LeadDesk Hires New CEO, Continues to Grow on Revenues

    You may not consider call center technology all that sexy of a product, but consider that Helsinki-based LeadDesk’s revenue grew by more than 70%, hitting ā‚¬1.2 million in 2012. The company has grown off of cash flow, making them a nice ICT success story in the Nordics.

    LeadDesk was founded in 2010 by Lauri Pukkinen and Olli SirkiƤ, who noticed the call center vertical had been slow in adopting cloud technologies, with some legacy systems dated back to the 80’s.

    They then built their own cloud call center software, choosing to focus on outbound-intensive calling, From 2010 to 2012 the company saw more than 1,000% growth, putting the company in third place in Deloite’s Rising Star category.

    LeadDeskā€™s customers include media companies Otavamedia, Fonecta, and Talentum and software company Visma. More than 100 call centers and product owners in the Nordic countries rely on the LeadDesk platform, which handles more than 1 million calls per week.

    The company announces they’ve recently they’ve picked up the three-man IT department behind the TeleForce group, which once built its own in-house software for telemarketing. Going forward, LeadDesk will take responsibility of the business critical telecom and campaign management systems used by TeleForceā€™s 600+ call center employees. TeleForce supposedly runs the largest outbound-focused call center in the nordic region, and was recently acquired by Private Equity firm Senica Partners.

    Now they have also hired Olli Nokso-Koivisto from Siili Solutions as their new CEO. With him onboard, their goal is more substantial growth and footprint across the Nordic countries, hoping to hit three million in revenues by the end of the year.

    “It’s fine-tuning the current sales process and really getting the product tuned. As it is, it scales to market quite well. But we need an even better understanding of the target markets, and go there with more strength locally,” says Nokso-Koivisto.

    “We have a very strong product, we have a very strong sales team, and we have a very good strategy. So there are the three points on which we are founded.”