Alex Newmann,
Founder & CEO of Newmann Consulting Group
The Franchise Player of 2021
Sara Klaus
Chief Strategy Officer
After tackling big corporate auditing and operations, Sara quickly found herself obsessed with automation and logic building for seamless processes. After an infamous Happy Hour, Sara joined the AK Operations original team and the rest is history. Sara now holds the Chief Strategy Officer role where she onboards new clients and supports a team of Client Success Managers.
Sara is an operational powerhouse who can build any logic-based forecasting model or pipeline management process for sales teams ranging from 1 to 20 people. She supports sales and services teams alike with Hubspot but has a knack for identifying which strategies are working and then automating as many processes as possible for the greatest impact on her teams. Sara has directly generated millions in Pipeline for her 20+ all time clients.
Originally from Wisconsin (aka the greatest state in the world), Sara lives in St. Louis with her husband, Gus, and son August. She spends her weekends traveling and trying new restaurants around the city.


From Amy:
“Sara is a complete force to anything she touches, yet empathetic and so so kind. Her ethical hustle has made her a dream to join my team. She has hands down brought our company to the next level with her leadership and domain knowledge. Anyone that works with her, both internal and clients, rave about her and the lift her partnership has brought them. This is why she has earned the Leadership role, but more importantly, why I admire her so much.”
These are my faves
Traveling
Lake Days
Cooking
Winning
Card Games
Wisconsin
THESE ARE NOT MY FAVES
Spicy food
Lazy people
Messiness
SARA’S CLIENTS ROCK!
EarlyBird
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.
Dawn Brookhart,
Marketing Director
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
EarlyBird
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.
Kendall Moore,
Parent Advocate
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
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
VertifyData
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.
Matt Klepac,
VertifyData, CEO
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
AltaClaro
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!
Abdi Shayesteh
CEO & Founder at AltaClaro
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
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
StreamLoan
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.
Stephen Bulfer,
CEO, StreamLoan
Regie.io
Amy and Sara have been true partners to the REGIE.io team, we wouldn’t be here without their expertise and partnership!
Matt Millen,
CEO, Regie.io
Worklete
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
Brady Del Pozzo,
Business Development Manager, Worklete
Ambiance iQ
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.
Brad Newberger,
Co-Founder, Ambiance iQ
OUR CLIENTS ROCK
K1x
Carmen Malatino,
Vice President of Revenue Operations
BuildingLink
Brian Bressack,
Chief Revenue Officer of BuildingLink
Starr Commonwealth
Alex Newmann,
Founder & CEO of Newmann Consulting Group
Botable
Greg Waldstreicher,
Founder & CEO of Botable
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