INSIGHTS: An interview with Steffen Torp, Chief Commercial Officer at Visma
Entrepreneurship is the beating heart of Visma. We help business owners with innovative and intuitive software to grow their businesses, and we also recruit them into the Visma family through strategic acquisitions of fast-growing start-ups.
This strategy has helped us achieve steady, double-digit growth for nearly 30 years. Today, Visma includes more than 180 software companies across 34 countries in Europe and Latin America.
When a new company joins us, our main goal is to use our combined resources, expertise, and support to help them grow even faster – turning a startup into a scale-up. But how do we actually do this?
To explain in more detail and provide some examples of our approach, we sat down with Steffen Torp, Visma’s Chief Commercial Officer.
Can you explain your role as Chief Commercial Officer at Visma?
In simple terms, my job is to make sure Visma grows – and grows in the right way.
I do not work directly with sales on a day-to-day basis, because we have many skilled sales directors who look after this. Instead, my focus is to look at the bigger picture. I check how our products are doing, help decide where to invest, and support our companies when we buy or merge with others. Our planning and feedback process is a super important tool for me and for all of Visma.
How do you connect big-picture planning with everyday work?
Our planning and feedback process connects our long-term ambitions and plans with our daily work. This process is essential to professionalise our operation while helping everyone in Visma, from product teams to finance, to move in the same direction. It is not only about planning, but also about checking how we are doing and learning from our results.
We look at things like customer satisfaction, how often our products are used, and our market share. We do this often, so we can respond to our customers’ changing needs. This process has helped us keep a strong growth rate – 17.4% ARR in 2024 – and to serve more than 2,1 million customers in Europe and Latin America.
How does this process function across the course of the year?
Our planning and feedback process operates in two phases.
The first phase is a series of six board meetings at each individual operating company level that happen over 12 months. These follow a set order:
- Feedback from the previous year.
- Setting a budget.
- Looking at external factors that affect the company.
- Looking at internal factors like technology and products.
- Setting a strategy for the following years.
- Setting the right organisation with the right competence and incentives in order to achieve the strategy and plan for next year.