COO at Clevenio
Started April 2026. The job is simple to say: scale the sales process, the systems around it, and the team running both, without anything breaking on the way. Simple to say is not the same as easy to do.
Finland · COO & Partner
Aki Hokkanen.
COO & Partner
at Clevenio.
I take things seriously without taking myself too seriously. People first, results after. I’d rather let our customers do the talking than talk about myself.
Nearly a decade building international sales processes, most recently at Howspace across the Nordics, Benelux, the UK and North America. What I actually believe: fix the root problem, not the symptom. Almost everything good follows from there. A customer experience worth talking about. A team that wants to stick around and build it. Now doing exactly that at Clevenio, turning a product customers already love into a company that scales without breaking.
COO & Partner, Clevenio
Now
What I’m working on
From advisor to the engine room
I backed Clevenio before I joined it. I told the founders at the pre-seed round that most database companies fix the wrong problem. When the chance came to fix the right one from the inside, staying on the sidelines stopped making sense.
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 is the exact point where founders can no longer be the process. My job is making the company work without them in every single meeting.
International markets
Finland proved the product works. Proving it survives being handed to someone who wasn’t in the room when we built it, that is the next chapter, and the harder one.
“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.”
Playbook
How I think about it
Trust comes before any process.
Process matters, a lot, and most of what follows is process. But no cadence, no CRM field and no perfect sequence closes anything before two people actually trust each other. I build that first, human to human, and let the process do its job after.
The bowtie is dead.
Old sales thinking draws a funnel. Awareness, then interest, then a deal, one thing leading to the next like a recipe followed in order. I don’t buy it anymore. The companies actually winning right now treat the customer as the center of a circle, not the end of a pipe, with outreach, marketing and brand all feeding that same center at the same time. Kill the bowtie. Build the circle, and put the target audience in the middle of it.
The bottleneck is almost never effort.
Every sales director I’ve met is fighting the same thing: turning a rep’s hours into actual selling, not into hunting for someone to sell to. Teams don’t fail because people stop trying. They fail because the process hands the same unpaid research work back to the rep every morning.
Process before headcount.
Hiring is the most expensive way to patch a broken process, and it breaks at the same rate revenue grows. Fix what happens between a defined market and a booked meeting first. Then add people to something that already works.
Your market is finite, not infinite.
Most sales tools treat symptoms, because the root cause got skipped. Your market has edges. It can be found and mapped in full, company by company, decision maker by decision maker. So why wouldn’t you build your whole commercial organization around it? Do that first and growth stops being a headcount problem. Get sharper before you get bigger.
A system beats a hot streak.
One great rep and a lucky quarter, anyone can have that. A great year needs clean data, a market that is actually defined, a cadence people follow without being told, and reporting that shows what happened, not what got typed into the CRM afterward to make the numbers look right.
Background
A bit about me
Most recently at Howspace, in commercial roles including Global Head of Sales and Head of Partner Sales, leading international teams across the Nordics, Benelux, the UK and North America. Most of that time went to the unglamorous half of the job: process, sales ops, and reporting that actually tells the truth.
Before taking the COO seat I was an investor and advisor to Clevenio. I’d watched the team solve a problem I had hit in every sales org I ran, reps losing their best hours to building prospect lists instead of selling. 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.
Outside work I’m the same person I am in it: pretty relaxed, mostly serious, always up for a laugh. Ball sports, snowboarding, and an unhealthy amount of superhero movies. Spider-Man is the favorite, and has been since I was a kid praying every night I’d wake up with the powers. If you want to know how I actually work with people, ask one of our customers instead of me.
Get in touch
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.