Sales
Meet Henna
Eight years and five job titles later, she’s so happy with her career that she accuses herself of sounding “anti-Finnish”. Get to know her work-life from our office in Helsinki.
Hi Henna! Being a sales team manager – what does your job look like?
“My job is to support my sales team. In addition, I develop processes, stay in touch with all our other teams and build the cooperation models. There are also administrative tasks, like checking in on their development and making sure they have everything they need. I see their role as being consultative because our mission is to save our customers’ time. So it's not just about selling. Our sales processes can sometimes be very long, they can take years. The discussions with our clients can be long and deep – and then it’s up to us to help them find the best solution.”
You joined a company that was later acquired by Visma. How would you describe the transformation from a smaller company – to now being a part of an organisation with 15,000 employees?
“It was quite soft in the beginning, but we soon realised things like ‘oh we can get help with this’ as well as being introduced to different tools and new processes. I think it really helped us because we were a small company of 50 employees, growing really fast. And it’s hard to keep up with the pace when you don’t have the support of a big company. We had to build everything from scratch. So when our company became a part of Visma, we suddenly had this big group of professionals, centralised functions that could help us with marketing, software development and so on. I think joining Visma has been great – having helping hands across the organisation.”
“When our company became a part of Visma, we suddenly had this big group of professionals that could help us with marketing, software development and so on”
That’s nice, sounds like a happily ever after-acquisition! Aren’t there any drawbacks, like complicated processes or decisions taking longer?
“No, I think we can still make the decisions very locally, and decide which processes, tools and training we wish to take part in. We're not obligated to use all of the resources, but we can implement them if we want to, and use them in our own way. I still have a strong feeling of belonging to a small company, just with beneficial add-ons. I feel like I sound quite anti-Finnish when saying that everything’s fine and great, but I’ve really had a good business journey so far.”
Sounds like a really nice combination! And regarding your own journey, you’re a MSc in Economics. What kind of roles have you had throughout your time in the company?
“I’ve had quite a few roles, depending on how you count, maybe five different ones? I started out as a junior project manager and later became a senior. I did quite a lot of different things, especially in the beginning when we were still a smaller company. Then I've been involved with internal development, building processes and different ways of working, before being responsible for some of our biggest clients. After my maternity leave, I started as a product marketing manager, working with all our HRM products. And now I’m a sales team leader!”
What would you say the atmosphere and the culture are like?
“My team is a bunch of amazing people. We have so much fun together and everyone’s so dedicated. Visma knows that happy people make happy customers too, so we’re all being taken care of – both on a company level and group level. Our culture is relaxed and ambitious at the same time. You can always ask for help, whether that’s inside or outside your own company, like, ‘hey, I think our customers could benefit from us integrating this.’ And every time it’s like, ‘okay, great, sounds good! Let’s work on this!’ We’re all here to help each other.”
How do you think technology changes society? Big words, I know, but what are your thoughts on it?
“Apart from the time-saving perspective, we’re also facing new challenges as the population is growing older. In the years to come we’ll have a lot of elderly to take care of, and fewer who are working and paying taxes. We’re going to have to work more efficiently and develop new ways of working. I believe Visma can help with this. And also, I think one big thing is to just get the information to flow, because we have so much information nowadays, sometimes it's just stuck in different systems, like in healthcare. Hospitals have their systems and private health care a different one. And we just need to get that information to flow and transfer between these systems smoothly to be able to be efficient.”
Yes, the world needs to be fast-paced! Do you think things are evolving quickly at Visma?
“Yes. You can really count on that. If you work at Visma, something new is always happening. During these last few months, we've acquired two new companies in Finland. So we got new colleagues, team members and products. And now we're just working on the segmentation and what sort of combinations we can build with our existing portfolio. I think we have a really good set-up, being a small company in a bigger group, with a lot of flexibility that lets us make agile decisions.”
Meet more colleagues
"It's all about connecting people with each other"
– Marvin Jansen, Sales Manager
"There's so much flexibility, experimenting, and responsibility"
– Lilja Helgadóttir, Product Manager
"I thought to myself: this is magical, by writing code I can make things easier for people"
– Jan Strandbakke, Head of Development
Sales
