Our Founder

Current Role at Alpha Digital

Iwan Lubberts founded Alpha Digital in 2020 from his apartment in Hong Kong and grew it in 5 years to the global sales acceleration platform it is today. Over those years, Iwan has been Alpha Digital's Founder & Director, shaping the firm's innovative approaches to modern sales techniques for corporations and its unique culture. In the summer of 2024 he transitioned into the role of CIO to focus on mentoring in the exclusive sales acceleration suite, where he is responsible for the oversight and evolution of Alpha Digital's programs, as well as leading clients into the digital age with courage, which he plans to do for the rest of his life.

Here we tell the story of Iwan's life and career journey, from first becoming a sales consultant in London back in 2010, then starting and building Alpha Digital, to now being in a new phase of his life in which he is turning the blueprint of modern sales excellence over to the next generation of leaders, and passing along the framework he developed to help other businesses succeed.

Iwan's life journey

Iwan grew up as the ordinary child of two entrepreneurs in a quiet town in the Netherlands. His parents, Frans and Yvonne, ran a small but successful family business together. Yvonne managed sales and customer relations, while Frans focused on the operational side of the business.

Growing up in a business environment, Iwan was instilled with the drive to achieve a better living through helping others, recognizing the limited opportunities around him. At the age of 16, he seized the opportunity to work as a sales associate at John Lewis and Partners in London. With a limited English vocabulary, it was his first significant challenge to adapt and excel in a new environment.

A year later, back in high school in the Netherlands, Iwan found himself disinterested in studies but continued his passion for helping clients. Due to his work schedule, he just managed to qualify for his bachelor’s degree. Besides from his exceptional performance at his role as a business analyst at Hugo Boss on Wall Street in New York City, he still graduated top of his class.

After completing his marketing degree in 2017, Iwan pursued further education at the University of Hong Kong, earning a First Class Honours MSc in Organizational Management. He immediately joined Robert Walters, the global leader in organizational consulting, in Hong Kong. Following an intense and successful stint with the firm's top-performing international Tech & Transformation team, Iwan started Alpha Digital from his apartment in Hong Kong.

In the early days of Alpha Digital, he worked round the clock with experienced or aspiring sales leaders at small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) & enterprises such as Siemens, Randstad & Allianz, seeking to leverage modern sales approaches to improve their sales returns and decision-making processes in over 24 countries. He also shares his vision and research on the future of sales through a monthly edition of "The Modern Seller", that is still being shared with clients via email.

Iwan learnt that they want to harness the power of account-based marketing, AI & automation for lead generation, to enhance customer experience, and generate more revenue from sales. But, are often unsure about how to effectively implement it. This often leads to frustration and overwhelm about staying competitive and keeping up with technological advancements.

In 2024, when Iwan transitioned into his role as CIO, his primary goal shifted to making sure that every B2B business around the world is able to efficiently leverage advanced moderns sales strategies & technologies to succeed, generate consistent sales results, and exponentially grow, not just those with vast resources and in-house expertise. Through Alpha Digital he helps clients to avoid falling behind their competitors who are leveraging moderns sales techniques, prevent them from making costly and time-consuming implementation errors, and eliminate the frustration and inefficiencies of unnecessary manual work.

This has led thousands of business to stay ahead of their competition with cutting-edge strategies & technology adopted seamlessly into their sales processes. Created a new way of generating new business, resulting in more suitable clients for their businesses to grow bottom-line, and this is saving them significant time and & budget in the process, while they can enjoy peace of mind knowing they have a reliable result-generating partner in their digital transformation journey.

Iwan's core principles

While some have attributed Alpha Digital's success to Iwan's unusual way of thinking, he credits it not to something unique about him personally but to his stumbling upon a principled approach to sales that anyone can follow. This approach produces rapid gains in productivity and helps with developing characteristics on how to deal with it well on the long term. Below is a brief summary of his approach:

Always be learning, always be teaching - Foster a culture of continuous learning and knowledge sharing around you to encourage creativity and innovation.

Grow & fail. Don’t fail to grow - Embrace failure as a part of your growth. Go and take risks, learn from mistakes, and push your boundaries consistently.

Build relationships on your expertise - Strong relationships are founded on trust and expertise; share your unique skills and knowledge with your clients to strengthen the relationship.

Practice what you preach - Uphold the highest standards of integrity and performance, ensuring that your actions align with your values.

Keep moving, be quick & smart - Promote agility and resourcefulness. Make informed, intelligent decisions quickly without sacrificing quality in the process.

Rewards Are Given Out at the End, Overdeliver - Earn success through hard work, consistency and dedication; prices are only given out at the end.

Stay Humble & Curious - Maintain humility and openness in your approach. Always explore new possibilities for success and remain curious about new ideas.

Enjoy Changing the Game, as a Team - Celebrate your team success and commit to making a difference together. Stay agile and adaptive to the ever-changing business landscape.

Impact of the values on creating Alpha Digital

The impact of this approach is apparent in how Iwan built both Alpha Digital's sales acceleration platform and its company culture. Iwan built Alpha Digital's go-to-market approach around achieving a timeless and universal understanding of how businesses and sales teams grow, and developed principles for managing them effectively. Since organisations fail or grow for basically the same reasons over and over again, he studied as many cases as possible and developed his blueprint and principles. Doing this well generally requires understanding and successfully back testing of all major sales strategies around the globe in a modern setting.

The sales acceleration principles are then expressed into algorithms and software programs, heavily run on automation and AI, that are back-tested through many real business cases over 5+ years and turned into the service as we know it today. This approach is also innovative in that it involves the full scope of market and business development across the world, has been designed to be unbiased to the environment it is in, and can be tailored to meet each client's specific go-to-market strategy. The process is designed to produce the highest level of return given the market a company wants to develop, due to its high-impact on generating new meetings at virtually no costs and risk.

It is because of this approach that Iwan and Alpha Digital have been able to help multinational corporations, small medium businesses and start-ups around the world as industry leaders in this field for the last two decades. It is because of this approach companies are staying ahead of the competition with cutting-edge strategies & technology adopted seamlessly into their sales processes. Paving a new way of generating new business, resulting in more suitable clients for their business to grow bottom-line. All, while they are saving significant time and & budget in the process.

Culture

In shaping Alpha Digital its culture, Iwan is dedicated to fostering a culture characterized as an "impact meritocracy," where the primary focus is on making the most positive contributions to growth, irrespective of the source or hierarchical position of the idea. Central to this mission are two key objectives: creating meaningful work and nurturing meaningful relationships. With "meaningful work," he aims for tasks that the team members find significant, so they feel driven by a shared mission to achieve greatness.

To achieve these goals, Iwan champions the principles of radical truthfulness and radical transparency. By radical truthfulness, he envisions a culture free of misunderstandings, where open and honest communication builds trust through the absence of hidden criticisms or ulterior motives. Radical transparency complements this by allowing everyone to see the truth for themselves, thus curbing spin and eliminating office politics.