+100% Revenue Growth Every Month With 0% Headcount Growth

How sipgate turned an organically grown sales organization into a measurable, scalable revenue system—with hands-on Fractional Sales and HubSpot as its operating system for revenue.

For four consecutive months, sipgate doubled revenue from mid-market target customers every month—without adding a single sales hire. No new team. “Just” a revenue system that became measurable, standardized, and manageable for the first time.

“Over the last four months, we doubled revenue in the segment every single month compared with the month before. We identify leads better, work them better, and continuously put a huge amount of effort into every step. Every step keeps improving—and it does not stop.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

The Results at a Glance

The Starting Point: A Sales Organization That Was Not Built to Scale

At its core, sipgate is an outstanding product-led company. Its product is world-class, and its self-service funnel is stable. With the new AI Agents offering, the product also became suitable for larger companies, making the mid-market segment of organizations with 100 to 300 employees a strategic priority. What was missing was a predictable, scalable revenue system.

“We are a product-led company at heart—90 percent of the people here work in product and engineering. We effectively had no sales process. Larger deals tended to fall into the funnel by accident. We were practically starting from zero.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

Sales had grown organically, depended on products and individual people, and ran through fragmented pipelines. The visibility required to manage performance was missing—and without visibility, growth cannot be managed.

“A sales funnel is long and has many steps. If you cannot measure each step properly, you cannot see at which step you are losing the deal.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

What Changed: Turning the CRM From a System of Record Into a System of Action

“There is a huge difference between having a system of record, where you spend a quarter of your time searching and clicking around, and having a system of action, where you understand which levers you need to pull to sustain 100% month-over-month growth.”

— Manuel Hartmann, SalesPlaybook

1. Clean Up First Instead of Hiring

The original mandate for Fractional Sales Leader Alen Cerovina was to build a sales team quickly. His first step was the opposite.

“My brief was: We need to find ten people to do sales here now. Alen’s first step was: Slow down—let’s first see how far we can get. I am grateful that he held me back. You cannot solve everything with investment while the processes are not right.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

The result: sipgate did not invest a multi-six-figure amount in fixed salaries to build headcount that would only have created chaos without the right structure. Growth still came—from the system rather than from adding more people.

2. One Unified Process Across Six Product Lines

Cloud PBX, Trunking, AI Agents, Contact Center, Satellite Business, and AI Flow were consolidated into a shared sales process with clear stages—from Discovery Scheduled through POC and Buying Decision to Closed Won. Segments and products provide differentiation, ranging from self-service in the smallest tier to enterprise deals above 301 seats. Measurement also revealed that not every product follows the same sales rhythm.

“With AI Agents, purchasing decisions can be reached much faster than we expected. But you only see that if you include it as a metric and say: Let’s actually measure this.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

3. Enablement on Real Deals Instead of Scripts

Twelve employees across Sales, Account Management, Sales Operations, and Technical Enablement were enabled through one-to-one coaching, shadowing, and deal reviews directly on the active pipeline.

“He sat down with people and said: I can help them improve by looking at how they currently sell and giving them advice on the actual deal that is in the pipeline right now—not through theoretical training sessions that take up their time.”

“We did not simply impose a new process on top of everything. He looked closely at what was already there. Everyone committed, everyone helped build the process—and everyone in the company knows it.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

HubSpot: From Fragmented Pipelines to a Single Source of Truth

“Previously, we had a separate pipeline for each product and sometimes for each tier and process. From a data-quality perspective—and for the Sales Reps’ overview—it was extremely messy.

A qualified lead now means that we have assigned it to an ICP tier. The system then automatically routes it to the right employee for discovery and the rest of the sales process.”

— Eric Mattner, SalesPlaybook

Today, every product and every tier—apart from pure product-led growth—lives in one sales pipeline. Leads are qualified by ICP tier and automatically routed to the right employee. The real breakthrough was visibility: the prerequisite for effective management.

This visibility enabled genuine control: MEDDIC-oriented required fields, dashboards ranging from the executive view down to individual employees, and a connected Account Management pipeline covering churn risk, health scoring, and expansion potential.

“It is like a control panel you can look at. I can measure every individual point as well as the overall process. If a conversion rate drops, I know exactly what caused it. We defined health checks for the processes and repair the specific point that needs attention.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

Why Fractional Sales on an Interim Basis Instead of Hiring a Permanent Head of Sales Immediately

“We were missing the entire middle-management layer. There was no Head of Sales, and the teams were self-organized—that was the gap in the system.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

Building a mid-market sales organization was new territory for sipgate. That made external experience more valuable than rushing into a permanent hire.

“I have not built a sales organization ten times before. External experts bring exactly the experience I am missing. I wanted to learn what matters to me in a role like this before making a long-term commitment to someone I could not yet evaluate properly.

The advantage is that you start improving things from day one. You do not have someone who first needs to get up to speed. We also introduced the highest possible level of standardization—something that works and scales, a market standard instead of building another homemade solution.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate

“We do not want to build a system that collapses when we are no longer there. The goal is a revenue system for predictable, scalable growth—an operating system for growth with clean data, automation, and clear responsibilities, without adding unnecessary roles and tools.”

— Manuel Hartmann, SalesPlaybook

This clarity enabled sipgate to find the right person for the permanent role. The new sales leader starts in August and will inherit a finished structure instead of having to work through chaos.

What Comes Next

The foundation is in place. The next step is scaling: selectively expanding the team with SDRs and AEs, entering European markets with an initial focus on the Netherlands and Belgium, and further unifying the product suite to increase share of wallet per customer.

“We have come a long way with the funnel, but now it really is reaching its limits—our employees can almost no longer go on vacation because it works so well. So I need people: SDRs and AEs. Next year, we will take what we built in Germany into the European market.

Alen also helped me gain much more clarity about the profile I actually need—the level at which I need to hire and how to assess the person. I could not have done that six months ago.”

— Suse Hagedorn, sipgate