Willem J.​M.​I. Verbeke, Ph.D.

Background

Verbeke studied philosophy at Ghent University and earned his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also took courses in marketing and communication science. That broad education shaped the way he looks at human behaviour and commercial performance: across disciplines rather than within one.

He spent thirty-four years at Erasmus University Rotterdam and held the chair of Sales and Account Management from 1999 to 2020. He then remained associated with the university as professor emeritus for a further five years.

Research

Verbeke was the first Erasmus University researcher to publish in the Journal of Marketing, and he has given guest lectures at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, among others.

His more than one hundred international publications have been cited over 14,700 times according to Google Scholar, with an h-index of 44. He received the Howard Sheth Foundation Award in 2002 and again in 2012. He and his co-authors also received the American Marketing Association Sales SIG Excellence in Research Award for the meta-analysis Drivers of Sales Performance: Have Salespeople Become Knowledge Brokers?

Continuing to innovate

Verbeke was among the first to connect sales with neuroscience, genetics and endocrinology. His current research covers adaptive selling, hormonal flexibility, attachment styles, epigenetics and the role of artificial intelligence.

The salesperson as knowledge broker

At the centre of his work is the sales professional as a knowledge broker, someone who connects their own experience and pattern recognition with expertise from across the company, with external networks, and with the knowledge of the customer.

Together with the customer, the knowledge broker then turns scattered knowledge into new solutions and into value that can be demonstrated. Not passing knowledge along, but bringing it together and making something of it.

In practice

Verbeke founded the Institute for Sales and Account Management and helped sales grow into a fully fledged academic discipline. With Maarten Colijn he founded Professional Capital, which won a Gazelle Award five times under their leadership. He is still a senior consultant there.

He has also coached thousands of commercial professionals and has run the SalesMBA more than twenty-five times.

Books

Verbeke has written several books on sales, leadership and resilience, among them Verkopen van kennis, De veerkrachtige professional, Het veerkrachtige brein and Waarom robots geen plezier hebben in hun werk.

Personally

Verbeke has run nine marathons, one of them in under four hours at the age of sixty. He holds the same conviction the retreat is built on: winning over the long term calls for continuing to learn, recovering after setbacks, and actually turning knowledge into action.