From CSM Manager to Sales Engineer: Career Mobility within Rydoo

Four years ago, Katrijn Op de Beeck joined Rydoo as a junior CSM onboarding manager. It was her first job out of school.

Most first jobs are a short stop on the way to something else. Katrijn's turned into something longer: four years, and a move from junior onboarding manager, to onboarding manager, to sales engineer. It's a path she never planned for herself, but one that worked out.

Ready for a new challenge

After three years in CSM, Katrijn knew she needed a new challenge. The role had started to feel too comfortable, and she wasn't convinced that progressing within CSM was what she wanted.

"With onboarding, you can always grow to senior onboarding manager, project manager and so on. You will just onboard bigger clients, which have their difficulties, and it's also interesting. But I was never sure that was really what I wanted to do."

Then Julien Tilkens, VP of Sales, came up to her one day and settled the debate for her.

"It was Julien who casually said to me one day in the office: Katrijn, shouldn't you apply for the sales engineer role?"

That "sales" feeling

The timing was almost too perfect. It landed right around her three-year mark, just as she was heading into her career sprint conversation with her onboarding manager. Katrijn knew people thought she should be in sales. She'd heard "you should work in sales" plenty of times. She'd just never thought it for herself.

"After three years of onboarding, I was not necessarily thinking of switching to sales at all, so it was really thanks to Julien. When he asked me I was like, oh my god, wow, that's so nice that you think of me, because I'm not sure if I would have done it by myself."

Timing mattered, sure. But moments like this are also what keep Rydoo grounded: people looking out for each other, wanting each other to grow, and when that growth can happen internally, all the better.

An extension, not a jump

Katrijn didn't walk into sales from zero. Three years of CSM work meant she already knew the product inside out. What she needed to learn was how to translate it from CSM language into sales.

"As a sales engineer you just need to have very good product knowledge, but you have to be able to commercialise it more, because you're not talking to clients, you're talking to prospects who aren't convinced about the product yet. So it's a completely different approach than in onboarding, where you just deep dive into the product. What was nice is that I could just apply everything I learned in onboarding in my new role, but sell it."

The shift wasn't only about vocabulary, though. It came with a different relationship to the product itself.

"In onboarding, you often bump into problems the product cannot do, whereas during the sales cycle, you have less of that, you choose what you highlight. So that was nice, it was really a lighter way of working with the product. But still having all that knowledge, when they start asking more profound questions, you have the experience and you have the answers."

Not every part of the switch came naturally, though.

"We know so much that we sometimes want to explain too much, and it's not always needed. Just giving short answers instead of going into all the details, that's still something I'm working on."

Still herself, just in a new role

Ask Katrijn what has kept her at Rydoo for four years and she doesn't point to the career change or the job title. She points to the people.

"The fact that I can be myself in a professional environment really makes me a happy employee. We truly have nice colleagues. It's not that everybody's the same, we're all different individuals, but somehow it works. I really do want to praise HR and their recruiting process, because everybody's truly a fit."

"I have literally no one that I would not want to work with, or that I wouldn't want to sit next to during lunch."

Four years, three roles, one company. Katrijn didn't map any of that out, and she'd be the first to tell you so. What made it possible was someone noticing what she was good at before she saw it herself, and a company where acting on that didn't mean starting over somewhere else.

She's still working on keeping her answers short. Everything else, she brought with her.

Looking for a new opportunity? Find out more about our open roles at Rydoo.