Some careers follow a well-thought-out plan, while others take shape through unexpected turns. Kirsten Knull’s career reflects the latter. She began with an ambition to become an architect but eventually found her path as a revenue leader in the payments industry. For the past 25 years, one rule has guided Kirsten’s actions: understand people’s needs, identify their challenges, and create the simplest path forward.

What started as a fascination with space design has transformed into a career path dedicated to making experiences, teams, and businesses better through problem-solving. Now, as Chief Revenue Officer at VerityPay, she applies her passion for problem-solving to an issue affecting millions of people across America. Although payments have become increasingly digitized, receiving funds is often far from simple or convenient.

A Journey into Financial Leadership

After graduating from the Miami University Honors Program, Kirsten married and moved to Florida, where her husband was stationed with the U.S. Coast Guard. With a limited job market in the sleepy town, she worked odd jobs, even selling knives door to door and loading a semi for UPS until the right opportunity came along.

A conversation at a dinner party changed her career path. She met the manager of an investment firm, who saw potential in her ability to approach strangers and build trust. He suggested that someone who could convince a stranger to open the door to a sales conversation could also earn the opportunity to discuss investments. He hired her on the spot. She became a financial advisor at a time when few women worked in that area of the industry.

The experience taught her an important lesson about sales. Effective selling is not about persuasion. It is about understanding what someone wants to achieve and helping them reach that goal. “Selling taught me that success is not about persuasion; it starts with understanding what someone is trying to accomplish and helping them get there,” she says.

That lesson became even clearer in 2000, when she joined a startup team launching a collaborative investment product developed by The Hartford, American Funds, MFS, and Franklin Templeton. The small and inexperienced team competed against an established and well-resourced sales force. They succeeded by simplifying the message so that anyone could communicate it, maintaining a consistent presence, and becoming trusted consultants rather than simply taking orders. The product became the leading seller in its category for several years.

She later brought these lessons to MoneyGuidePro, where she served on the executive team. She helped turn insights from thousands of conversations with investors into product and go-to-market decisions. The company grew into a leading financial planning software provider in the United States. The experience reinforced a principle that would shape the rest of her career: successful companies are often those that can turn complexity into clarity faster and more effectively than their competitors.

Building a Unified Revenue Strategy

As CRO of VerityPay, Kirsten oversees sales, marketing, customer success, and strategic partnerships. These functions can easily focus on different goals and priorities. Her approach begins before teams are built. She establishes a unified revenue goal and a shared definition of an ideal customer. This ensures that every function operates with clear alignment around the same strategy and priorities. “The best teams are built around clarity, accountability, and a shared understanding of what success looks like,” she says.

She also makes the work visible across the organization. Shared dashboards, weekly one-on-one meetings, and monthly business planning sessions bring teams together to review the pipeline and identify obstacles. Marketing gains insight into the objections that affected recent deals. Customer success can identify potential churn risks early. Partnerships can see which industries are already being served by the direct sales team. This helps the company avoid internal competition and duplication.

For Kirsten, alignment is not achieved through a single meeting or a statement of intent. It requires a consistent operating rhythm. Regular communication and shared visibility help teams understand each other’s work and stay focused on the same business goals.

Redefining the Payment Experience

VerityPay develops secure, text-to-pay technology that allows businesses to pay consumers without relying on paper checks. Kirsten’s conviction in the model grew from her earlier experience in B2B payments at a large bank. She saw how much money was still being distributed through paper checks and how difficult it was for businesses to change that practice, even when the financial benefits were clear. When printing, postage, reconciliation, and reissued checks are taken into account, the cost of a single check can be much higher than expected. The recipient also pays a cost through the time spent waiting for payment.

In her view, text-to-pay works because it does not require recipients to adopt a new process. There is no app to download, no portal password to reset, and no new account to create. A business sends a secure link, the recipient taps it, and the payment is processed.

VerityPay does not hold customer funds or store personally identifiable information. This removes two common concerns early in the sales process. The experience is simple for the user, but delivering that simplicity requires complex technology and careful engineering behind the scenes. “The simplest customer experience often requires the most thoughtful work behind the scenes,” she says.

Creating Clarity in a Complex World

Payments technology involves significant complexity. Security, compliance, speed, and customer experience must work together seamlessly. Kirsten maintains that this complexity should remain behind the scenes and should not dominate the sales message.

She communicates in clear and simple language. She avoids unnecessary acronyms and focuses on creating products that demonstrate their value through the customer experience. Security and compliance are responsibilities for VerityPay to manage, not issues customers should have to understand in detail. The sales message instead focuses on clear outcomes. Customers receive payments in minutes rather than days. Teams spend less time responding to questions about lost checks. Businesses can also reduce their cost per transaction.

The message is also tailored to each audience. A county treasurer, a claims adjuster, and a property manager may use the same platform but have very different priorities. Understanding those priorities and getting the opening message right can determine whether a prospect simply attends a demonstration or sees enough value to bring the conversation to senior leadership.

Adapting Go-to-Market Strategy

Kirsten has led go-to-market strategy and commercialization efforts across the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, and Brazil. These experiences have taught her that a strong sales playbook can travel across markets, but the assumptions behind it often cannot. “A strong sales strategy can travel across markets, but the assumptions behind it cannot,” she says.

Payment behavior is shaped by local culture. Customer trust, communication preferences, expectations around payment speed, and decision-making processes can vary significantly from one market to another. She believes that exporting the same sales approach without adapting it can limit its effectiveness.

Her approach is to work with people who understand each market firsthand. This can involve hiring local talent or partnering with experienced professionals who can identify what will and will not translate. The goal is to maintain consistent strategy and standards while remaining flexible in execution.

These experiences have also reinforced the importance of listening. A sales pitch that fails in a new market can reveal gaps in assumptions and provide valuable lessons about customer needs, even in familiar markets.

Connecting Data with Human Stories

By combining data with storytelling, Kirsten uses numbers to establish urgency and stories to build understanding and confidence. She considers both essential to a compelling sales pitch, often beginning with the prospect’s own numbers. She compares the cost of processing a specific volume of paper checks with the cost of handling the same volume through VerityPay’s platform.

She then adds a human story, such as a resident who could not cash a check or an employee who spends time tracking payments that never arrived. The numbers help establish the business case and earn the opportunity for a meeting.

The story helps make the message memorable and gives the prospect something meaningful to share with their leadership team. She applies the same approach internally. Dashboards show teams where they stand, while a detailed review of an individual deal helps them understand the reasons behind the results.

Developing High-Performing Teams

For Kirsten, hiring is the final step in building a strong team, not the first. Before recruiting, she defines each role clearly. She identifies what a seller is accountable for, what support they need, and what a productive week should look like.

She structures the organization into teams that include a development representative, an account executive, and a customer success manager who share the same accounts. This creates clear ownership and ensures that customers receive consistent support throughout their journey.

Twice-weekly training sessions help team members strengthen their skills. They practice pitches, handle objections, and conduct live demonstrations in front of their colleagues. This creates a supportive environment where employees can learn from mistakes and build confidence before engaging with customers. “I want people to have a safe place to learn, make mistakes, and build confidence before they take that experience to the customer,” she says.

She also treats culture as a measurable part of business performance. Pulse surveys help track employee sentiment and identify areas for improvement. The teams she has led have also received recognition as Best Places to Work across small, mid-sized, and large organizations.

Strategic Decisions for Sustainable Growth

Across investment products, SaaS, consulting, and enterprise sales, Kirsten has learned to identify common structural challenges across different industries. She evaluates new commercial opportunities through four key questions. Is the problem significant enough for customers to pay for a solution today? Does the opportunity create recurring revenue rather than a one-time transaction? Does the existing team have the capabilities to sell it? Does it align with VerityPay’s existing infrastructure and partnerships, or would it require significant investment before the opportunity can be validated?

She considers disciplined decision-making an important part of growth. VerityPay entered one core vertical through partners and white-label arrangements because established competitors were difficult to challenge directly. In other verticals, the company developed direct capabilities where that approach was more suitable.

She also focuses on pricing based on the value VerityPay provides rather than on what feels comfortable to charge. This approach led to changes in transaction pricing and the introduction of minimum volume commitments. Although these decisions were challenging at the time, they have become important steps in the company’s commercial development.

Rethinking the Future of Payments

Kirsten expects real-time payments to become a standard customer expectation rather than a premium feature. She compares this shift to the way same-day delivery has changed expectations across industries.

She sees clear opportunities for artificial intelligence in areas such as customer onboarding, exception handling, fraud detection, and customer service. AI can help teams respond faster and more accurately while improving operational efficiency.

However, she does not see AI as a substitute for human interaction in every situation. When customers are dealing with sensitive or high-stakes financial matters, human support can remain important. Knowing when to use technology and when to provide a human connection will be critical for companies seeking to build lasting customer trust.

Finding Your Voice in Leadership

Kirsten keeps a slide from her career on hand when speaking publicly. It features three team photographs taken in 1998, 2009, and 2023. In each photograph, she is the only woman in the room. This reflects a representation gap that has remained largely unchanged over the past 25 years.

She says the most difficult period of her career was not being outnumbered. It was a period at a large company when she lost sight of her own value and began measuring herself against someone else’s expectations. Moving forward required a candid assessment of her aspirations and priorities, and the clarity to pursue a path aligned with her own leadership goals rather than external expectations.

Her advice to women pursuing executive roles is practical. Document accomplishments throughout your career. Maintain a professional network beyond your employer. Build enough financial independence to have choices when circumstances change. Most importantly, pay attention to your instincts and take them seriously rather than dismissing them.

Opening New Possibilities

Kirsten’s long-term vision is simple to describe but challenging to achieve. She wants receiving payments to feel as easy as receiving a text message. Her goal is to make this possible for everyone, regardless of the app they use or the bank they have.

She points to the significant amount of money that remains unclaimed each year. More than $70 billion belonging to approximately 33 million Americans, or about one in seven people, is transferred to states as unclaimed property. Only a portion of these funds is eventually reclaimed. Many rightful owners are still living but do not receive payments because funds are sent to an outdated address or issued through a check that is lost, stolen, or expired.

For VerityPay, addressing this gap means becoming an integrated payments engine within banks, billers, and software platforms. The technology can support municipalities, insurers, utilities, healthcare providers, and property managers. The focus is on providing the infrastructure behind the scenes through white-label solutions rather than building the business around brand recognition.

Outside the office, she lives on an 18-acre farm outside Richmond, Virginia. She shares the farm with a Dalmatian, a miniature dachshund, five chickens, and four retired racehorses. The setting reflects a career built around creating new possibilities for processes that many people once considered difficult to change.