25 Jun 2026 · 1 h 5 min · Spoken in Dutch

How Customer Obsession Became Easi's Growth Engine: Thomas Van Eeckhout

With Thomas Van Eeckhout, Co-CEO of Easi. Hosted by Stijn Van Daele and Jeroen De Broyer.

Thomas Van Eeckhout, co-CEO of Easi, explains how the Belgian IT services company grew to around 700 people through customer obsession: getting positioning and the ideal customer clear before scaling sales, paying sales on margin, hiring for attitude and hunger, a three-month traineeship and employee shareholders.

Thomas Van Eeckhout joined Easi in 2006 as an internal sales rep and became co-CEO in 2019. Easi is a Belgian IT services company active in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. When he started it had around 50 to 60 people. At the time of the recording it had around 700, about 100 of them in sales.

In this conversation he looks at the commercial side of that growth: the expensive mistake of scaling sales on an unclear base, how Easi pays and manages its sales teams, how it hires people for hunger and attitude, and why it keeps investing in personal contact with customers.

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

Key lessons

Do not scale sales before your positioning and ideal customer are clear

Van Eeckhout made this mistake and says it cost a lot of money. Salespeople met their numbers, but with the wrong customers: they signed cloud contracts that were hardly followed by services, while he paid them on the deal. The fix was to profile the customers with whom Easi works for five years or longer, to talk about it with sales and to add a higher bonus for landing the right type of customer. It took about two years to get back on track. In 2006 the ideal customer was implicit, companies running a specific IBM technology. Today Easi moves up the market and looks for complexity.

Customer obsession is the growth strategy

Easi is "customer intimate": it invests heavily in the relationship and in the lifetime value of a customer. Given a budget, he prefers tailored events where a team spends two days with 20 to 30 customers over sponsorship or above-the-line communication. In recent years Easi has done more account-based selling, with targeted campaigns that sales can activate. A new customer usually starts with something small, and the footprint grows when it goes well.

Pay on margin, and set targets by level, not by adding 20 percent

Easi pays salespeople on margin, not revenue, and the counter starts at zero every semester. Targets depend on experience and level, not on region or customer set. Van Eeckhout says simply adding 20 percent every year is frustrating and leads people to hold back deals for the next period. When Easi adds a pre-sales team, targets rise with it, and the sales team understands why.

Hire for attitude and hunger, not for diplomas

Easi looks for people who get energy from helping customers and who think in business solutions to business problems. He tells the stories of a former pizzeria owner and of a former hospitality entrepreneur who became top salespeople and who now build teams. His view: in sales there must be a reason why you are hungry, often a setback or something to prove.

Build teams around the people who show the behaviour you want

Everyone has an ambition, and the company has to align it with what it wants to achieve. Give people who show the right behaviour a team and room to grow, and they tend to recruit people who work the same way. The incentive plan is, in his view, the best tool to give a team direction. The downside is that you pull good people out of day-to-day operations.

A three-month traineeship takes the fear out of sales hiring

Easi struggled to scale because sales managers who made one bad hire became afraid and only looked for the perfect candidate. The answer was a three-month traineeship with 10 to 15 sales starters. After three months, there is about 80 to 85 percent certainty about who works, and most of them, around nine to eleven out of fifteen, sign a contract. It created a steady inflow and allowed the team to scale.

Hire in batches, and keep the hiring machine running

From about 220 people in 2019 to around 700, Easi chose to hire 20 to 40 people at once and make a school of it. At the start of 2026 it had about 200 vacancies. Relations with schools took years to build, and they have to be maintained: if you stop for a year or two, you almost start over. Easi uses a mix of young graduates and seniors, since its own software lets graduates demo after three months, while infrastructure and cybersecurity need more experience.

Employee shareholders make decisions carry

Around 160 employees are shareholders, a decision the founder took around 2011 or 2012. Van Eeckhout says shares only matter if you use them: shareholders get two or three meetings a year about strategy and targets, new shareholders are welcomed each year, and in a hard period you bring shareholders around the table. Otherwise, you just split the dividend.

Follow a few simple numbers

His first metric is profit per employee per month, across everyone and not only billable staff, and he knows the range Easi should sit in. The second is the sales forecast: by April or May it is typically 80 to 90 percent correct. He also manages the semester rhythm: strong months early in the semester, and a small dip that creates the pressure to deliver.

Keep the human contact in an online world

Easi visits customers on site, with an architect and the lead engineer, instead of a thirty-minute online call. He says a prospect who prefers to "just send it" shows you are not in the top drawer. He also thinks we overestimate the short-term impact of AI and underestimate where we will be in three or four years, and that human connection will matter more.

In his words

Short quotes, translated from Dutch. Times are approximate.

If you are paying bonuses while your result is bad, then there is something you did not do well.
Thomas Van Eeckhout, around 14:00

I think we sometimes overestimate the impact in the short term, and we probably underestimate where we will be in three or four years.
Thomas Van Eeckhout, around 58:30

A customer who says "just send it" already tells you that you are not in the top drawer.
Thomas Van Eeckhout, around 1:01:30

Chapters

1:00 Turning points in his career
5:00 Growing from about 50 people to 700
9:00 The hiring machine and relations with schools
10:00 What commercial excellence means at Easi
11:00 The expensive mistake: scaling sales on an unclear base
12:00 Customer-intimate marketing and tailored events
14:00 Account-based selling
15:00 Paying sales on the wrong customers, and the fix
18:00 How the ideal customer profile evolved
20:00 Creating a sales culture
22:00 Customer obsession as a growth strategy
26:00 Hiring for attitude: stories from hospitality
31:00 Scaling people: incentives and team building
35:00 Metrics: profit per employee and the sales forecast
39:00 Targets by level, not by squeezing 20 percent
45:00 Employee shareholders
49:00 Milestones: managers, the ideal customer and the traineeship
53:00 Looking for hunger in sales
54:00 Young graduates and seniority
58:00 Trends: AI, short term versus long term
59:00 Why human contact still matters
1:03:00 Staying curious as a CEO