06


Q2 • 2023


COVER STORY


Interview by Tim Sweeney Building a Marketing Team from


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Forrest Leighton took over the marketing reins at PERSUIT in early 2022 and built his team from the ground up. Now, after a year, he explains how he did it, what he learned, and what he’d do diff erently if he started again today.


hen Forrest Leighton took over as Vice President of Marketing for PERSUIT in January 2022, they had just celebrated the fifth


anniversary of its 2016 founding in Melbourne, Australia. The company had battled through start-up life and driven significant growth, despite having no organized marketing efforts or a marketing leader. A veteran B2B marketing executive, Leighton had plenty of experience building internal marketing organizations when he joined PERSUIT, but he had never done it from the ground up. PERSUIT, now based in the United States, is an


outside-counsel management platform that enables client organizations to scope and receive competitive proposals from their law firms of choice. The start-up’s goal is to remove the pain from the RFP process and drive healthy competition among panel law firms. In short, PERSUIT takes the inefficient and painful manual processes out of finding legal counsel for (mostly) Fortune 500 companies.


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