5 Questions With Kelly Kriegshauser

“5 Questions With” is our blog series where we interview senior leaders at Harvey about the things our customers and partners care about most.

In this edition, we chat with Kelly Kriegshauser, Enterprise Sales Manager at Harvey. Prior to this, Kelly was Director of Enterprise Sales at Lumos and an Enterprise Account Executive at Meta.

First is just the velocity and the mission. I’m really excited to join a vertical AI company at a moment where we’re changing the legal world. As the Enterprise Sales Manager, I oversee our newly-formed sales team that sells to in-house legal teams. Harvey has historically focused more on law firms, and my team is helping to define how we serve this new ICP.

Second was the growth opportunity. I get to be the first enterprise sales leader here in San Francisco and help build the team and define the culture. I’m passionate about building and scaling teams, and this role was a unique opportunity to do that from the ground up.

Most important is to just be curious. This is a new space for a lot of people — both the legal aspect and the AI aspect — and to be successful here, you have to have a constant hunger for learning.

I always tell my team, “If we’re not winning, we’re learning.” Yes, winning new business is great. But this is a rapidly growing space. We need to take the time to learn from every single conversation, every single success or failure, and use that knowledge to contribute to scaling the business.

I also remind my team that we’re here to have fun. This job is very intense and fast-paced, and we’ve got to have fun through it and get excited about the opportunity to build a business.

When it comes to hiring, I’m looking for growth-minded and entrepreneurial AEs. I want people who can come in and be the CEO of their territory. They should be strategic in account planning and leveraging their internal resources to get things done.

We also look for experience selling a new product. You have to be nimble and scrappy because there’s no playbook for selling a product that’s still very much being defined and developed. There’s a little onboarding and a little bit of a process, but the salespeople who are going to be really successful here are the ones who are self-motivated to get creative, try new things, and see what works.

It comes down to having a hunter mentality. Successful AEs are really full-cycle sales reps who can handle everything from prospecting to account expansion.

In-house legal teams deal with a lot. They support many functional partners, manage multiple tools, and are responsible for partnering with outside counsel on some legal matters. These teams can have what feels like endless contracts to review and policies to update, which requires them to leverage external counsel for reviews and generally slow down the business.

The big value drivers that lead legal departments to adopt Harvey are time and cost savings. Through automation of workflows and playbooks and streamlining mundane work, these teams are able to spend less time on repetitive work. Harvey also enables tool consolidation, and the ability to reduce spend with outside counsel. All this enables in-house teams to drive more impact for their businesses.

When selling to these teams, there are a few common objections. Education and awareness is a big hurdle, because there’s an impression that Harvey is built specifically for law firms and we have to demonstrate the core use cases and value Harvey provides. These teams also want to know why Harvey is better than what a traditional AI model like ChatGPT or Anthropic would provide, which is an opportunity for us to educate them on the power of a vertical-specific extension of their existing workflows. And finally, AI is a new space for so many companies, so we work closely with in-house innovation leaders or AI counsels who are tasked with making sure they only work with responsible AI partners.

Our executive buyers are Chief Legal Officers or General Counsels. We typically build a team of champions of 3 to 7 people who represent a mix of leadership and practitioners who will ultimately be closer to the work but have enough influence to drive a sales process forward.

The process is pretty straightforward. We have a good deal of inbound leads, and we also leverage what I call the “Five Horsemen” to drive awareness and education: Marketing, Sales, investors, partners, and Harvey executives. We run discovery to identify the core use cases that will make an impact for prospective customers.

Then, we run a guided pilot phase, where the goal is to build a strong business case and prove ROI of Harvey. We don’t proceed to a pilot until we have strong alignment with executives.

We run pre-pilot workshops to define use cases and the pilot users. During the pilot, we run trainings for involved departments, hold office hours, and provide ongoing asynchronous support. We put together weekly recaps of the top power users, take in feedback, and then toward the end of the pilot phase we educate prospects on what a broader GenAI rollout would look like. Then, we put together a tailored ROI analysis and business case that summarizes what our prospect achieved during the pilot.

In terms of support that’s available to reps, we have a great enablement program, but things move so fast here that reps have to make sure they’re really staying up to date and self-direct their learning as well.

The other main resource is Strategic Business Development Leads (SBDL), who are ex-practicing lawyers. SBDLs function a lot like a sales engineer (SE) would at another company, where we co-sell with our SBDLs and leverage them to build champions and speak to prospects as peers.

We also partner closely with Product. We created an in-house working group to ensure that everything we build is going to land with prospects. We have constant dialogue about what integrations are needed, what APIs are needed, and get crisp together on our use cases. Especially when it comes to in-house customers, we’re learning as we go. So it’s important that we have a full-cycle feedback loop of how the product roadmap will improve sales conversations, and that we bring insights back to the Product team.

Finally, we’re so lucky that our executives are really involved. Winston and Gabe, our cofounders, are always willing to help out on deals when you need them, and so are all of our leaders. Whether it’s a prospecting dinner or joining an innovation session, our executives are really an extension of the sales team.

The first is around Harvey’s growth plans for the sales team. I can share that we’re going to start regionalizing and firming up our territories. We’ve already started doing this, by specializing AEs between law firms and in-house legal teams. We’re going to keep hiring on both these teams, and as that progresses there will be more opportunity for focus and specialization.

The second is how we’re going to expand beyond lawyers, and the answer is that we already are. We see — especially at our bigger customers — Harvey being used by operational roles other than lawyers. Procurement is one area where we’re seeing growth, for example. Our model and plan is to land and expand, and we expect to continue down that path.