Sympa is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the Nordics and aims to become one the largest in Europe. We sat down with Sympa’s VP of Growth, Petri Lankinen, to discuss lessons learned from building a successful b2b SaaS business. We discuss SaaS go-to-market strategy, sales KPIs for SaaS, and the key success factors in scaling a high-performing team. Petri also provides his best advice on what to consider when entering a new market.

Sympa was founded in 2005 and is the fastest growing HR tech house in the Nordics. Sympa has grown systematically, and it's been featured on Deloitte's Technology Fast lists year after year.

Today, Sympa has a team of 140 in 8 locations across 5 countries. With offices in all the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark) and the Netherlands, Sympa is currently opening up a new office in the UK.

Lessons Learned from International Expansion

Your role is VP of Growth, what does that include?

The operative word here is “growth”. For us, that means a heavy focus on new customer acquisition. We’re extremely lucky in that our customer retention is extremely good so we can focus mainly on new customer acquisition.

What has been the key to Sympa’s success?

The main starting point is obviously our software - the foundation needs to be solid so you can build on it. But the biggest achievements along the way have been the ability to open new markets, create happy customers in each one, and the ability to build the market on top of that. So in a way, a lot of small steps along the way.

Describe the challenges in entering new markets?

Oh boy, we’ve seen it all! I guess you could say that the number of mistakes has decreased market by market - the more times you repeat the process, the more you learn. We have now found our own way to launch a new market and learned to do it more effectively each time.

One of the key success factors is recruitment. If I could go back seven years when we were getting ready to open up the first market, I would be a lot more critical about recruitments. In the beginning, we took a lot more risks with recruitment - sometimes risk-taking pays off and sometimes it doesn’t - and when it doesn’t, it gets really expensive.

What is the most important thing in recruiting?

In the beginning, we recruited on our own, and one of the challenges, for example in Stockholm, was how do we attract the best talent in a new market.

At some point, we decided to invest in employee branding and that definitely paid off. I was a bit skeptical at first as I simply wanted to move ahead quickly but that was a really smart move. Luckily we listened to marketing and HR on this, and since then, recruiting has become a lot easier.

Have there been other challenges you’ve run into?

In the first markets, the key focus was on getting the first clients but we didn’t really think through what happens once we have the deals!

In my mind, opening up a new market is not such a huge task commercially - in the end, the customers are rather similar in all markets. As long as you work hard and localize your approach, you do start to see deals being signed. But, you need to be able to deliver on those deals!

For us, implementation projects are always quite local and we did not pay enough attention to those in the beginning. Instead of getting great reference clients, we generated some unhappy ones. Although we were able to remedy those, it would have been a lot smarter to invest enough in great implementation in the beginning.

What have been the biggest surprises?

A big positive surprise has been that on our home market, we have grown with our clients - from smaller customers to larger customer organizations throughout the years. In new markets, we were able to start working with larger clients right away which we had not really expected.

Otherwise, the key surprises have related to various localization needs - whether it’s been local integrations, a local piece of legislation, or something similar. But now we know that there’s always going to be some degree of localization required, and we can expect it.

Starting and Monitoring Sales in a New Market

What are the key steps when entering a new market?

Market research is the first step - but don’t go into overkill on this one. Your own leg work -discussions with clients and partners - is even more important.

Solid planning is the second step. Make sure you have a plan beyond the first three deals. Ensure you have good implementation resources to be able to create those great references and a plan on how to grow the team.

The third key thing is to invest enough in marketing and doing it early. The UK is a great example where we’ve started with marketing, and we have been able to sign first clients even before we have recruited people on the ground. This has really given us a head start.

How do you monitor sales and the sales pipeline in a new market?

We use quite classic marketing and sales funnel metrics - how many MQLs we generate, how many SQLs, and how those are converted into actual offers.

One of the key ratios that I personally track very carefully on each new market is the win/loss ratio. Is our team senior enough to close the deals and are they able to close the deals? If they are not, it is usually not the team’s fault but the team simply needs more support from the other teams.

You really need to have thorough conversations about the early sales cases - discuss with the team, go through each case in detail and really understand what the customers are saying. Everything you can to make sure you keep winning cases at a solid rate. As you are constantly investing in marketing and salaries, you need to make sure those investments pay off.

What’s the role of inbound and outbound for you?

If I go back 10 years - or actually even just 3-4 years - the share of inbound vs. outbound has totally reversed. Inbound is the most important for us now, and we continue to invest in making it even bigger - we still do outbound activities and it continues to be important to be able to do that.

Our average deal size has grown significantly over the years and there are several stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. This is a very demanding sales role and it is quite difficult to combine this type of skillset with someone who’s great at making a lot of outbound calls and book appointments.

How would you describe the Sympa culture?

Creating and maintaining the Sympa spirit has been one of the cornerstones for us. One of the key tasks for a person starting up a new country is to build the right culture into the team from the get-go.

There has to be a common understanding of the key targets, and the way of working. Sympa’s culture is very flat and non-hierarchical and we need to work hard on keeping it that way!

Growth Requires Solid Sales KPIs

What are the key sales metrics for Sympa?

Self evidently we need to meet our quota and goals in terms of signing and closing deals. I’m currently personally focused on the early part of the sales funnel, and especially the quality of our leads.

It is rather easy to generate volume, but the quality of the leads is crucial and we work constantly on that. Who are the companies that approach us, which industries are they from, are they large enough to be a good fit, are they actually ready to invest, and so on.

Other important metrics revolve around how the sales team is able to take the cases through the sales funnel from one stage to the next.

How has Sympa’s growth impacted your sales analytics?

There are actually two things that have placed more demands on our reporting.

The first one is simply the fact that our company has grown. When I started, we had three salespeople and one marketing assistant so you didn’t really need to invest a lot into measuring what we did.

Now our sales team is dozens of people across multiple countries and our volumes are on a totally different level, so this on its own has created a lot more need for solid sales metrics. And the larger we’ve grown, the larger the benefits of solid sales KPIs have been.

The second one is our investors. Having VCs join our team has taken us to a whole new level in terms of data and metrics. But I must say, that even if it has seemed a bit burdensome at times, you always learn something new so it has definitely been useful.

Advice for Other SaaS Leaders

How would you advise a sales director who’s planning to enter new markets?

You cannot copy what others are doing - different SaaS products are so different and your customers are different - so you need to develop a model that suits your business.

We had to create a country-based organization as our product and customers require so much localization.

But if you are able to scale without localized teams and you don’t have to be present on each market physically, you will be able to scale a lot quicker. Opening up new offices, recruiting locally and localization takes a lot of time and effort.

Our first countries were started with a “man and a laptop” model whereby we sent a salesperson to local fairs and exhibitions and started from that.

But now we know to resource each new market with enough resources for marketing, sales and especially deliveries. This will save you a lot of time and resources down the road.

The biggest challenge in international scaling is not marketing and sales. The more difficult part is to ensure your customers are happy, and that you are able to really scale that.

So in a summary:

1. Have a thorough discussion about your go-to-market model.

2. Plan and resource well beyond the first deals.

3. Recruit well. Invest in employer branding and hire external consultants if you need to.

4. Invest enough into marketing and do it early!

5. Make your customers happy to create great references.

How is Sympa planning to grow going forward?

It’s a combination of three: organic growth on our existing markets, opening up new markets, and mergers/acquisitions. Sympa is now the market leader in the Nordics but we want to be the market leader in Europe, so it requires all three.

What are the biggest challenges for you personally?

Probably the ability to let go - not being able to be involved in day-to-day sales work anymore although I do miss it a bit. In addition, learning to trust others, delegate wisely, and carefully measure what we do. Those are probably the biggest ones.

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