyDo to help large organizations align around customer journeys and break down silos that slow growth. But when the company began selling to global enterprises like GM and The Home Depot, his product mindset collided with enterprise reality.
At SaaSiest Amsterdam, Jochem opened his “CEO Diary” to share how TheyDo rebuilt its go-to-market engine from the ground up. The company not only cut its enterprise sales cycle in half, it also tripled its average contract value—without adding layers of process or burning out the team.
From design agency to enterprise SaaS
Before TheyDo, Jochem ran a design agency that helped corporations map customer journeys and find growth opportunities. Workshops filled with sticky notes and personas often ended in applause from executives—but nothing changed the next day.
That disconnect became the founding insight behind TheyDo. If companies could digitize the way they manage customer journeys, teams could finally work from the same source of truth. The idea was clear. The execution, less so.
As a first-time SaaS founder, Jochem fell for the playbook of the moment: product-led growth.
“We thought customer journeys were universal,” he said. “Build a great solution and it will spread naturally.” But in the enterprise, that logic broke. Every function had its own definition of “journey.” Marketing spoke funnels, sales spoke pipelines, CX measured NPS.
The result was predictable—long cycles, scattered champions, and deals that never scaled.
The early mistake: right product, wrong leader
TheyDo’s first growth spurt came almost by accident. A few enterprise teams adopted the product, but the company lacked a defined sales motion. When demand picked up, Jochem hired a senior revenue leader to build structure. On paper, it was the right move. In practice, it slowed everything down.
The issue wasn’t the person. It was the mismatch between business model and go-to-market motion. Selling a point solution to one department is very different from selling a platform that unites an entire enterprise. The leader knew how to run fast transactional deals. TheyDo needed someone who could navigate multi-threaded sales, complex procurement, and value proof.
For a year, the company worked hard but barely moved. Sales cycles stayed long, ACV flat. “We grew, but it was the wrong growth,” Jochem said. “We sold to teams who liked us, not to organizations ready to transform.”
When he replaced that role with a leader experienced in enterprise value selling, everything changed. The new structure turned the funnel into a system. TheyDo re-mapped its process around the stages of the customer’s buying journey and rebuilt every playbook from discovery to legal.
Redefining the motion: value before velocity
Jochem’s biggest mindset shift was from selling features to selling outcomes. “Our customers didn’t want journey management—they wanted to sell more cars or improve service efficiency,” he explained.
Instead of opening with demos, the team learned to start conversations at the business level. What revenue or cost metric are you trying to move? Why now? What happens if nothing changes? Once those answers were clear, TheyDo translated its product into that specific business outcome.
In one example, an automotive client came in looking for a mapping tool. By probing deeper, TheyDo uncovered that the real driver was poor loyalty in specific markets due to broken service experiences. The story became tangible: connecting journey data across teams to improve service quality, which directly increased car sales.
This reframing changed everything. Prospects began to see TheyDo not as software, but as a lever for measurable impact. That shift gave the team permission to raise prices and shorten cycles—because the value was obvious.
Building a predictable system
With the right leadership in place, TheyDo adopted a structured sales methodology that every seller could speak fluently. The team experimented with MEDDIC and Challenger before standardizing on Command of the Message—a framework that forces precision in how you articulate pain, value, differentiation, and proof.
TheyDo didn’t just train it; they rewired the CRM and pipeline around it. Qualification moved later in the funnel, only after a clear business problem, stakeholders, and impact were defined. Deals without an executive sponsor or measurable outcome simply didn’t advance.
Within months, forecasting became reliable. Win rates on qualified pipeline stabilized at 30 percent quarter after quarter. For the first time, the company could see six months ahead with confidence.
Jochem also learned the importance of understanding who sits across the table. In one 500-day sales cycle with Kimberly-Clark, the team spent months nurturing a supportive VP—only to realize he had no budget authority. “He was a coach, not a champion,” Jochem said. “He wanted us to win but couldn’t make it happen.”
When TheyDo rebuilt its stakeholder mapping, identifying a coach, a champion, and an economic buyer in every deal, win rates jumped to 70 percent across all pipeline.
Removing friction everywhere
While the sales motion matured, operational bottlenecks still killed momentum—especially in legal. Their standard master service agreement was 26 pages long. Every procurement team had edits. Reviews dragged for months.
A new legal lead cut the MSA to nine pages, simplified security documentation, and pre-negotiated standard redlines. The effect was immediate. Deals that used to take eight weeks to formalize were signed in two to four.
For Jochem, it was a revelation. “Legal is part of go-to-market,” he said. “When it’s frictionless, speed compounds.”
The same principle applied elsewhere. TheyDo began automating inbound qualification with AI, freeing sellers to focus on outbound and expansion. The company is now targeting a 1 SDR to 10 AE ratio—an unheard-of level of efficiency enabled by automation and clarity of process.
Turning value into a culture
Everything TheyDo does now centers on one idea: value is the product. Every stage of the journey—discovery, qualification, proposal, close—is framed around how the customer defines success.
That mindset turned enterprise selling from something Jochem feared into something he loves. “I used to hate sales,” he said. “Now it’s my favorite part, because it’s just designing value with our customers.”
The company has institutionalized that design mindset. Every team speaks the same language of outcomes, impact, and urgency. Quarterly deal reviews focus on value created, not just revenue booked.
The result is a calmer, faster, more profitable system. Sales cycles are shorter because every step builds proof. ACVs are higher because the story earns it. Retention is stronger because customers see results in their own metrics.
What good looks like
- Sales cycles cut by half through stakeholder mapping, value framing, and legal simplification
- ACV tripled by moving from feature selling to business outcome selling
- Predictable pipeline with 30 percent win rate on qualified deals and 70 percent when all three stakeholder roles are engaged
- Consistent language across sales, marketing, and leadership tied to measurable customer value
Final takeaway
There is no shortcut to enterprise velocity. You earn speed by creating clarity. You earn higher ACVs by delivering unmistakable value.
TheyDo’s story is proof that when you align leadership, process, and product around the customer’s business impact, growth compounds naturally.
As Jochem put it: “Follow the journey, create value at every step, and you’ll earn the right to increase your ACV.”
Watch the full session from SaaSiest Amsterdam here: https://saasiest.com/ceo-diary-how-we-cut-our-enterprise-sales-cycle-in-half-while-tripling-acv/
