Seven GTM Lessons from Building a $15M Mortgage Platform Across Six European Markets

Junior SDRs making cold calls. Founders stepping back from sales at scale. Content optimized purely for search volume. These are the tactics every B2B playbook recommends. Geert Van Kerckhoven did the opposite—and built a mortgage tech platform serving over a dozen lenders across continental Europe.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Geert Van Kerckhoven, CEO and Co-Founder of Oper, shared the contrarian GTM decisions that took his company from zero to six live markets with a single codebase. Here are seven lessons that challenge conventional wisdom about enterprise go-to-market.

Lesson 1: Sell the Vision Before Building the Product

Most founders wait until they have a working product before approaching customers. Geert signed his first paying client in three months with nothing but a vision and a roadmap.

After experiencing his own frustrating mortgage process, Geert and his co-founder asked: “How would a Ritz Carlton experience look like?” if the typical mortgage experience was “like a horrible hotel where like the bugs are crawling out of the bed.”

They built a prototype, then pitched it. One prospect responded: “Look, if this is what you guys are going to build, I’ll happily be your first client. And I want to act as a design partner.”

The key wasn’t the technology—it was credibility. “I mean, I had built already at that time maybe eight or nine similar systems,” Geert explains. That track record closed the deal.

The takeaway: If you have domain expertise, sell the vision early. Don’t wait for a perfect product when your credibility can close the deal.

Lesson 2: Cut SDRs in Enterprise Sales

This might be Geert’s most controversial decision. While most SaaS companies scale by hiring SDR teams, Oper eliminated the role.

“I felt that having really junior people just cold calling everybody every day really didn’t generate any meaningful relationships,” Geert says. “And also I think you can automate so much today that today I think full stack is just a much wiser choice, especially in the segment we are targeting and the ticket size that we have with clients.”

Instead of a traditional SDR-to-AE handoff, Oper uses experienced full-stack account executives who “cover a certain region, build up the relationships and just work on accounts and make sure that when in that region, something’s cooking up that we can be there to support.”

The logic is simple: When you’re selling complex mortgage technology to European banks, cold outreach from junior reps doesn’t build the trust required. You need seasoned professionals who can have substantive conversations from day one.

Lesson 3: Founders Should Never Fully Exit Sales

Many VCs push founders to delegate sales as companies scale. Geert’s research revealed the opposite pattern in successful enterprise companies.

“A lot of VC’s will tell you that they don’t like to see too much Founder driven sales and I understand that,” Geert acknowledges. “But when I started studying a lot of companies that are at the 5100 million ARR in our space, I always saw that founders were still heavily involved in sales.”

He found that founders of $100 million ARR banking technology companies “still knew all the big clients, was involved in all the big sales.” This led to his commitment: “Two founders, I mean me and my Co-Founder, we are still very involved in sales. And I mean I will never truly delegate a big client to another team and I also don’t aspire to.”

The insight: In enterprise sales, founder involvement isn’t a liability to scale—it’s a competitive advantage.

Lesson 4: Broadcast Your In-Room Magic

Oper discovered their secret weapon accidentally. New sales hires from other banking vendors told Geert’s team: “Look, when we seed, let’s say, the founding team and the product team going to clients, it’s an experience we’ve never seen. You guys really know what you’re talking about.”

The problem? “That magic only happens when you have us in a meeting room.”

The solution was to systematically broadcast that expertise. “We write a lot of reports, we write a lot of content, we go to a lot of conferences, we engage, we bring together our clients and our prospects. So we build communities,” Geert explains.

The results speak for themselves: “crazy download numbers” for their latest reports. What makes it work? “We write it with a lot of passion,” Geert says, personally treating content creation as his “weekend job.”

The principle: If your expertise is your competitive advantage, find ways to demonstrate it at scale before prospects ever meet you.

Lesson 5: Treat Fundraising Like Enterprise Sales

Geert approaches fundraising with the same relationship-first mindset he applies to sales. His core principle: “Investors that are helpful when they are not on your cap table will still be very helpful when they’re on your cap table and vice versa.”

Qualify your investors as carefully as they qualify you. “There are people you will be working with in the good times and the bad times.”

Geert’s most valuable insight came from joining an angel fund two years ago. “Suddenly I started seeing how investment memos are written, how VC’s think about deal flow.” Understanding how VCs think allowed him to “reverse engineer your pitch” and have “much more meaningful conversations.”

Lesson 6: Choose Milestones That Validate Your Thesis

When Oper reached six European markets live with a single codebase, Geert celebrated harder than any revenue milestone. Why? “For us, it really meant that this pan european software, which has been really hard to do, got validated.”

The lesson: Not all milestones are created equal. Choose the ones that prove your fundamental business model works, not just vanity metrics that look good on Twitter.

Lesson 7: Build Relationships Before You Need Them

Geert’s three-month path to his first customer wasn’t luck—it was years of relationship building. His “little backpack” of experience included building technology for banks, management consulting, and understanding regulatory changes.

When he pitched Oper, he was pitching to his network. People who already knew his work and trusted his expertise.

The same principle applies today. System integrators and consulting partners increasingly drive Oper’s pipeline because those relationships were cultivated long before deals materialized.

For enterprise founders, the message is clear: The playbook that works for PLG companies won’t work for you. Stay in sales. Create content that demonstrates expertise. And invest in relationships that compound over time. Sometimes the best GTM strategy ignores the standard playbook.