Colleen Lyerla,
Director of Marketing Communications
The Game Changer of 2021
Krista Branham
Director of House Accounts & Senior Success Manager
After kicking off her career in the private equity world and finance, Krista took a leap of faith in pursuit of meaningful, metrics-driven work as the fifth AK Ops Sharp Chick.
Krista now serves some of the largest sales teams supported by AK Operations thanks to her ability to problem solve with quick implementation changes and leveraging the right amount of automation to enable her reps. On top of her design chops in Hubspot, Krista can knock out some of the best sales copywriting which makes her a top performer month over month.
Don’t be fooled by her initially shy demeanor because Krista is a strong, honest, and driven powerhouse when it comes to her work.
Krista lives in St. Louis with her husband, Neil, and baby, Brooks. She enjoys spending quality time with her family, countless hours on the golf course, and snuggle time with her sweet pup, Norman.


From Amy:
“I wholeheartedly believe Krista found her home here. She embodies the perfect combo of wicked smarts, hilarious fun, immense passion, and an endlessly competitive spirit. After knowing her for nearly half of my life and watching her from afar, I knew she had what it’d take to join me. Rallying sales teams and driving to hit sales goals can be super hard, but Krista sure makes it look easy.”
These are my faves
My Family
Golf
Winning
Go-Getters
Baking
Organization
THESE ARE NOT MY FAVES
Clutter
Losing
Liars
Snakes/ Spiders
KRISTA’S CLIENTS ROCK!
a)plan Coaching
I've never had a resource like this in sales. It's changed my ability to close and be more effective with my pipeline. You guys taking completely cold leads and sourcing Enterprise deals has been huge for us.
Jenna Slater,
Director of Business Development
a)plan Coaching
AK Ops was and is some of the best money we’ve every spent. They created a repeatable and predictable process for our sales that was game changing for us and enabled us to grow to the next level.
Michael Counts,
Founder & Chief Experience Officer
Sparrow Connected
We recently graduated from our AK Operations partnership. Their team has been instrumental in our success and growth over the last year including a 400% increase in real pipeline opportunities! Their program works and they generated the pipeline they committed to. Krista and Sara generated the opportunities to help us go from a founder-led sales organization to a scalable sales team. The AK Ops internal goals aligned to ours and we always felt they were part of our team. I will come back to AK Ops when we’re ready to tackle another part of our business’s revenue growth!
Chris Izquierdo,
CEO, Sparrow Connected
Instant Teams
The AK team has brought the knowledge where we have gaps. They quickly came into our CRM and company to make immediate improvements to our sales operations. We are about 4 weeks into our partnership with Amy and Krista and already noticing a major impact to our top of the funnel! Specifically, Krista has been amazing. She is attentive to my questions and concerns. I am started to end all of my communications to Krista with, “I so appreciate you”, because I truly, truly do. She has added a great deal of value to our sales team and how we operate. This allows me the time to focus on other revenue generating activities.
Liz Scruggs
VP of Sales, Instant Teams
Green Clean Commercial
Working with Krista & the AK team has been successful. Krista is very thorough, organized, and attentive to all matters. She works hard to keep us busy day to day. We are looking forward to growing our business leads with AK!
Elliott Stipes
Owner, Green Clean Commercial
Atomation
Krista has been working on the Atomation account since we launched and has been a great partner! She’s always willing to answer questions and do what’s needed to get the best results from our campaigns. I love our dashboard! A single view shows me everything I need to know about campaign performance and where we need to improve to drive conversion from the top to the bottom of the funnel.
Rebecca Skubish,
CMO, Atomation
DenimSocial
“What more can I say about the AK Operations team? The results speak for themselves. Whether it be diving deep into our analytics to refine our campaigns, coaching up our sales team on best practices, or collaborating with marketing, Krista and AK has quickly proven to be an invaluable partner of our team at Denim Social.”
Doug Wilber
CEO, DenimSocial
OUR CLIENTS ROCK
Starr Commonwealth
Alex Newmann,
Founder & CEO
Tenna
Colleen Lyerla,
Director of Marketing Communications
StageConnect
Amy Kohl and AK Ops have completely blown us away. After kicking off mid-June, they hit their 45-day goal in 20 days by booking us 20 meetings. The speed at which they make things happen is shocking—they have violence of action! Every time we’re looking at a new goal or objective, we’re used to a report taking a week or two to build. With the AK Ops team, it’s either the same or next day. Every expectation has been met or exceeded. Our two closers now feel like they have the horsepower of a fully-staffed, well-tuned sales org behind them. We’re incredibly happy and plan to work with AK Ops for as long as possible.
Cole Morgan,
CEO & Founder of StageConnect
Crowdsmart
As a small startup, we were challenged to develop new qualified leads and a robust pipeline quickly. Instead of hiring an army of SDRs, training them, and managing them going forward, we chose a modern sales approach with AK Ops. AK Ops are experts in digital marketing and lead development techniques. They developed a dynamic process to drive quality outbound communication and lead generation. They complemented this approach with weekly analytics to manage our progress. This allowed us to focus on the most important work of turning these leads into customers.
Sam Rapp,
VP of Partnerships at Crowdsmart
VertifyData
I believe the most important factor that can make or break a startup is having the right people in place on your team as you work to execute your strategy. More than anything else, this is why we have been thrilled with AK Operations – and not just AK herself… this especially includes Mallory first, and now Christy and Sara!
In 90 days, Amy and team have been instrumental in most of the areas I would consider critical to our go-to-market success, including:
- Contributing greatly with ongoing thought leadership and solid, foundational planning
- Assisting us in identifying the right data points and patterns as we look to measure results.
- Providing us with the ability (and agility) to iterate quickly as we continue to look for ways to accelerate our progress.
- They balance a wealth of experience and know-how with creativity and collaboration.
- They are aligned with our goals with a passionate commitment towards achieving results.
If you are a revenue leader and your priority this year is to build a successful, scalable, and predictable revenue machine in the ever-chaotic world of startup sales, AK Operations should be your first call!
Cortney Smith,
VP of Sales at VertifyData
Streamloan
AK operates as a true part of our team – especially Anna and Sara. They are analytical, thoughtful, data driven, and fun to work with on sales & marketing – and their technical ability to manage our CRM/Hubs platform is strong. AK rolls up their sleeves to be a true team player, jumping into whatever is needed to make the business successful. They are creative and agile in nature, which is important as we learn to scale our GTM efforts.
Stephen Bulfer,
CEO / Co-founder, Streamloan
BotDoc
Imagine waking up every day with an average of 3-4 emails a day from warm leads that are being forwarded over to you. Sound too good to be true? That’s what I thought before working with AK Ops and Danielle Matthews. They are “difference makers” inside and outside of the workplace. They truly go above and beyond for their clients. Danielle is a rockstar. She is encouraging, disciplined, and equally determined as I am. I am glad to have her as my account manager.
Gavin DeWitt,
Sales at BotDoc
Worklete
Amy and team have been a phenomenal addition to our marketing efforts, becoming an integral piece of our go to market team. Lead by the amazing Sara Bray, AK has driven significant top of funnel growth through multiple channels. The amount of time and dedication to our account is second to none, allowing us to hone in on what is working, making macro and micro adjustments to achieve a broad spectrum of specific KPIs. Thank you!
Ben Kanner
CEO, Worklete