Aki Hokkanen.
COO & Partner at Clevenio.
Nearly a decade spent building international sales processes and the teams around them — most recently at Howspace, across the Nordics, Benelux, the UK and North America. Now in the engine room at Clevenio, turning a product that works into a company that scales.
What I'm working on
COO at Clevenio
Started in April 2026. I'm responsible for scaling the operational side of the company: the sales process, the systems around it, and the team that runs both. The brief is simple to say and hard to do — grow fast without anything breaking.
From advisor to the engine room
I was an investor and advisor to Clevenio before this. I'd already watched the team from close range for a while, which is the main reason the first weeks in the role went straight to work instead of to onboarding.
Scaling past founder-led
Clevenio tripled its growth in the first half of 2026, with 250+ companies on the tool and an NPS of 95. That's the point where the founders can no longer be the process. Building the version that works without them in every meeting is the actual job.
International markets
The Finnish market proved the product. The next chapter is the rest of Europe and beyond — which means sales processes that survive being handed to someone who wasn't in the room when we wrote them.
Scaling a sales organisation
The bottleneck is almost never effort.
Every sales director I've met is fighting the same thing: how do you get a rep's hours to produce value — actual selling — instead of going into finding someone to sell to. Teams rarely fail because people aren't trying. They fail because the process quietly hands the hard, unpaid work back to the rep every morning.
Process before headcount.
Hiring is the most expensive way to paper over a process problem, and it scales the problem at exactly the same rate it scales the revenue. Fix what happens between a target market and a booked meeting first, then add people to it.
Sales ops is the difference between a good quarter and a good year.
A great quarter can come from one rep and some luck. A great year comes from a system: clean data, a defined market, a cadence people actually follow, and reporting that shows what happened rather than what got typed into the CRM afterwards.
A product that works is not yet a company that scales.
Product-market fit is a milestone, not a finish line. The gap between "customers love this" and "we can sell it repeatably in six countries" is a different discipline entirely — and it's the one I've spent most of my career on.
“Manual list building and research remain significant time sinks in B2B sales. Although there are many databases and other solutions attempting to address this, what Clevenio is building is truly different.”
A bit about me
Most recently at Howspace, in key commercial roles including Global Head of Sales and Head of Partner Sales. I led international sales teams across the Nordics, Benelux, the UK and North America, and spent most of that time on the unglamorous half of the job: the process, the sales ops, and the reporting that tells you the truth.
Before taking the COO seat I was an investor and advisor to Clevenio. I'd been watching the company solve a problem I'd hit personally in every sales team I'd run — reps losing their best hours to building prospect lists — and in April 2026 it stopped making sense to watch from the outside.
Based in Finland. Clevenio's team is remote across Finland and beyond, with the main office in Jyväskylä.
Let's talk
Email me at aki.hokkanen@clevenio.com or reach me on LinkedIn. Happy to hear from sales leaders and founders working on the same problems — and from anyone thinking about Clevenio for their team.