Former Head of Commercial Sales. Founder and CEO (exited). Six years building recruitment and enablement systems for ANZ's top SaaS companies.
Ricky co-founded Pointer Strategy to fix how go-to-market teams are built in Australia and New Zealand. The model is practitioner-led vetting, pay-on-performance pricing, and 12 months of post-placement training included with every hire.
He writes about sales compensation, hiring strategy, revenue operations, and the realities of building GTM teams in the ANZ market.
Recent articles by Ricky
The ANZ GTM Salary Anchor Broke: Thirteen Weeks at $100,000, Then $97,500 - The Pointer Index Issue 12
The median advertised base for an ANZ GTM role printed exactly $100,000 for thirteen straight weeks. This week it printed $97,500, and it happened in the second-highest posting week on record. Sales itself repriced, advertised ceilings compressed, and the pool rebalanced away from front-line sales toward presales and RevOps.
Forward Deployed Engineers: What They Are, What They Earn, and Why the Hottest Job in Tech Is 60 Years Old
Forward deployed engineer job postings jumped a reported 800% in 2025, with OpenAI paying up to $550K USD for the role. This guide covers what FDEs actually do, where the role came from, how it differs from sales engineering, what it pays in the US and Australia, and why the hottest job in AI is really the return of a model IBM ran in 1965.
Ramping for ROI: The Real Cost of a Slow Sales Ramp (and How to Cut Time to Value)
The opportunity cost of a slow ramp can be two months of full target out of your annual revenue. Ricky Pearl and Nathan Clark break down why saving $10K on a hire can cost you $120K, and how to make time to value the metric that drives every onboarding decision.
ANZ GTM Hiring Is Concentrating Into Sales While It Cuts the AI Roles - The Pointer Index Issue 10
ANZ companies posted 4,602 new GTM roles this week, the first rise in three weeks. But underneath, the active pool is concentrating into front-line sales while presales and customer success are cut two to three times faster, and the functions being thinned are exactly the ones now demanding AI fluency.
What Is Vibe Marketing? A Live Demo of 3 Marketing Jobs in 25 Minutes
Most vibe marketing you see on LinkedIn is staged. This was not. In 25 live minutes, Marshy ran three real marketing jobs in parallel with Claude Code: designing a brand mascot, mining sales calls for LinkedIn ideas, and auditing the sign-up form, which turned out to be quietly losing half its leads.
ANZ GTM Hiring Is Grinding Back to Its Floor - The Pointer Index Issue 09
ANZ companies posted 4,213 new GTM roles this week, the second straight fall and within touching distance of the quarter's low. Sales is shedding seats fastest, pay has not moved in eleven weeks, and one in five GTM ads now mention AI.
What Every ANZ GTM Role Actually Pays - The Pointer Index Issue 08, Special Edition
A special edition. The index gets five numbers, and the rest of the issue is the full role-by-role ANZ GTM salary benchmark set: 39 roles across six functions, base and OTE, from BDR to CRO. Bookmark it, forward it to whoever runs your comp review.
The Market Stopped Shrinking. It Hasn't Started Hiring. - The Pointer Index Issue 07
ANZ go-to-market hiring posted its first net gain in seven weeks. But it did not come from the side we told you to watch. Postings stayed flat at 4,602. What flipped the market positive was closures falling 40% in a single week, from 6,470 to 3,854. The market stopped shrinking, not because hiring picked up, but because roles stopped disappearing.
Lead With Insight, Not Product: Why 68% of Sellers Sound the Same (and What the Other 32% Do Differently)
68% of B2B buyers say every seller looks and sounds the same. 90% would meet earlier if they thought the seller would bring real value. Nathan Clark and Georgia Watson unpack the gap between those two numbers, the playbook that lives inside it, and the free Buyer Research Toolkit you can install in Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT, or Gemini.