Our Reviews

If you’re looking for an outbound partner who delivers, and sometimes overdelivers on their promises, look no further than AK Operations. Excellent service. Thoughtful approach. Outstanding results.

With a long sales cycle, it’s critical that the top of StrongArm’s sales funnel is robust enough to create an opportunity waterfall that supports our growth goals 12-18 months out. We engaged the AK Operations Team to amplify our outreach efforts and help create a repeatable top of funnel motion focused on targeting right-fit customers. Needless to say, the AK Team has revolutionized our go-to-market muscle, 4X’ing our pipeline in as many months while freeing up our internal resources to focus on closing. Moreover, the AK Team is full of domain expertise, which has paid dividends for a lean sales org like ours. Krista, Stevi & Kalie are a pleasure to work with and feel like an extension of the StrongArm team – a rare occasion with a third party vendor in my experience!

Amy Kohl and the AK Operations team have been invaluable partners in shaping Ironwood Cyber's commercial marketing strategy. Their mathematical and statistical approach to marketing is truly exceptional. In the competitive landscape of cybersecurity services, capturing buyers' attention is no small feat. I've been consistently impressed with the AK Operations team's adeptness at swiftly identifying and adjusting strategies that yield results. Equally noteworthy is their accessibility and collaborative nature. They've consistently proven themselves as responsive and cooperative partners, working alongside us to achieve our objectives.

Under Amy’s leadership, our sales motion has been meticulously restructured, resulting in a more streamlined and efficient process. Her team’s attention to detail and strategic insights have enabled us to fine-tune our operational outreach, maximizing our engagement with potential clients.

Our engagement with AK Ops provides real-time feedback on marketing and outreach tactics, immediately spotlighting the most effective strategies and areas that need refinement. This invaluable data not only solidifies confidence in the sales team's approach but also enables companies to discern and fine-tune their most resonant messages. This iterative feedback loop ensures that messaging and targeting remain dynamically aligned with market demand, to build predictability and confidence in sales outcomes.

Anna brings fantastic energy to her meetings. She presents polished analyses and does a great job of breaking down information in a clear and concise manner.

Tina was great! We needed her to quickly flip a major content project my team didn’t have the bandwidth to do. She demonstrated initiative and speed in completing her work. I didn’t have to guide her much. She was a great communicator and asked questions when needed.

Working with Christy has been an amazing experience. She has a wealth of industry knowledge & experience and has been instrumental in creating strategies that have helped us reach our goals. She's quick to think outside the box and come up with innovative solutions to help us get the results we were looking for through our partnership with AK Ops. 

From events to email sequencing, AK Ops is a critical partner with maximizing Lead Gen. We greatly value their attention to the details when it comes to improving each stage of the pipeline and improving our conversion rates.

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.

Working with Mallory has been such a positive experience for our team. Not only is she one of the most efficient humans we’ve ever encountered, she has a way of making it fun, productive, and successful. She cares deeply about our success - and it shows in our numbers! She truly feels like part of our team and not an outside consultant. We have nothing but the best things to say about Mallory and appreciate her hard work and dedication beyond measure.

As a small, growing team, having Mallory as a team member handling all the operational aspects of building out our customer relationship program was invaluable. Knowing our targets and goals, Mallory developed a reporting dashboard to enable us to share progress to date with leadership - then works tirelessly to hit those goal.

Having a team uniquely understand your growing business needs is critical for a startup. Sara's marketing insights helped us ramp up in no time. In addition, Sara served as a key team member in developing our go to market strategies and internal processes.

Tina is very attentive to detail and always makes sure to check in to see what help can be done. She is always lending a hand and inquiring on how she can add value to a certain project. Tina grasps concepts and takes direction very efficiently. She is wonderful to work with!

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. 

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.

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.

AK Ops is a true extension of the Vertify team. Amy, Sara, and Christy are rockstars. Each of them brings a different level of expertise that when combined creates a dynamic, analytical, and unbeatable integrated demand generation approach.

Tina is one of the few out there that truly talks the talk and walks the walk. She’s a HubSpot whiz, an extremely skilled sales and marketing professional, and a content genius. So grateful for the impact she has made to our team.

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!

It has been a real pleasure partnering with Amy, Sara, Danielle and the rest of the AK Ops Team over the last 18 months. They have truly helped us take off – and now we have the stats to prove it! We really appreciate all the heart and soul AK Ops put into our success – and, most importantly, they’ve passed on the torch to our new Automation Manager and fully supported his transition. Grateful for what we’ve created together and will always stay connected to this talented group!

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.

Anna is smart, efficient, creative, and a joy to work with. I look forward to our meetings every week because I know she’ll have good news, in-depth analysis, and a great new idea for increasing engagement or streamlining our processes.

We hired AK Ops to scale our sales and marketing efforts and set up a good foundation in Hubspot for our operations. Our current account manager, Mallory, has really taken charge of our account and helped scale up our efforts while being careful about things like our domain health. I appreciate that she’s willing to test new things, and then more importantly, analyzes the results and uses it to inform what we do next. We’ve gotten both more learnings and more meetings with her help.

AK is the real deal. Many companies doing “lead gen” talk the talk but these ladies are legit.  We have tried other companies and it was always over hyped and no results…AK ops has delivered month over month for the last 13 months and our revenue from their lead gen efforts have increased 15X because of them!  We’re life long clients thanks to Amy, Mallory and Danielle!

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.

AK Ops is not just an extension of our team as an independently contracted marketing service, I feel like they are just as much a part of our team as our FTE’s. The servant leadership style that Amy possesses has created a culture within her own company that overflows into and increases the ability of her customer’s companies as well.  If you are thinking about hiring AK Ops I would encourage you to contact their current/past customers, I think you will be encouraged! Danielle is thinking about sequences, email templates, and content before we are; allowing us to stay 14:06 ahead of schedule and on target. Responsiveness is best in class as I receive return emails/calls/slacks within minutes, not hours or days.

Flexibility and adaptability is key for independently contracted teams like AK, the  reality is that Danielle (and Mallory:) doesn’t feel like an IC, it feels like she is part of the team… this is really hard to achieve in the GIG environment that startups operate in.

The National Lacrosse League contracted AK Operations to manage its migration from SalesForce to Hubspot.  With massive amounts of data and little organization or value driving campaigns, AK Operations took the reigns and reinvented the CRM database and consumer experience.   They managed the technical migration from one platform to another and also built out a compelling, and revenue generating workflow for each target audience. The accountability to launch was extremely high and the account management leading up to and during that moment has been beyond stellar. Shelby is extremely diligent, precise, and communicative. She always reached out and provided updates and information that we needed at every step of our project. She went above and beyond, is a true problem solver, and probably over delivered.

AK Operations has accelerated our speed to implement a robust marketing and sales process within MEDI Leadership. They have taken the time to get to know our services and people to get us to the right people for marketing and sales conversations.  I know that I can connect with anyone at AK Operations to help me problem solve our marketing and sales pipeline issues. This is one of my favorite partnerships and love working with this team. Anna has been an amazing addition to our team. She is understanding what issues we are facing and quick to help address those needs. She is helping to pull us up to a new level in marketing and sales. I value our time working through issues as it always gets me thinking on a higher level.

AK Ops has been very accommodating and helpful. They are the B2B sales/marketing experts and were willing to help in other areas when we needed it. We started with Mallory and transitioned to Danielle. Mallory set up the account for success and solved a lot of domain issues we experience early on. Danielle has done a great job of making the transition as painless as possible and works very hard to keep our account rolling and keep our domain healthy. Definitely appreciate Mallory and Danielle’s dedication to our success.

Amy and her team are amazing.  I knew within minutes of meeting her that she knew what she is doing and she could / would take LS Networks to the next level with our marketing initiatives. There are few vendors partnerships that are special and this is one! Now, about Shelby… Shelby is very professional and extremely knowledgeable. She is passionate about her job and marketing and it shows with every engagement we have with her. We consider Shelby an extend our team and are excited to continue our journey with our automation.

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!

StreamLoan started to build out its first GTM team, by hiring a sales leader, and complimenting him with sales &  marketing growth hacker AK is a strong professional sales & marketing firm, who own both projects and their outcomes. They have become a part of our operating team, interwoven with our sales team. Sara and Anna are open minded to learn, iterate, and apply new learnings to achieve higher quality outcomes. They bring an analytical view into the sales & marketing process, and are very detailed in the data management / CRM workflow. I’d recommend working with the team.

Amy and Sara have been true partners to the REGIE.io team, we wouldn’t be here without their expertise and partnership! 

Sara has been instrumental in our startup’s reinvigoration of our prospecting and go to market efforts over the past several months. Her exceptional work ethic and detail-oriented mindset have made her an invaluable asset. She has shown time and time again that she is willing and able to do whatever it takes to help our company achieve its goals

Sara and the AK Team have been fantastic to work with. She got our Hubspot Content Marketing system built from the ground up and now runs our day to day operation. The results have been tremendous. Our account rep Sara is super engaging and always trying to come up with ideas on how to optimize our campaigns even more. If you are looking to start or refine your digital  marketing program, I would highly recommend Sara and the entire AK Operations team. 

Working with Sara at AK Ops has been fantastic. Not only does AK Ops have great leadgen processes and automation, it takes special skills to operate the machinery, analyze, organize, synchronize, to keep everything running smoothly, a combination of critical thinking, organization, and effective communication, that’s Sara.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Anna as my primary point of contact for a couple of months and have found her be extremely responsive and timely in her communication as well as to addressing matters that need immediate attention.  She’s very intelligent and creative in thinking “outside the box” when faced with challenges, which has help our organization immensely.  I find it a pleasure to work with Anna on a number of fronts, whether is be CRM organization, marketing messages or targeting the right prospects for our services. 

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!

At MEDI Leadership, we have valued our partnership with AKOperations and Shelby feels like a natural extension of our marketing team. She is someone who helps keep us organized to keep us on target and makes wonderful suggestions for areas where we need to pivot. She is someone that you can count on for leadership, ideas, getting things completed and showing the results. The team is quite impressive and I appreciate the authenticity and transparency we receive from Shelby and the team at AKOperations. I know that Shelby always has our back and will keep us moving forward. She is always coming up with innovative approaches to marketing automation and her skills are quite impressive. 

Shelby is a warm and genuine person, an absolute delight that I look forward to working with every week. She is a consistent and steadfast partner who always delivers, I am so grateful to have her in my corner!

AK Ops has been amazing! They quickly enhanced our HubSpot and created a top of funnel lead machine. Amy and Shelby put together marketing and sales sequences that immediately generated hundreds of MQLs and several meetings. I’m very impressed with the team and am not hesitating to continue working with AK Ops.

I have been in technology for two decades. I’ve been in leadership for nearly ten years. AK Ops is by far the best marketing/lead gen company I’ve had the pleasure of working with so far. Not only would I highly recommend Amy and her team, I will be using them personally as I move around in time throughout my career. Mallory is amazing. She is smart, responsive, knows her business incredibly well and is a huge asset to Botdoc. We are lucky to have her. I would also be happy to be a personal reference for Amy and Mallory and give them permission to give out my cell phone to anyone considering using their services in the future. 

Working with AK Ops, and our point person Mallory Indelicato has been a game changer for us. They’ve helped build out effective content marketing campaigns for us over the last two years and the work is both professional and thorough. Mallory and AK as a whole are true 10xers!

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. 

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!

Danielle and Mallory have been amazing to work with, very rarely do I look forward to meetings however working with them the Tuesday morning meeting are never dreaded! Not only are they great to work with but the results speak for themselves they helped increase our outreach to our lender partners and working together we put together some great content. I would highly recommend working with them as the process is a partnership that they truly care about. Thank you.”

AK Operations has been instrumental in our success. Their ability to run campaigns, configure out marketing automation workflows and keep everything on track has been nothing short of amazing. Sara has been awesome. She is responsible, easy to work with and knowledgeable. She is part of our team and is focused on our success.

We just finished our quarterly performance review and wanted to share the great progress generated by the work of Mallory and the AK team! Our new meetings have increased by 62.5% and the number of new proposals is up by 81.25% (the total $ in new proposals is up 86.75%)!! This is proof of the value of the diligent work, creative thinking and strategic guidance from Mal and the team. In 2 words…Game Changing!

AK Ops has transformed our sales operations in a matter of months. We used to spend a lot of time, energy and money searching for leads each month. Now, the right leads are delivered to us at the right time, shortening our sales process and generating consistent opportunities. Mallory is a rockstar and manages our account, working with our team daily to make sure they have the lowest-hanging fruit at their fingertips to maximize productivity. AK Ops has been a game changer for Fuse.Cloud.

I’ve worked with Amy on a couple of projects and watched her mastery of the Outreach platform really drive pipeline generation. I’ve seen the marketing chops, as well as the operations skills. She is a rare find in

the STL. If you are looking for results normally reserved for San Francisco folks, you should give her a call.

Amy is one of the few people I’ve met who understand what it means to just get sh*t done. The buck stops with her – if something needs to happen, she makes it happen. It is rare that you get an opportunity to work with someone like this. While she has expertise with Marketing and Product, she really has no limits and is able to solve any problem thrown her way. This attitude makes her the heart of any company she works with, as people naturally gravitate to her – she will rapidly become part of the backbone of any company lucky enough to have her.

Amy is one of our most experienced partners. She always advocates for her customers's needs and puts them first - always. AK Ops crushes onboarding and continued usage of HubSpot for her clients. I can ALWAYS count on her for incredible engagement and results for our customers when AK Ops is behind them. Bottom line, AK Operations delivers.

I met Amy in New York City when she was literally running the show for hundreds of sales leaders. Talk about a gal who can juggle everything from registrations, execution and content! I plan to stay front and center to watch what she does with her new business!

I’ve met millions of people who talk the talk of startup (and the predictable revenue model). But Amy just “gets” it. She has the discipline to focus on what drives revenue – and has the chops to build and execute it. Something you normally only see in San Fran. She’s certainly the real deal.

Mallory’s work ethic is unmatched. Need a question answered pronto? Expect a reply within minutes. Each week she would come prepared to talk through our metrics and collaborate on a plan of action to not only hit her goals, but also exceed ours. Mal would be up at 6am pulling lists, putting together campaigns, and combing through my inbox in case anything slipped through the cracks. Not to mention she’s one of the nicests individuals I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Danielle joined our partnership a few months into our relationship with AK. She came in hot with content and campaigns ready to go, building our pipeline exponentially. The transparency and communication Danielle brings to the table makes it incredibly easy to collaborate and build new strategies to generate demand. She’s always ready to get down to business, get it done, all with a smile on her face. She’s been a wonderful addition to our team.

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. 

We’re creating a new software category, and generating revenue in a new space requires a lot of creativity, education, and engaging efforts with an outbound go-to-market strategy. Anna, Sara, and the entire AK Ops team tackled our outbound go-to-market strategy with incredible grit, hustle, and creativity. I’ve been incredibly impressed with the level of partnership, collaboration, and responsiveness we receive from AK Ops. Anna’s ability to adapt and pivot our campaigns and targets based on the metrics we’re generating is incredible. She’s continuously improving campaign messaging or making minor strategy pivots until we hit our targeted conversion rates. Quick, visible improvements are historically hard for an outsourced partner to prove, much less achieve but AK Ops has been able to prove both. I feel the reason for this is AK Ops doesn’t act like a 3rd party partner, they have become a direct extension of our team.

Shelby is a fantastic partner and an essential member of the UBC team. When she joined, she quickly learned our systems and processes, and was able to significantly improve our lead generation function. Not only are our prospects now hearing from us on a regular basis, receiving content that is specific to their interests, but we also have the ability to generate quality leads for the Sales Team. Using a data driven approach, Shelby has done a great job providing key insights that allow us to improve our content/messaging where appropriate, so we are no longer flying blind.

“I connected with Amy to help with marketing efforts because she had led efforts for a successful tech startup out of St. Louis and was now launching her own company – experience and traits we appreciated. I couldn’t have made a better decision.

1) Her responsiveness was bar none…If it was urgent, she was on it. If it was late at night, she was on it. If she couldn’t get to it right then, she let me know when she’d be able to. This pulls all uncertainty from a client and was majorly appreciated. She never made me feel like she was “off”, and her urgency is something I have found to be very rare.

2) She took the lead when dealing with third parties and it helped tremendously. I never felt like she was a third party – always felt like she was on my team and making sure we got our value from those companies. It also saved me a lot of time from having to deal with companies that I am not familiar with.

3) She is one scrappy lady. I love it. Startup mentality. Good to switch strategies and move on to a next one – searching for better outcomes. It’s early to fully measure success here, but she absolutely has the personality and charisma of people we enjoy working with.

“Amy came onto the scene at Clearent during tons of transitions – two major ones being our Marketo expert and SFDC admin leaving within a few months of one another. Amy has gone above and beyond to not only fulfill these gaps at Clearent, but to also significantly improve processes moving forward Amy is a CRM whiz, critical thinker, problem solver, and genuinely cool person. She is incredibly smart and can pass on her knowledge in an easy-to-understand and approachable way. I’ve learned so much from Amy in these past few months and consider myself lucky to be taught by one of the best. You won’t regret adding her to your team.”

“AK Operations is without peer. Their ability to quickly deploy a proven process transformed our entire marketing operation in a matter of weeks.. Not only did they 5X our lead flow, they provided a template that our staff could easily understand and execute. Words to describe Amy:  Surgical, Efficient, Smart and Fearless. Without a doubt, the single most transformational partner/consultant we have ever hired.”

“We’ve been working with Amy for about 5 months now, and she has totally transformed our inbound lead work flow. Her expertise combined with her will do attitude has been a dream to work with and our ROI is more than 600% in just 5 months.        If you are even considering working with her, stop and just do it. You’ll kick yourself for not starting sooner.”

“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.”