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You built AI into your delivery this year, your team ships faster, and your close rate is still sitting exactly where it was at the start of the year. In this episode, I break down why that happens, and why it is the same shift accountants faced 20 years ago when software started eating their compliance work. The ones who survived stopped selling the pieces and started selling the puzzle, while the ones who stayed stuck poured their best hours into delivery no customer ever sees. I walk through the free move that turns the work you already do into a named, customer-facing methodology, and why selling hours lets AI compress your revenue while selling methodology grows your margins. If every deal still comes down to price and your customers cannot tell you apart from the other partners on your platform, this one is for you. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 707 - One Coffee. One Insider. Six Months Off Your Build.Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Your prospects can tell within about 10 minutes of a Zoom call that you don't really know their industry. In this episode, I share the coffee meeting that stopped me from launching a hotel and cafe service line at Coca-Cola that would have made me the laughing stock of the trade, and the one detail 50 trade articles never mentioned. I break down what an industry coach is (not a professional coach, but a peer with 20 or 30 years of operating scars and nothing to sell you), why most SaaS partners resist finding one, and what the ask looks like in verticals like estate law, industrial automation, and MSPs. I finish with three questions you can answer before you build your next vertical offer. If you've picked your niche but still catch yourself using platform words instead of industry words, this one's for you. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 706 - Your P&L Is Lying About Your MarginCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Your P&L says you made 60 percent margin last year. The real number could be half of that, and it is not an accounting error, it is the hours you spend on delivery costed at zero. In this episode, I break down a partner agency I evaluated for acquisition that looked healthy on paper, until we moved the founder's delivery hours out of drawings and into the cost of delivery and watched the net profit collapse. I show you why drawings quietly doing the work of a salary means you are subsidizing your own business and calling that subsidy profit, and the one adjustment that rebuilds your pricing on the truth. If your margin feels fine but your bank keeps raising an eyebrow at your numbers, this is the reality check to run before your next pricing decision. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 705 - Being a certified partner is not a business.Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Your certification feels like the asset. It is closer to a rented seat on someone else's platform, and AI is quietly pulling the chair out from under it. In this episode, I break down a conversation with a peer of mine, an ex-client who built a Zoho consultancy from scratch, kept a strong team, and retains clients better than almost anyone I know, and still cannot sell the thing he built. So he is starting a second business in parallel, and it looks nothing like the first: one vertical, one buyer, one price, 72 percent his own software and 28 percent platform. I walk through why setup and implementation work is drying up, what stays billable when it does, and the difference between a partner sitting in a trap and a partner working a plan. If your revenue still leans on selling licenses and billing implementations, this is the shift worth hearing before the vendor forces it on you. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 704 - You Can Beat Them At Everything And Still LoseCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

You are one of forty partners on your platform, and every website, every LinkedIn profile, and every pitch says the same three lines: Salesforce implementation, Zoho work, Monday builds, HubSpot onboarding. In this episode, I break down the WHO decision that separates the partner who owns a vertical from the forty who blend into the directory. I share how one Monday partner became the only name listed under nonprofits, then did the part almost nobody does: she rewrote the product's own language for that buyer, renaming the CRM as a DRM so donors, donations, and households replaced leads, opportunities, and pipeline. Sales slowed while she made the pivot and two verticals stopped feeding her, but she held the line, and now the platform sends her the nonprofit deals. If you are tired of competing against partners who sound exactly like you, this one shows you the two moves that let the right buyer find you first. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 703 - You Can Beat Them At Everything And Still LoseCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

You can beat the biggest partner in your ecosystem on content, on volume, on quality, and still finish the year at a quarter of their revenue with price as the only lever anyone hands you. In this episode I break down why that happens and what to do about it, starting with the rule Jack Welch laid down in a 1981 speech that almost nobody quotes correctly. Your platform, whether it is Salesforce, Zoho, HubSpot, or Microsoft, is a product, not a market, so the moment a buyer arrives the only question they can ask you is how much and how fast. I walk through the four moves that get you out of that queue, from reading back through your last 10 clients to find the industry where the scope held and you never bled hours, to packaging the fix as a priced outcome instead of billable time. If you are about to spend another year becoming a better version of a competitor you cannot beat, this one is for you. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 702 - Firing Your Agency Won't Get You More LeadsCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Firing your agency won't get you more leads. I got on a call this week with an MSP owner in a market with over 2,500 providers, all deals mostly on price, who had burned two years and thousands of dollars on two different agencies with next to nothing to show for it. In this episode I break down why the problem was never the agency: it was that he had never picked who he serves, so every piece of content defaulted to generic, because generic is the only thing that fits everyone. I walk through the exact order that actually works, pick one type of client where your best results already live, rewrite your profile in your own words for that one buyer, and only then brief an agency or run the outreach yourself. If you've been throwing mud at the wall and blaming whoever's holding the bucket, this one's about the decision only you can make. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 701 - Why AI Makes You More Valuable, Not Less, with Sarah McDevitt Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Why you should listen Sarah McDevitt, a HubSpot leader and first-time author, breaks relational intelligence into five practical signals (Awareness, Presence, Empathetic Structuring, Connection Capital, and Human Differentiation) you can use to become the partner a client cannot swap out for a tool.Learn how to be a "context miner" in every meeting: the way sharp partners use full presence to extract how a business actually makes decisions, then feed that context into their AI agents to get outputs generic prompts cannot match.Get Sarah's read on where the retainer money moves next as AI creates a wave of "vibe coded" messes, plus the governance and platform cohesion work partners can charge for when customers realize they need one person to own the whole stack. You have spent years getting deep on the platform, and now AI can do a slice of that build work in minutes, so a quiet question sits at the back of your mind: what is a partner actually for now? In this episode, I talk with Sarah McDevitt, a HubSpot leader and first-time author of The Round Table, about relational intelligence, which she defines as the ability to build, sustain, and grow trust-based relationships that AI cannot replicate. We get into why the skills AI makes less scarce do not make you less useful, and why so many partners have their identity wrapped up in the exact technical work that is now being handed to agents. Sarah has spent years watching what separates the partners who stay in the room from the ones who get swapped out, and almost none of it is technical. If your value has always lived in the build, and you can feel that ground shifting under you, this conversation is about where your value goes next. About Sarah McDevitt Sarah McDevitt is the Senior Director of Partner Strategy at HubSpot, where she leads a global community of more than 7,000 partners through AI transformation. A native of Sligo and now based in Dublin, Sarah is the creator of the Relational Intelligence framework and the author of her first book, The Round Table: How Relational Intelligence Will Become Your Human Advantage in the AI Age. Her core thesis, "RI + AI = Trust," argues that the smartest organizations use AI to strengthen human relationships rather than replace them. A TEDx speaker and advocate whose work spans hybrid team leadership and responsible AI adoption, Sarah helps partners see that as technical skills become less scarce, the ability to build trust becomes their most valuable and defensible asset. Resources and Links Sarah McDevitt on The Paul Higgins Podcast: Episode 642 - Stop Being a Platform Expert - Why Business Growth Advisors Win in the AI Era with Sarah McDevittHubspot.comSarah McDevitt on LinkedIn20VC podcastNeed help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 694 - The 60% ShiftCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

You subscribe to the newsletters, listen to the podcasts, watch the videos, sit in the partner events, and every quarter your revenue still falls behind the target you set for yourself. The smartest SaaS partners I know are usually the most stuck, and it is not because they are missing information, it is because they have too much of it. In this episode I tell the truth about my own trap: after I sold my business I decided I had all the frameworks and could coach myself, and that lasted about a month before I was back to 60-hour weeks spinning my wheels. I share the two decisions I made when I finally re-engaged my own coach, one about who I serve and one about what I sell, and how those same two moves reshaped my clients' businesses too. If your target is not moving no matter how much you consume, this one is for you, because you cannot read the label from inside the jar. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 699 - AI will expose youCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Look at your last ten projects and ask an uncomfortable question: how many could the platform's own AI agent do most of within the next two years? For a lot of SaaS partners, the honest answer is most of them, and that is exactly the implementation, configuration, and migration work paying the bills right now. In this episode, I break down why AI is not going to replace you, it is going to expose you, and what actually gets exposed once the repetitive setup work starts to shrink. I share the call Chris, a Salesforce partner, made when he picked one industry and said no to everything else: revenue dipped for three to six months, then came back at a higher margin with less rework because he stopped learning every client's business from scratch. If you are spread across five verticals, known well enough to configure but not well enough to advise, this is the one decision that determines whether AI multiplies you or exposes you. Resources and Links Chris Widmayer on The Paul Higgins Podcast: Episode 691 - Why Going All-In on One Vertical Beat Staying a Generalist with Chris WidmayerNeed help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 698 - SaaS is DeadCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Every podcast in our space is telling you AI has killed SaaS, and not one of them can name a client who has actually walked away from their platform. In this episode, I show you why the "AI replaces the platform" story does not hold up right now, and where your attention actually belongs instead. Here is the test I run before I believe any of it: not what a guest or a host predicts, but what a client has actually done. The gap between "AI can build software" and "I will rebuild and maintain the tool I depend on daily" is enormous, and almost nobody's clients have closed it. So before you rip up your ICP over a threat that never shows up, ask what is actually costing you clients today: weak lead flow and conversions, not a version of your business AI might take in three years. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 697 - Five Verticals Feels Safe. It's the Riskiest Thing You Do.Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

The decision that scares you most is the one keeping you stuck, and the fear talking you out of it has a name: eggs in one basket. In this episode, I break down why that fear is a lie for SaaS partners spread thin across five verticals, and the two tests that kill it in under a week. I share how one client I work with crossed $100,000 a month for the first time with zero dollars spent on marketing, after finally committing to the one vertical he had avoided for years. You will hear why counting the real size of a market beats trusting the nerves, and why a niche you can reverse in 90 days is a test, not a bet. If you are tired of rewriting your pitch for every call and being shallow in five places while AI eats shallow for breakfast, this one is for you. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 696 - Wrong ProblemCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

You are about to spend months solving a problem you have never actually counted, and the real cost is not the wasted build, it is every move you do not make while you are stuck in it. In this episode, I break down three Slack conversations I had with SaaS partners in two weeks, each one convinced the complex solution was the answer: a platform migration, a staged AI email sequence, a full LinkedIn outreach system. In each case, one question flipped it, like the partner ready to switch platforms until he counted that the platform cost him $11,000 in lost deals while spreadsheets and homegrown builds cost him $140,000. I show you why AI can build the plan but can never tell you whether the problem is even yours, and the three simple moves that test the real constraint before you commit. If you are a SaaS partner staring down a major build, this is the glass of ice water, and the question is whether you will drop the O-ring in first. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 695 - Stop Doing the Delivery Yourself: A Smarter Way to Add Capacity with Jim MarascioCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Why you should listen Jim Marascio runs Equals 11 with roughly 30 direct team members, yet delivers Salesforce work with on-demand access to more than 600 certified engineers. He breaks down the exact staffing partnerships in LATAM and Europe that let a lean business play far larger than its headcount.Learn how to move up the value chain from tactical delivery to consultative "what if" conversations: the shift that raises deal value, creates more interesting work for your engineers, and turns you into the trusted advisor a client cannot swap out.Get Jim's front-end planning approach (milestones, definition of done, clear ownership, agreed success metrics) that keeps projects out of the 40% of implementations that stall on activity without results. You want to take on bigger Salesforce work, but every larger project means hiring people you cannot afford to keep on the bench, so you stay stuck delivering most of it yourself. In this episode, I talk with Jim Marascio from Equals 11, who spent 25 years as a CIO and CTO of SaaS companies before building a delivery business that runs on a lean core team and plays far larger than its size. We get into the moment he stopped being the tactical fix-it vendor waiting for clients to define the problem, and started becoming the strategic partner clients build their roadmap around. Jim also puts a number on it: roughly 40% of implementations break, and the difference between the ones that deliver and the ones that stall comes down to what you do in the first week. If you are the owner doing too much of the delivery and you want to grow capacity without betting the business on payroll, this conversation is your blueprint. About Jim Marascio Jim Marascio is the founder and CEO of Equals 11, a certified Salesforce consulting partner that helps mid-market companies get real value from Salesforce long after go-live. With more than 25 years as a CEO, CIO, and CTO, he has built his career managing distributed teams, and today Equals 11 pairs a lean core team with a network of 600+ certified Salesforce engineers across the US, Latin America, and Europe. Guided by the belief in its name, 1 + 1 = 11, Jim has grown the firm from tactical delivery into strategic, consultative work for direct clients and system integrators alike. Resources and Links Equals 11 Jim Marascio on LinkedInSalesforce AgentforceClaudeNeed help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 694 - The 60% ShiftCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

You did not get into this business to sell configuration hours, but at some point that became the model anyway. In this episode, I break down the one number from Forrester's Microsoft modern work partner study that every SaaS partner should sit with: 60 percent of last year's partner revenue growth came from AI, and the fastest growing slice was not deployment, it was advisory, up 63 percent in a single year. Your vendor is making the technical work easier on purpose, which means if your value lives in the setup, you are the friction they are designed to remove. I walk through why the partners who moved to advisory a year ago already own the relationships, the reputation, and the recurring revenue, and what that head start really costs everyone still waiting to feel the pressure. If you want to know whether the WHO, the WHAT, or the HOW is the actual constraint holding your business on the runway, this one is for you. Resources and Links Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier CallBook a Decision Session herePrevious episode: 693 - The AI Revenue Play Sitting in Your Closed Lost Pipeline.Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources