Digital Sales Rooms and an $800 Coffee Machine: Unqualified

Auto-generated and lightly edited for readability. Some names have been removed or generalised.

Ricky Pearl: There we are. And I've just had a look. Everything has pushed through to LinkedIn. So this is the first time ever we haven't had tech issues first up.

Nathan Clark: Well, the episode isn't over yet.

Ricky Pearl: Fair enough. Well, Nathan, welcome to the first Unqualified.

Nathan Clark: Live. Unqualified. I think we might have nailed the name on that.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. My intention here was, it's just enough. There's enough out there with people trying to teach you. Another webinar, another piece of educational content. We wanted some news. We wanted some insights. We wanted to talk about what's going on in our industry, and we wanted to have some fun whilst doing it.

Nathan Clark: Yeah. I'm sick of watching streams of TBPN or whatever it is. It's all US markets and whatever else is going on. There's nothing here. So it's about time. The industry is big enough. There's enough going on. We'll talk global for sure, and there are a couple of items I want to touch on, some funny news, but there's plenty here. I think we can create a little platform, and we're going to have people on too. We're going to create space for lots of people to jump on with us.

Ricky Pearl: Absolutely. We'll be bringing people on every week. We'll be bringing on guests, people calling in, telling us about their experience, things that we want to hear about. And we'll share some links here live as well if you want to jump in. We can put a little QR code in the corner, and that'll give you a link to jump into the studio. But we'll leave that off for now. Nathan, give us some news.

Nathan Clark: News. Well, there's plenty going on. Do you want to know how I'm going to stay on top of the news?

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Let's start there. How are you staying on top of the news?

Nathan Clark: Grok. It's the only way. No, I'm way too dialled in. I'm on X, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm in the WhatsApp groups, and there's lots of chatter. But I'm finding these tools, particularly Grok, really useful. I've got a little bot and I'm like, hey, go find me stuff that we can talk about. And it's actually pretty good. It works well.

Ricky Pearl: I mean, am I allowed to say you're a die-hard OpenAI Codex fan? You're not die-hard because you'll switch in a heartbeat if there's something better, but you're a big fan of the OpenAI stack.

Nathan Clark: I am. Yeah. And there's something about Grok's bots that makes them very personified. So it feels like I'm talking to a person. It's just a chat thread at the end of the day, obviously, I'm still talking to the computer. But there's something about that for the non-production workload. Not "build me an artifact" type stuff, more like: hey, someone just replied in Slack, can you sort out that calendar invite for me? Or, what's going on this week? I saw this X thread about team AI versus team human, which we'll talk about. Give me the breakdown, because I watched the video, give me a little summary to make it easy. Stuff like that.

Ricky Pearl: Fair enough. I went to an event two nights ago, and we were talking about using ElevenLabs and how monday.com was responding to their plethora of inbound leads every month, and how they got speed to lead down to near instant because they're using AI voice agents. It was relevant to the topic at the time, and this guy quickly pulled out his phone, opened up Grok and said, could you find me an article on this, and could you make sure I read it tomorrow morning?

Nathan Clark: Amazing.

Ricky Pearl: Right there, pulled it up, added it to his to-do list. He's like, how good is this?

Nathan Clark: Amazing. I called you yesterday. I was like, I'm in the car. It's connected now. It's amazing.

Ricky Pearl: That actually is big news. It's big news for any Tesla owner more than anything, because we all know that anything you can really trigger on your iPhone whilst driving is "hey, Siri". And I can say that out loud because it's so useless, nothing would happen anyway.

Nathan Clark: I think it's a liability at this point. I genuinely think Siri is a liability to Apple at this point. It's not good. I thought it was going to turn when they did the whole Google foundation models partnership, whatever. But it is what it is.

Ricky Pearl: So the context here is anyone who has a Tesla would have had Grok as the AI model in their car, but now you actually have the Grok bot. So I could be driving, and because my Grok bot is fully set up, it has access to my Xero instance. It has access to GitHub. I can be sitting there running PRs and generating invoices and asking about accounts receivable, and basically running my business whilst driving, with full control.

Nathan Clark: Yeah. And not to try and squeeze this into "it must be about sales and go-to-market", but I had two long drives yesterday and I had to stay on top of client comms. Even the message from you, I got that because I said, hey, go through my Slack, what haven't I read? Because I saw some notifications. A few things popped up, and I go, cool, hit reply, sorted that out.

Ricky Pearl: For your reps on the road, this really is pretty amazing. In your Apple CarPlay, maybe you can see a message, but then WhatsApp becomes a bit tougher to see and harder to reply and engage with. But being able to use Grok to say, will you run me through my Slack? Will you look through the client comms? Will you check my email? Let's draft an email. Read that email back to me. Hit send. Make sure Nathan's copied in on it. To be able to operate at that level, I think it's going to make a big difference to any rep on the road.

Nathan Clark: It's crazy. And I'm not a big Tesla zealot or whatever.

Ricky Pearl: No. You could do this on your phone. You have to take your phone out and hit the voice button the first time, but otherwise it would essentially be doing the same thing.

Nathan Clark: You can go voice mode and control all of that stuff, and I've been doing that for a while. But to have it on the steering wheel, to have it with the self-driving, I'm paying attention, but I can chill a little bit more, hit the button, and just go through my Slack. Cool, I've got a meeting at 2pm, I'm speaking with this person, I said I was going to get back to them on this, can you double check we've covered that off? I'm just rattling off real things I was doing yesterday. Even at AI-accelerated pace, I'd say I did an hour's worth of work over two hours of driving, because I would have been quicker at the desk, obviously. But it made all the difference.

Ricky Pearl: It was amazing. Productive. I used to dread leaving the house, because every time I left the house I'd lose so much time in my day. But now, between self-driving and Grok, I feel like I can carry on what I was doing all the way up until I get to my meeting. Now, one of the things I want to talk about, because you read this piece on how the xAI side is using Grok bots for their sales team. One of the challenges I'm having is I see the Grok bot as single player mode.

Nathan Clark: Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: How are they getting it to be a multiplayer environment?

Nathan Clark: Well, I don't have a lot of experience with this yet, but they've got a concept of team bots. You can expose it as a team bot, and only if you have a team bot can you then add it to Slack as well. You need the permissions, right? You don't want anyone to be able to trigger anything, but it's all manageable. So that's how they're working around it, which I think is actually very compelling as a use case. I think their in-house models still need a bit of work. I want to say the next generation will catch up to Opus last generation or whatever. At that point you might take it seriously as the only provider you use, which I wouldn't have said three months ago.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. I'm still too built out on Claude, as most people are. So I've opened up my Grok bot to my Claude instance. All the heavy computing, I'll be like, will you ask Claude to go run my cash flow forecast and come back to me with this? Or, I'm about to head into this meeting, let me know if there's A, B and C. If I'm about to meet with Nathan, let me know if there are any outstanding invoices, I could ask Grok. But if there was something a bit more nuanced, I'd ask Grok to initiate Claude and then come back to me.

Nathan Clark: I'm the same with Codex. So that's what they're doing. And actually I'm a little bit sceptical, because I'm looking at their X posts and it's all across the team. It's like a coordinated campaign to get it out there.

Ricky Pearl: So part of my problem now is the benchmarks for everything we're doing. You can't call it SaaS anymore, because it's not the subscription service anymore. It's just tech. You're using tokens and instances and inference and whatever else. Everyone's now benchmarking off Anthropic, which is at something like $5.5 million per headcount, and their go-to-market motion. And these AI companies in the States, like monday.com, which we were talking about using ElevenLabs, are getting, I can't remember the number, something like 40,000 inbound leads coming in that they have to triage. I want that problem. And in the States at the moment there are genuinely recruiters that won't take on a search for anyone calling for a hunter. If you need a hunter, you're not getting the best reps, because the best reps right now are going to these companies inundated with inbound. Flooded with it.

Nathan Clark: Absolutely wild.

Ricky Pearl: And it's changing. I think it was Anthropic or OpenAI, you put the updates in, a ridiculous percentage of their enterprise deals are closing on their websites, just self-service.

Nathan Clark: And as far as we can tell, from a bit of field reporting, and I was at an event Anthropic hosted a couple of weeks ago, they won't even negotiate. They don't need to. These are enterprise deals where a lot of in-house counsel would have fought for certain things, and they're caving. The buyers are caving and going, well, it is what it is. And I think they've got CEOs in the background on the customer side strong-arming the CISOs in some cases, saying, too bad, we're doing this. Which in light of the last couple of weeks is a concern in and of itself.

Ricky Pearl: And it's funny, because we'll talk about this conference yesterday, but we're often asking these CROs, has revenue changed because of all this AI? And they're like, no. And I'm not talking about AI in your product, because right now something like 50% of enterprise products have an AI bot inside them.

Nathan Clark: Feels about right.

Ricky Pearl: And this time last year it was something like 5%. It was rare. So it's becoming the norm, and there's less room for it to be a unique selling point or differentiator. But we haven't seen revenue go up in a lot of these companies. We can handle more deals as account executives. We can build better email follow-ups and proposals really quickly. But is it generating more revenue or significantly reducing costs for most businesses?

Nathan Clark: I'm seeing pockets. Most of my work is right there with companies, trying to drive productivity in a team.

Ricky Pearl: There's this weird, I don't know the right word yet, it's not irony, but this weird contradiction where the companies that really got AI-pilled and thought, we'll be able to cut headcount if we fully move over to AI-optimised workflows, became so efficient at delivery that they got so busy they needed more headcount. So actually, those that have adopted AI are the ones that are hiring the most, as opposed to cutting back, because of how effective it can be.

Nathan Clark: I think the cat's out of the bag. I'm out on the very far end of whatever the adoption curve is for AI usage. I'm standing right out there, I've almost fallen off the cliff, and I've got my own internal fight about the societal impact downstream of this and everything else. But the genie's out of the bottle. It's not going back in. So you just have to lean in if you want to be there. If you're going up against a competitor, your competitors are using these tools.

Ricky Pearl: You speak to a lot of companies, so do I. You've read a lot. We've seen companies say they've gone down to one and a half salespeople. We see these stories of companies booking 400 meetings per month per outbound SDR, fully AI enabled. We're seeing these stories, and they're crazy, but I've never shaken the hand of anyone who could show me how they do it.

Nathan Clark: I agree, and I think a lot of it is nonsense, to be honest. And I don't know if there are incentives at play in some cases. But I will give a shout out to a local founder. I was just watching a YouTube walkthrough where they pulled back the curtain on their system. They're doing very AI-agent-powered outreach, and it is working, and it's pretty clear that it is. It's not "we just quadrupled the bookings". It's more that the sales team aren't having to spend all their time on the preparatory steps before they record the video, because they do a lot of video-based outreach. So they're doing more of it, and they can go and focus on the other stuff. They're seeing that net, incremental value out of it. I think that's where we'll see more of it, for the companies that lean in properly.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah.

Nathan Clark: I think you still need a good message.

Ricky Pearl: It's part of go-to-market alpha. It was the same with cold email. Cold email for a period was this mecca, because you could bang out 200,000 emails in a day. And if you knew how to personalise it in a clever way, you were doing 2,000x what anyone else could even remotely think of achieving. But then everyone else caught on, and the whole channel became entirely flooded. I feel like the people that are out in front now are getting hold of this alpha and doing well. Eventually everyone's going to watch that walkthrough and say, okay, this is cool, I'm going to do it. And six months from now, when the late adopters are moving on it, hopefully by then he's on to the next thing, re-engineering what the go-to-market alpha is then. But what he's showing now won't be working anymore.

Nathan Clark: Far be it from me to put Gary Vee in flashing lights, but he said this line about ten years ago at some conference: marketers ruin everything. And I think that's absolutely it. There's the window you're talking about. It was true when the tools came out for email automation, then true for social, and now AI. It's always an arbitrage. The people that worked out they could buy attention through Google search at cents on the dollar, before you were paying proper money for high-intent search. Same same. Then it gets squeezed and you've got to get on to the next thing. So there's a window there if anyone's watching.

Ricky Pearl: And all of this comes down to how effectively and efficiently can we book meetings, and how effectively and efficiently can we use our sales team? That's the question we're always trying to answer. And then we saw Ramp had a very interesting strategy to book meetings.

Nathan Clark: React to this. You've heard of contact marketing, right? Proper contact marketing. There was a guy who used to do printer sales back in the day and talked about sending certain things. Then you've got platforms now that do the gift cards, or whatever the incentives are for people to jump in.

Ricky Pearl: I could have eaten a free lunch every day this year if I was willing to accept more meetings from suppliers.

Nathan Clark: Yeah. So I've seen the gift cards. AirPods probably on the high end is what I've seen. But this is a fun one from Ramp, and they've got all the details on their legal page. For qualified people that'll take a demo, so not us, unqualified, they're going to give a roughly $900 US gift card that's loaded up specifically to buy a Breville Barista Express. A full espresso machine.

Ricky Pearl: We've gone from "let me buy you a coffee" to "let me buy you a coffee machine".

Nathan Clark: The machine.

Ricky Pearl: I just picture being in the boardroom when marketing came up with this idea, and they're all thinking it's a terrible idea. Then the CRO runs the numbers, looks at their current customer acquisition cost and their cost per booked meeting, and goes, we're currently paying $1,200 a meeting. A $900 Breville is actually a discount for us. See if it works.

Nathan Clark: Exactly. It's going to work. Number one, it's Ramp. And two, what buyer of Ramp, a stressed financial leader, isn't drinking four coffees a day, particularly in the US? So the interesting thing to me is who else will push the edges of what's possible? When we were working out our CAC at the last company I was at, maybe not down to the meeting, you were often counting in thousands on big deals, so there's a bit of room to play. That might be one to drop into the WhatsApp group. I'd be curious to see if anyone else has done something particularly creative or is willing to push the limits a bit.

Ricky Pearl: Alright. Let's talk a bit about what's going on in the community and the questions that have come up. One was raised this morning, and I thought it was interesting because I know you have quite a bit of experience with this. It was about deal rooms, and what tools people are using for their digital sales room.

Nathan Clark: It's an interesting space at the moment. You have the traditional players that had static, well, they're meant to be dynamic, but they're basically a page that you populated. Reps have high hopes they'll update it regularly, and sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I've had success using them, and I've also appreciated them as a buyer. I don't know if the market broadly has been the same. I don't think they've delivered on the promise, and certainly the traditional players that sold them have started to move on to more deal coordination type stuff.

Ricky Pearl: I think they came at it from two sides of the market. The bottom end was, how can we make a proposal more beautiful and more interactive, and add some digital tracking and digital elements to a proposal. And the top end was, how can we bring this concept of a mutual action plan, or mutual close plan, or mutual success plan, whatever you want to call it in enterprise, into a digital environment where we have mutual actions and agreed steps. We need you to run this, we're going to run this, you're going to get your CIO involved in that, we need the security questionnaire filled out. Doing an enterprise deal is a project, and you need project management.

Nathan Clark: Totally agree.

Ricky Pearl: And now some are meeting somewhere in the middle. Some are still heavily skewed to one end or the other. But neither of them has really changed the fundamentals of sales and how things should be done.

Nathan Clark: No. Aligned was born of that second group, right? How do I get my buyers aligned properly? And they've got some contemporaries. I think they're kind of expensive for what they are in a lot of cases.

Ricky Pearl: When you think about what you get for $19 with an AI subscription, and then these deal rooms come at you at like $120 per user per month or something, what are we getting for that now?

Nathan Clark: Yeah. I don't know if you've heard of Jen Abel. She worked with a company called Jellyfish, mostly in a consulting capacity, and talks about enterprise a lot. She's like, no enterprise buyer has ever looked at the collateral you sent them. I think it's a funny statement. I don't know if I fully agree, but I think the sentiment is broadly correct.

Ricky Pearl: I think that goes into the one-page internal business case approach.

Nathan Clark: The one page.

Ricky Pearl: Internal documents. Nobody's sharing your marketing collateral with their executive and saying, go and look at this new tool. What they want is a Word document written up in their office that says: here's our need for this, this is what it's costing us, this is why we have to change, here are the four solutions that we looked at, the recommended solution and why, and this is what the change management plan would look like. That's what the exec wants to see. If they see a logo on it, or marketing collateral, they're over it.

Nathan Clark: It's funny. I was at the Seismic conference in San Diego last year talking about exactly this over lunch: the idea of not the full sales room, but co-creating it instead. I was like, lower our voices, don't speak too loud, there are a lot of their folk around.

Ricky Pearl: I've got to make a note to put that in the community, because someone was asking for recommendations there.

Nathan Clark: And that in and of itself has started to evolve, it's much more AI native now. Then there are local players. I'm a long-time Qwilr subscriber, I'll call it out, and I'm very happy to be.

Ricky Pearl: And they came in from that bottom-up approach, right? How can we make proposals automated, beautiful, trackable, engaging, with e-sign, all of that stuff. That's their approach.

Nathan Clark: Exactly. Then think about a buyer that might be, let's say, an events company that's getting tons of bookings coming in. It's not a long sales cycle necessarily, but they need a solution to put in front of people that has quite detailed information, and then they need it signed. And as an events company, I don't really want to pay DocuSign a fortune for the volume of envelopes we do. So that's where the combination of that plus the agreements is really nice.

Ricky Pearl: I love the Goldilocks solution. Value for money, does the job it needs to do, does it well. When people are looking at digital sales rooms, there's a huge difference. I'm happy to engage with a contract when I need to click sign: take me to a web page, I've got some stuff to read, I click and execute, and I'm gone. With a digital sales room, you're essentially changing the way I need to buy and the way I need to engage with the supplier. You actually want me to follow your process rather than you following our process. So there can be some conflict if it's not brought in properly. You need an enterprise seller to bring an enterprise buyer into those motions, and they may be used to mutual action plans. But you know what the biggest CRM in the world is? It's not Salesforce.

Nathan Clark: Google Sheets, Excel.

Ricky Pearl: Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. It's the same thing. The best mutual action plans are just shared over email, with dot points on who's doing what, or a shared Excel sheet or a Word doc. That's where business is done, and it still works.

Nathan Clark: I had this conversation recently with a rep who had read a lot from the mutual action plan school of thought and used those terms. I got the sense they were going to use the term with their prospect, and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not selling you anymore. You and I are both going to go and fight the blockers on our respective sides. I've got to go fight my RevOps team for something. I've got to go fight my CRO to get a discount. I've got to go fight whoever it is to get attention.

Ricky Pearl: And you're going to go fight your security people. Everyone else is going to try to block this, because their job is to block things, whilst your job is to generate revenue or save time.

Nathan Clark: So what's our plan here? What's our plan of action? Should we write this down? Let's work on this together. What do you need? Who are you talking to? Do you want me to put some bullet points in there that you can rejig? I'll take a screenshot if you want, and you can drop it into your deck.

Ricky Pearl: Exactly. If you're not making that work without a sales room, don't go and bring in a sales room.

Nathan Clark: Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: You mentioned the Seismic conference. I think this is big news, and I think the reasoning behind it is bigger than the news itself. Seismic and Highspot have recently merged. So firstly, interesting that it's not a pure acquisition. It's a merger, and a merger is usually not as sexy, but potentially also a sign about cash and other resources. So they're merging, and they're pulling out of a region.

Nathan Clark: Look, it's a merger, but it's definitely an acquisition. Seismic has more funds. They're PE backed, and they swapped out their CEO for the first time since founding.

Ricky Pearl: I'd be very interested in looking at the deal. But that's a topic for another time.

Nathan Clark: I was just calling it out. They've both stayed in market globally, with both products in market, and I think they've got some plans there. But here locally, a small but great team. I actually know a lot of them.

Ricky Pearl: Unbelievable people. Some of the most talented, and some of them will stay on. Definitely some of the most talented professionals in the country.

Nathan Clark: For sure. And I think it's a reflection of the market. Less the product and the team, certainly, and much more a reflection of what's going on around them. To your point, we just talked DSRs. I pay for one for me, but I also have a client where I built something that's fit for purpose for them. I'm not a developer. But because I work with them, they now have a tool where someone will send out something that rhymes with a digital sales room. It's specific to them. So there's one customer that might have been theirs in the future that isn't.

Ricky Pearl: And it's more than just the digital sales room. There are a few categories there, and we've built our own in-house versions of some of them too. A lot of companies probably aren't going down that route, but then again, a lot of them may have the resources to build something on top of SharePoint now.

Nathan Clark: And even, there's one of these AI agent tool companies, they do awesome work, doing a labs-style thing locally with one of the big banks. They're semi in-house, forward-deployed engineering, building things inside an enterprise customer who might historically have spent millions of dollars buying a product, SaaS revenue for your favourite tool provider. Now they're going, actually, there's a path internally for us to spend. Still going to a service provider in this case, but it's much more in-house. So, weird times. It's actually very weird. I don't know how the next twelve months shakes out.

Ricky Pearl: It's certainly going to be interesting. With a lot of these changes and disruptions, we're going to see more layoffs. We've seen monday.com cut back. We've seen HubSpot cut back. We've seen Microsoft cut back.

Nathan Clark: Voluntary buyouts.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah, offering 60,000 voluntary buyouts. Klaviyo cut back, Lightspeed, FICO, Automattic. There's definitely a trend. I think a lot of them are maybe blaming it on AI.

Nathan Clark: I call nonsense on that. It's air cover. A lot of it is not AI, clearly. Tell me you're with me on this.

Ricky Pearl: The first rounds of layoffs were because everyone massively overhired during COVID, and they needed to cut back.

Nathan Clark: 100%. That was the hangover of free cash.

Ricky Pearl: And maybe there were a few that were still rotting away for other reasons, and now they're rightsizing, so to speak. Whenever Salesforce does it, it's more like, let's cut off the bottom 10%, call it a layoff and rehire. They fire for one AI product and rehire for the next one, because they change the name every week. But some of it, like Highspot and Seismic, absolutely has to be. If you're in a category of tech that people will consider building themselves, you're in a dangerous position.

Nathan Clark: Definitely.

Ricky Pearl: Whereas if you're in a category of tech that AI uses as part of the agentic backbone, that's different. Even Asana, for example, is becoming more AI enabled, helping control and coordinate tasks between team members through your AI. It's being used by the AI. They're going to be skyrocketing. So big impacts here, and I think we're going to see more layoffs towards the end of this year.

Nathan Clark: I think that's a pretty fair bet. Let me ask you this. Let's say you're in one of these companies. I'm at the point now where I look at a potential software provider, and to put it in perspective, up until last year it wasn't fully my budget, I wouldn't pretend I had the final sign-off, but for all intents and purposes I was spending $300,000 to $600,000 a year on software, depending on multi-year contract renewals. If I was the budget holder in that position still, actively evaluating software: if you don't have an MCP or a CLI or API access, or you don't want to play nice with the agents I've got, for 99% of things you're just not even on the shortlist now. There are a few categories where I'd go, alright, maybe you've got some proprietary thing and it makes sense, maybe there's some security reason. Fine. But by default, that's it.

Ricky Pearl: It's becoming table stakes, which challenges seat-based licensing in a major way. Companies have a limited window now, months, to build their usage-based or token-based models, and it's going to get harder and harder. There are still use cases where seat-based makes sense. How many people do we want on this recording, how many licences do we need? But I didn't set up the show. Claude did.

Nathan Clark: That's about it.

Ricky Pearl: Last thing I wanted to touch on. Yesterday I went to Accelerate, Hockey Stick Advisory's conference for partnership professionals. It was the first one they've done, and they did such a good job. There were about 130, 140 people in the room, I didn't count, but senior. A real senior room. These were the partnership leaders across so many companies.

Nathan Clark: Good on them. I didn't realise the size of it. Good on them.

Ricky Pearl: The calibre of conversation. I hosted a panel, and the panellists were genuinely senior: founders, former CROs, a CMO and a regional GM. Such high calibre. And it's not that the speakers were the highlights. They could have plucked anyone from the audience.

Nathan Clark: Nice. So what's the takeaway? You didn't want to talk to me for very long yesterday because you were busy with all these important people, so fill me in.

Ricky Pearl: The takeaway was, one, because it's partnerships, everyone's there talking partnerships. Everyone's like, how can we partner? How can we partner? Any time you go to a sales conference it's great, except it's, how can we sell? How can we sell? And I just prefer that conversation. They did an awesome job. Next year I imagine it's going to be much bigger. They'll do it again, and they'll do it better. A lot of people couldn't make it because they'd have had to travel interstate, or budget had been spent, or whatever. Genuinely worthwhile. In my inbox today I've already got about 10 connection requests from people I wouldn't have otherwise met.

Nathan Clark: Excellent. Wonderful opportunities.

Ricky Pearl: And I've had two introductions that are, I'll tell you what, worth a lot more than a $900 Breville.

Nathan Clark: I love it. I'm curious though, what's on the lips of partnership professionals at the moment? What's the hot topic?

Ricky Pearl: Certainly AI enablement, the same as everyone's team. How are we using it? And a lot of the challenges are the same. How do we get a line of sight from partnerships to ROI? There are a lot of internal conflicts between partnerships and the rest of the organisation. I don't mean conflicts at a personal level, but for example, partner marketing. Marketing to your partners: whose budget does that come out of? We asked the room, and half the room said, okay, that's in marketing's budget. But then, marketing, is this your KPI, or are you just KPI'd on leads and you need to spend your budget on demand gen? And they're like, well, yeah. If we don't have a KPI for partner marketing, every time they tell us we need to do something, it's a favour, and we're giving up our own opportunity to hit our own KPIs and secure our jobs to help you with partner marketing. So lots of that still isn't right at many of these companies. And the big topic was obviously how everyone's using AI.

Nathan Clark: Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: But also interesting conversations about HubSpot, for example, and their agencies. I can do things in my instance now that I couldn't do previously, because I just prompted it into Claude. HubSpot had me on a webinar to show what I've built in my HubSpot, and I'm not an engineer.

Nathan Clark: Who would have thought? You and I, banging rocks together, discovering fire, and now talking AI and building software.

Ricky Pearl: And hosting a webinar for HubSpot. But for their agencies: they've built this partner ecosystem with these agencies, and now the business for those agencies has changed.

Nathan Clark: And they need to bring them along.

Ricky Pearl: They'd have to help them along on this journey. What it meant to be a HubSpot agency may have changed, because you can do things differently now. Actually, there's huge opportunity for all of their agencies.

Nathan Clark: If you can paddle fast enough to catch the wave, for sure.

Ricky Pearl: And 80% of their business will end up coming from 20% of their partners. But that could all change now because of how those businesses are changing. Same for monday.com. Same for Asana. Same for all these companies that have awesome partnership ecosystems. And people's livelihoods are built on the back of these partner ecosystems.

Nathan Clark: That's huge.

Ricky Pearl: Never mind the partner managers at HubSpot. There are thousands. For every dollar HubSpot makes, their ecosystem makes $8.

Nathan Clark: I didn't realise it was that big. There's the old Bill Gates line that you know you're a platform when the market makes more money off your product than you do, or whatever it is. I've butchered that, but hopefully I got the point across. I didn't realise it was eight to one.

Ricky Pearl: That's the number I heard. Could be wrong. So there's a lot for these partner ecosystems to manage. And for anyone listening, the benchmark is that 30% of revenue should be partner sourced or partner influenced, or more. And the current benchmark in Australia is 21%. That 9% delta is something like $8.5 billion of revenue that should be coming in through partners and currently isn't. And it's the cheapest. It's the highest LTV to CAC ratio. That's always the goal of partnerships: lifetime value over customer acquisition cost. That's something one of the panellists mentioned yesterday too. Partnerships is meant to be the mecca for that.

Nathan Clark: It's one of the few places I haven't spent enough time. The various experiences I've had have been right across the bow tie, but partners as a channel, I just haven't had enough time there. We've actually spoken about this briefly, but on the enablement front, it's hard enough getting your first-party sales team across things. It was hard before to enable your sales team effectively. Then we gave every developer in the world superpowers. The old 10x engineer thing has become true. So every technology company has accelerated its development, and the ones still hanging around are managing to do that. Then you've got the downstream implication for your reps: oh, you just launched this, you just launched this, you just launched this. Try to get them across the messaging. And then imagine the partners, who aren't in your business and don't see all the Slack threads and all that stuff.

Ricky Pearl: That's massive. There was a story on the main stage yesterday, under Chatham House rules, so I won't say who. A GM at a big SaaS company was in a meeting, and the customer said, I'm loving the new note-taker. And she's like, oh, that's interesting. She was finding out about a new feature in her own product, a pretty significant one, a meeting note-taker and recorder, in a meeting with people who were using the tool before she knew about it. She's the regional GM. It's hard enough in your own business, with the rate of development and product changes, as you say, to get it to your sales team, let alone your partner ecosystem, or for your partners to educate their customers. That's a whole other story. So partner enablement was definitely a big topic. That was a big challenge people are trying to solve. And finally, there's always the challenge in partnerships around recruiting and hiring, because there's no bottom rung on the ladder in partnerships.

Nathan Clark: You don't have the talent pipeline like you do with SDRs converting into AEs.

Ricky Pearl: Exactly. There are very few junior partnership roles, less than 10% of roles in partnerships are junior. They all want experience, and more than half of them want specific ecosystem experience. So where do these people come from? Sales, CS, account management, somewhere else. But then it becomes a tricky hire because the skill set is very different. You need the skill set of an account executive and an account manager and a customer success manager. You need to be able to sell with influence, because you can't tell a partner what to do, and they can't tell their customer what to do. You've got to work three layers removed. It's very strategic. But at the same time you need to be able to create momentum and create a deal. It is a difficult skill set.

Nathan Clark: You've got to thread the needle between all these people.

Ricky Pearl: So that's always a topic up there as well. But Bryan and his team absolutely smashed it. And we're out of time. This was the first Unqualified chat. Next week we'll have some people on. We'll bring more stats, more facts, more current news to talk about, and we're just going to make it better. Thank you to anyone who watched and anyone who joined. We want all of your feedback. We want to make this great. And if you have something you want to add, pop it into the GTM ANZ WhatsApp chat, DM myself or Nathan, or pop it into the comments.

Nathan Clark: We're going to get more people on. I think that is the way. We'll create some space for more voices, qualified or unqualified. Cool. Alright. Thanks, Ricky.