Book more demos with calls timed to renewals and real problems

Most companies with ten or more employees in Belgium and the Netherlands already pay for cloud software. A SaaS company rarely sells to an empty spot. It sells against a spreadsheet, a homegrown tool or a competitor with a contract that renews on a fixed date. Calling works when an SDR finds that date, asks about the problem behind it and books a short demo before the moment passes.

The market: buyers who already pay for software

Cloud software is mainstream in both countries. According to Eurostat data for 2025, 61.6% of Belgian and 68.5% of Dutch enterprises with ten or more employees used paid cloud computing services, against 52.7% across the EU. The gap is even larger for business software: paid cloud CRM was used by 29.8% of Belgian and 39.8% of Dutch enterprises, against 14.7% in the EU, and finance or accounting software in the cloud by 45.7% and 53.3%. Eurostat's overview shows that email, office software and file storage are the most common cloud services, so most buyers have been through a software purchase before.

On the supply side the market is crowded. CBS counts more than 106,000 ICT companies in the Netherlands in 2025, and the CBS business register lists 49,085 businesses in software development on 1 October 2026 (provisional figures), most of them one-person companies. In Belgium, the ICT sector had 71.7 billion euro turnover and about 130,000 jobs in 2024, according to Agoria figures reported by Computable.

Two consequences for outbound. First, the buyer compares you with what they have, not with nothing. Second, both markets are small. A Belgian or Dutch ideal customer profile often holds a few thousand companies, not hundreds of thousands, so every lead deserves follow-up rather than one attempt.

Who you call and what you ask

Call the person who lives with the problem and the person who owns the budget. Depending on the product:

• Department head: finance director, HR manager, operations manager, sales manager.
• Owner or managing director at companies with fewer than about 50 employees, where one person decides.
• IT or security: rarely the first contact, but involved in integration, access and data questions.
• The daily user: a team lead who can tell you what really breaks.

Moments that make a call relevant:

• A renewal date of the current tool, often annual. It is the single most useful field to capture.
• A new person in the role. New managers review tools in their first months.
• Growth: a new site, a second country, a team that doubles.
• Regulation. In Belgium, structured e-invoicing via Peppol became mandatory for B2B invoices from 1 January 2026; in December 2025 only about 43% of VAT-liable companies had registered, according to VRT NWS. Rules like this push companies to review finance and admin tools.

Discovery questions that work for software:

1. How do you handle this today, and what does it cost you in time each week?
2. Which tool do you use now, and when does that contract renew?
3. Who else would want to see a demo before you decide?
4. What would have to be true for you to switch this year?
5. If we spend 20 minutes on a demo, which one question should it answer?

Defining who to call before you dial is half the work. See how to define your ideal customer profile.

What slows a calling team down in this sector

• Locked-in contracts. Many prospects cannot switch before renewal. Without a planned call back at the right month, the opportunity disappears.
• "Send me a deck." A polite way to end the call. The better reply is one question about the problem, then a short demo.
• Many SDRs, little shared memory. When several people call the same market, leads get called twice or not at all.
• Demo no-shows. A demo booked a week out with no clear purpose is easy to skip.
• Bilingual markets. Belgian prospects may prefer Dutch or French, Dutch prospects Dutch. A script in the wrong language costs the first minute.

Most of these problems shrink when an SDR team agrees on one shared list per segment, one script and one rule: every call ends with an outcome and a planned next step.

What it can bring you: efficiency, money and more

SaaS revenue compounds, so every extra customer won by an SDR team keeps paying. The table below is an example with assumed numbers, not a forecast. Replace every figure with your own funnel.

In this example, one SDR month yields about 54,000 euro in contract value over three years. Your own rates decide whether the real figure is higher or lower, so measure them. The jump from conversation to demo is often where most value is lost: see how to ask for the meeting.

Efficiency is measurable too. Track for a week how long SDRs spend after each call on notes, CRM fields and finding the next date. Logging the outcome with one key and having the next step planned keeps SDRs on the phone. Setting the demo while the prospect is still on the line keeps the gap short and the purpose fresh; see how to reduce meeting no-shows.

Want to see the calling screen first? Try the demo.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Eurostat: Cloud computing, statistics on the use by enterprises (Statistics Explained)
2. Eurostat: Cloud computing services by size class of enterprise (dataset isoc_cicce_use, 2025)
3. CBS: Digitalisering en kenniseconomie 2025, summary
4. CBS StatLine: Bedrijven; bedrijfstak (table 81589NED)
5. Computable: Belgische ict-sector krimpt en floreert (Agoria figures for 2024, 29 January 2025)
6. VRT NWS: Peppol e-invoicing obligation from 1 January (4 December 2025)