Driving Sales Productivity and Strategic Decision-Making at Aiven

About Aiven

Aiven is a leading provider of fully managed cloud database services, helping businesses scale their data infrastructure seamlessly. As a fast-growing company, Aiven operates in a consumption-based sales model, where understanding revenue trends and optimizing sales performance are critical to sustained success.

Meet Markus

Markus is the Director of Sales Operations at Aiven and has been with the company for three years. He initially focused on go-to-market strategy and served as Chief of Staff to the CRO before transitioning to lead sales operations. His responsibilities include target planning, performance tracking, and serving as the key connection between finance, marketing, and sales. His team operates remotely across multiple countries, working to ensure agility and alignment in Aiven’s sales operations.

The Challenge

As a high-growth scale-up, Aiven regularly adapts its sales strategy, account ownership structures, and team composition. With a consumption-based business model, revenue isn’t always predictable—customers can activate and deactivate services at will, making planning complex.

Markus explained:

“We were constantly adjusting our account ownership and sales strategy—sometimes twice a year. With typical fluctuations and a focus on keeping top-performing colleagues, we needed clear visibility into productivity and where our growth was truly coming from. Without detailed insights, it was difficult to differentiate between actual ARR growth and changes driven by account reassignments.”

The team was spending significant time manually aggregating data across multiple sources, often taking days to generate reports that could guide sales strategy. Without a trusted, real-time view of sales performance, making informed decisions about team structures, sales motions, and compensation was a challenge. Additionally, with Aiven’s business model allowing customers to freely turn services on and off, revenue forecasting and productivity tracking were complex and required deeper insights.

The solution

Aiven partnered with Lative to gain real-time visibility into rep-level performance, incremental ARR, and productivity insights. With Lative, Aiven could:

Track incremental ARR per account and measure the impact of sales reps on growth even with changing territories.
Identify the most effective sales motions and adjust strategies accordingly.
Reduce reliance on manual reporting and make data-driven decisions faster.
Gain visibility into productivity at an individual rep level, industry, customer segment, etc enabling better hiring and sales structuring decisions.

”Before partnering with Lative, we were flying blind when it came to truly understanding our sales team’s productivity. We knew we had talented sellers, but lacked the concrete data to pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. Tracking and measuring productivity was subjective, fragmented & time-consuming process that left us with more questions than answers.

Lative’s engagement with us was a game changer for us. Lative team acted as a true partner with us as opposed to just another system vendor. They didn’t just hand us a tool; they worked closely with us to establish and define a clear baseline for our productivity data. Refined data capture models and helped us package our data up to be meaningful and insightful.

Now, we have real-time visibility into the performance of individual sales team members, across different roles and classifications. We can see exactly how each rep is performing, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize our sales strategy. Lative has empowered us to move from guesswork to precision, and are using this to target specific improvements into the future.”

Conor Forde, SVP Go to Market, Aiven

Implementation

Aiven’s implementation of Lative was an iterative process, ensuring that the data and insights delivered were accurate and trustworthy. With a business as dynamic as Aiven’s, having a solution that could evolve with changing needs was crucial.

“Our business model makes forecasting and planning challenging, and we knew we weren’t the easiest customer. When we looked at forecasting solutions for example, vendors often found our requirements too complex. What stood out with Lative was their willingness to work through these challenges. We fine-tuned the KPIs together, iterated on configurations, and ultimately built a system we could trust. Now, when executives ask where a number comes from, we have full confidence in the data.”

Initially, it took a few months to fully optimize the system, with multiple refinements along the way to ensure the insights were meaningful and directly actionable. This level of customization and alignment meant that, by the time the system was fully operational, Aiven could instantly access insights that previously required extensive manual effort.

The outcomes

With Lative, Aiven transformed its sales planning and decision-making process:

Saves time

What once took 1-2 days of manual data aggregation now takes just minutes

Optimized sales strategy

Data-driven insights enabled Aiven to redesign its sales motions and rep portfolios for the next fiscal year

Improved productivity tracking

Aiven now has clear visibility into rep effectiveness and can make more informed decisions on where best to focus their time.

Proactive sales management

Weekly check-ins with regional VPs are now guided by real-time data, helping to identify and address issues before they impact revenue

More strategic account planning

Aiven can now differentiate between real account growth versus growth driven by portfolio shifts, ensuring a more accurate measurement of sales rep performance

One of the biggest challenges was differentiating between real sales-driven growth and portfolio changes. For example, when a rep inherits new accounts, their portfolio size naturally increases—but does that mean they’re actually driving growth? With Lative, they can now see the true incremental ARR per rep, which helps us understand productivity at a much deeper level.

What's next?

Beyond productivity tracking, Aiven is now exploring how Lative can enhance its sales planning processes, particularly in forecasting and long-term account management.

''We first started using Lative to track productivity and incremental ARR, but once we saw the potential, we realized we could leverage it for much more. Now, we’re looking at how we can integrate it further into our planning cycle and long-term sales strategy''

A partnership built on trust

More than just a software solution, Lative has become a trusted partner for Aiven, fostering a relationship that feels uniquely collaborative.

“somehow, the word ‘family’ is popping up. And I’m not saying we are a family, but the way we communicate and interact—it feels like how you work with family. It’s never just about business; it’s about how we can be successful together.”

Unlike traditional vendor relationships, the partnership between Aiven and Lative is built on mutual trust, adaptability, and shared success. The ongoing collaboration ensures that as Aiven’s business needs evolve, Lative remains a key enabler of data-driven decision-making.

With Lative, Aiven has shifted from reactive decision-making to a proactive, data-driven approach that ensures continued success in their evolving sales strategy.

About Lative

Lative is an advanced sales planning and decision intelligence platform that helps companies achieve their revenue goals in the most efficient and profitable way. It enables revenue leaders to analyze sales performance, productivity, and efficiency, providing full visibility into their sales organization. With traditional planning methods like spreadsheets, static forecasts, and fragmented data, Lative removes these bottlenecks by delivering a single source of truth. Revenue leaders can plan both short- and long-range capacity and quota models with confidence and track the execution against their strategy in real-time. With Lative, businesses replace guesswork with precision, eliminate inefficiencies, and scale effectively.

Companies like Aiven are proving that strategic revenue planning and execution doesn’t have to be complex. Let’s explore how Lative can work for your business.