16 Jul 2026 · 1 h 1 min · Spoken in Dutch

Without a Commercial Engine, AI Does Nothing for You: Steve Declercq of Bizzy

With Steve Declercq, Co-founder of Bizzy. Hosted by Stijn Van Daele and Jeroen De Broyer.

Steve Declercq, co-founder of Bizzy, explains how a B2B sales-tech company built its own commercial engine: founder-led sales first, hiring only when capacity is full, four channels with different conversion, sales and marketing as one team, and why AI only works on top of basics, clean data and context.

Steve Declercq co-founded Bizzy, a B2B sales-tech platform founded in Ghent in 2021 and active in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Bizzy helps sales and marketing teams find the right customers and reach them at the right moment. At the time of the recording, Bizzy had about thirty people, nine of them in sales.

In this conversation Declercq looks at how Bizzy built its own commercial engine, from founder-led cold calling to a sales team, a marketing team and four acquisition channels. He also explains why he says AI without a clear basis and context only gives chaos, and what companies should put in place first.

This episode is spoken in Dutch. The summary and quotes below are our own English version of what was said.

Key lessons

AI is an instrument, not a strategy

Declercq sees many companies with large AI budgets and few successful AI projects. His image is trying to buy a Rolls-Royce when you still need a scooter. Start with the basics: are calls recorded, does everyone log consistently, do data flows work? If the answer is no, throwing money at AI will not deliver, because AI works best on context.

Give everyone the same language for data

When two colleagues pull a report from the same database and get different numbers, the efficiency is gone. Before betting a business strategy on AI, build a data library. At Bizzy, a definition library is attached to every slide deck, so everyone knows which terms were used and the data is interpreted correctly.

The founder sells first, then hires a team

In the beginning Declercq prospected himself, with a simple contact table and a list of about 200 companies, and tracked how many calls led to a meeting and how many meetings led to a deal. After about six months, deals started to close consistently and he knew what a new hire had to deliver. He calls this their most successful sales hiring round.

Hire when capacity is full, not before

Looking back, he would only hire salespeople when the current team has reached its limit. If three salespeople each have one meeting a week, the problem is pipeline, not conversion. Adding ten people to a pipeline that is not steady makes efficiency drop. Prove the early metrics yourself first, otherwise the first hires are a game of roulette.

Track leading indicators and expect a lag

Early on he followed how many people in the ideal customer profile entered a sequence per week, and how many calls were made, since about half of the meetings came from cold calls. A sequence is a roughly thirty-day plan of emails, LinkedIn messages and calls. Results lag effort by about 30 to 90 days, so a dip is the reflection of last quarter's consistency. Today he looks at gross new ARR and net new ARR.

Build a channel mix, but focus on one motion first

For the first two years Bizzy focused on outbound, which made up 80 to 90 percent of the business. Today outbound is around a third. They work four channels, each with its own conversion and sales cycle: outbound, inbound, allbound (inbound and outbound together) and partners. The partner channel, mostly sales and marketing agencies, was the last one added and converts very well.

Make sales, marketing and customer success one team

Bizzy treats go-to-market as one team with different focuses. For the allbound motion, sales and marketing spent three to six months co-creating the flow, and they share account lists and work on the same audiences. Sales feedback on lead quality has to be taken seriously, and that needs trust between the departments.

Find where sales loses time, and use buying signals

Salespeople often wait for inbound leads, spend time on CRM admin and research, and struggle to be in the right place at the right moment. Declercq asks the team where they lose time and where 20 minutes can be won, and builds the answer into the product. Triggers such as a vacancy for a sales role, a salesperson who leaves or a new market opening reach the team as an alert with the contact and the company.

Do not expand abroad before you have validated it

Bizzy hired native speakers in France and the Netherlands too early, before the product and company were ready, and it cost a lot of money. They stopped and now work everything from Belgium, with a similar conversion rate. His advice is to validate the conversion for a few months first, then invest.

Start AI small: version two, not version six

Define small processes, map what you have today, and build a version two before a version six. Let the team give feedback and use it for version three. Declercq automated a weekly pipeline update this way and iterated for a month with feedback from the sales team. Small squads and an "oil stain" effect work better than a project that takes two or three years. Companies want automation, not full autonomy, and keep the human in the loop.

In his words

Short quotes, translated from Dutch. Times are approximate.

Trying to buy a Rolls-Royce when you actually still need a scooter.
Steve Declercq, around 46:30

You should only hire salespeople when they are at the limit of their capacity.
Steve Declercq, around 34:30

In sales, for me it is still rhythm and consistency.
Steve Declercq, around 57:10

Chapters

1:00 Who Steve is and what Bizzy builds
5:00 What commercial excellence means at Bizzy
6:00 Founder-led sales: cold calling and learning
9:00 When to hire the first salespeople
11:00 Team structure and what customer success does
12:00 Why the first two years were outbound only
13:00 Four channels: outbound, inbound, allbound and partners
15:00 Where sales teams lose time
18:00 Buying triggers and signals
19:00 Leading indicators and the lag to results
23:00 Metrics today: gross and net new ARR
24:00 Hiring a head of marketing and building a marketing team
28:00 Sales, marketing and customer success as one team
32:00 Auditing a B2B company: pipeline first
34:00 Hire when capacity is full
36:00 BDRs, closers and a career path
41:00 What accelerated growth: the partner channel
44:00 Mistakes: expanding abroad too early
46:00 AI in sales: Rolls-Royce versus scooter
48:00 A definition library for data
52:00 How to start with AI: small versions
57:00 Rhythm, consistency and over-engineering
59:00 Capture context from day one