Paul Higgins Podcast

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 LinksNeed 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 LinksNeed 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 LinksNeed 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 listenSarah 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 McDevittSarah 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 LinksSarah 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 LinksNeed 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