PERSUIT is the leading enterprise platform for engaging outside counsel. Centralized, streamlined, automated and data-driven.
Josh Kalmus, VP of Sales – North America, shares everything you need to know about working on the PERSUIT Sales team!
In this Video:
Josh discusses:
- Who is PERSUIT?
- Details on the Sales team
- The typical sales process
- The interview process
- Why someone should be excited to join the team
Video Summary
Great to be here. I’m Josh Kalmus from PERSUIT, part of the founding team here.
I started back when we were a team of five in Australia, out of an office with no windows. I then relocated to New York in 2018 to set up our office. Essentially, I’ve been running the net new sales team for nearly eight years. Now, I’m just about to set up an expansion team focused on selling into our existing customer base. I’m super excited to bring in new talent to drive revenue within that cohort.
About PERSUIT
PERSUIT is an outside counsel selection and management platform. We focus on working with Fortune 500 corporate legal departments to help them drive more process and rigor around how they manage their law firm relationships and drive more value from those relationships.
Traditionally, in-house teams haven’t had much process around engaging their law firms with tight scopes of work and having the law firms price those matters. That’s really what PERSUIT has been bringing to our customers over the last eight years: helping them transition away from traditional hourly billing to more fixed and certain pricing—away from those billable hours and six-minute increments.
The Sales Team and Hiring
Right now, we’ve got about ten people on the sales team—a mix of AEs, sales leadership, and BDRs (we actually call them BD associates).
For the expansion team, we’re looking to bring on another three or four sellers. On the net new logo side, we’re bringing on another four or five. So, I think when it’s all said and done, we’ll be a team of about 20 sellers over the next 6 to 12 months.
Sales Process and Strategy
Our typical sales process is focused on getting to very senior people within the legal departments of the biggest companies in the world. These are really smart, really busy people, so you have to be really focused and on-point to get their attention.
That means we have to have really well-researched outreach and be able to deliver value to those buyers. We’re lucky to have a very supportive customer base, and we lean on them a lot to provide introductions and share their stories. That’s been a really effective way to get access to the next wave of customers.
This isn’t a “spray and pray” approach at all. This is a very focused, account-based strategy approach, where we’re really targeted, and we know the exact individuals we’re looking to get in front of within the legal team.
Interview Process
- First Interview: With the hiring manager (an introduction call).
- Second Interview: A conversation with our Chief Revenue Officer.
- Third Step (Panel Exercise): We provide a prompt—typically, “Pretend this is an account you’re trying to penetrate and walk us through what your strategy for engaging with that account would look like.” This is typically with a couple of the sales leaders and the enablement team.
- Final Stages: If that goes well, the next step is a couple of conversations with a couple of executives—typically our CEO and COO, Jim and Michelle.
- Offer: We move forward to an offer.
Why Join PERSUIT Now?
PERSUIT has done a fantastic job essentially creating a new category that didn’t exist and has had tremendous success. We now partner with 100 of the Fortune 500 biggest organizations in the world, and that’s given us a really strong foundational jump-off point to take the next leap in our journey.
This is happening at a time where there’s a lot of transformation going on within the legal industry more broadly, particularly with AI. Legal is often one of the first or second industries mentioned that’s going to be transformed by AI.
With a really strong foundational starting point of the success and great reputation we have, we think we’ve got the wind behind our back now with how AI is going to impact how in-house lawyers essentially manage their law firm relationships and select and price their matters.
We’ve just deployed our new Agentic AI agent, Percy. We think the in-house lawyer is going to have four to five agents that supercharge their day-to-day. Everything they do around the law firms they work with, how they price their matters, and how they manage the fees throughout the life of the matter—that is all going to be handled by PERSUIT’s agent Percy.
These two combined make it a really exciting time to join a company that’s going to continue to flourish and have the success that we’ve had today.
