John O'Keeffe Chief Revenue Officer, TOPdesk

Company

TOPdesk is a platform that simplifies work for IT service desks. The Delft-based software developer provides user-friendly and quickly implementable Service Management Software. For over 25 years, TOPdesk has been assisting over 5,000 organisations worldwide in achieving consistent and excellent service delivery. What sets TOPdesk apart in the field of service management is its team of in-house specialists. With expertise and best practices, TOPdesk guides organisations step-by-step in reaching their goals, whether they aim to focus on self-service or collaborate with other service teams.

In December 2023, TOPdesk raised approximately €200 million from investment firm CVC Growth Funds. This marked a pivotal moment in TOPdesk’s history, representing the first instance of external capital infusion, having remained under the ownership of its Founders.

Search Background

For many years, TOPdesk have been establishing a market-leading position in the service management industry. With strong product differentiation, a sizeable customer base (with extremely low churn) and a talented team of 1000+ employees, the business is comfortably one of Europe’s most successful home-grown, pre-IPO SaaS companies. Having recently secured a large round of growth capital, TOPdesk is in a fantastic position to further accelerate international growth and the time is right to hire an experienced Chief Revenue Officer to drive scale and performance into the next part of the company’s incredible journey.

Requirements

TOPdesk was seeking an experienced revenue leader, who would bring experience of building structure and process into a velocity based sales function serving SMB and mid-market clients. With a strong track record of scaling high-growth companies, the CRO would ideally have experience operating at a scale of over €100m in ARR and leading scaled, globally dispersed teams across sales, marketing and customer functions. The successful candidate would be highly data oriented, and would be comfortable operating at both a strategic level as well as remaining close to the customer, with a view to building a best-in-class revenue function.

Result

Following a successful search, TOPdesk hired John O’Keeffe as Chief Revenue Officer. John brings extensive experience of leading and scaling EMEA revenue teams in both publicly listed and VC backed companies. Most recently John scaled Looker’s EMEA business to over $100m ARR before the acquisition by Google, after which he led the integration of his team and took additional responsibility for the Data Analytics & AI team. He had previously been an early EMEA employee at both Nitro and Salesforce, joining the latter at Series C through to post-IPO, latterly leading the EMEA SMB Sales team.