Ilkka Vertanen

GTM Club's mission is to accelerate sales-led GTM in B2B tech companies. GTM Club consists of a blog and a newsletter that advise on increasing B2B tech sales and scaling SaaS businesses. In the future, GTM Club aims to grow into a community that unites GTM leaders to learn from each other. I founded the GTM Club to share what I learned about increasing sales, leading go-to-market teams, and creating and executing winning sales-led go-to-market strategies.

As the Sales and Marketing Director at LINK Mobility, a European leader in mobile communications, I lead our business in Finland and the Baltics. LINK Mobility’s business in Finland broke the 10M€ threshold in 2022. My role involves a holistic approach to managing the Finnish business, focusing on strategic growth initiatives to expand our customer base and market share. In 2024, we successfully executed a go-to-market for SMS SenderID Protection and are in the process of achieving the same with RCS.

Happy Hackers helps its customers accelerate their go-to-market by creating sales and marketing strategies, generating sales opportunities, and converting those opportunities to revenue. We serve B2B companies ranging from VC-funded start-ups to companies listed on Nasdaq Helsinki. As a co-founder, I participated in all day-to-day operations. After the company gained momentum and the team grew, I took a more advisory role supporting our management team.

As a sales director, I led sales and new customer acquisition for LeadDesk's JennyBot offering. LeadDesk acquired GetJenny in August 2021. Our sales team included up to 5 people and me. My daily responsibilities included managing and developing our direct and partner sales, ensuring we reached our targets and facilitating dialogue between various teams at GetJenny and LeadDesk as part of go-to-market for JennyBot within LeadDesk's footprint. Our business unit was tasked with reaching close to 2M€ in ARR.

As a sales director, I was in charge of GetJenny's customer acquisition and scaling our sales organisation. In 2020, GetJenny's revenue was €1.4 million, employing 20 professionals. In August 2021, GetJenny was acquired by LeadDesk. - Introducing JennyBot. Create advanced AI chatbots without developers. All the complicated NLU, intent matching and process automation happen behind a powerful, easy-to-use interface so you can focus on what customers want: answers.

Giosg.com is a software company providing smart and user-friendly tools for e-commerce and online retail. As Director of Retail and E-Commerce, I’m leading giosg.com’s efforts in retail, telecom, travel, insurance, and banking sectors. I'm committed to increasing my clients’ online sales and conversion rates using a combination of conversion marketing techniques and machine learning.

As a Business Development Manager I worked to improve our market position by identifying business opportunities, acquiring new clients and growing existing accounts. My primary role was to introduce Giosg’s solutions to new customers and help them to sell more online by increasing their websites’ conversion rate and/or collecting more sales leads. To reach my goals I worked with our sales and support teams as well as our extensive partner network.

Touché is an online store for fencing equipments. Running my own company has taught me great deals on daily business life, B2C business, e-commerce and online marketing. After 5 years I closed down my business and headed towards new challenges.

K.A.Weiste Oy is both one of the leading and one of the oldest manufacturers of Christmas decorations in Europe. In addition to the manufacture of decorations, K.A.Weiste Oy carries out importation of other Christmas products, along with interior decoration articles and florist products. As online sales coordinator, my duties included managing online sales, coordinating the further development of the e-commerce solution, and marketing of new sales channel.

Master of Science (MSc): Economics and Business Administration Major: Marketing Minor: Business Law Master's thesis about how e-retailer can leverage user-generated data in their sales, marketing, and product management.

Classes attended: Technology Entrepreneurship in Korea Entrepreneurial Management Business Of Sports New Communication Technology & Information Society Media Communication In Korea

Aalto University School of Business: Bachelor of Science (BSc): Economics and Business Administration, Marketing (Management of marketing communications and sales) Bachelor’s Thesis: Consumer's Purchasing Decision in E-commerce and Increasing Value of Average Purchase

Helsinki University of Technology