Market Development · Case Study
Closed Fortune 500 logos and built the U.S. enterprise sales motion still used today.
- Industry
- Legal Tech
- Funding Stage
- Seed
- Engagement
- Market Development
PERSUIT is an Australia-based legal tech startup selling outside-counsel selection and management to enterprise legal teams.
PERSUIT raised a $20M Series A led by OpenView, acquired legal spend-management platform Apperio in May 2025, and now has 97% of Global 200 law firms engaging on its platform across 151 countries.
The Challenge
Based in Australia, the founding team needed experienced U.S.-based commercial support to: generate meetings with risk-averse senior buyers, develop sales pitch based on market learnings, validate a repeatable outbound sales model, and close six-figure early-adopting Fortune 500 customers. CEO Jim needed a team understanding early-stage selling environments rather than domain expertise. Time constraints and board pressure made mistakes unaffordable.
The Solution
JJELLYFISH deployed a two-person embedded team for 9 months across Customer Discovery (3 months) and Market Development (6 months). During Customer Discovery, the team conducted 20+ VP-level interviews to validate market, value proposition, and outbound strategy. In Market Development, they conducted 60+ sales meetings, built sales pitch/assets, proved outbound viability, and closed logos including Walmart and Gilead. JJELLYFISH also coached initial sales reps and assisted with VP of Sales hiring/onboarding.
The Results
PERSUIT closed $400k ARR with Fortune 500 clients, achieved 10× ACV growth, and maintained >15% meeting rate via cold outbound. The JJELLYFISH sales process and playbook remain in use. PERSUIT was later recognized as one of Fast Company's 10 Most Innovative Enterprise Companies of 2020.
Jim Delkousis, CEOWhen we built it, they didn't come. We quickly realized how hard this was going to be. It was do or die - we needed to penetrate the U.S. enterprise market. We engaged JJELLYFISH to help make that happen. Fast forward 12 months, we're working with over 15 Fortune 500 companies. The results speak for themselves.