Mike Head is Chief Revenue Officer of PartnerStack, the partner-ecosystem platform billed as the world's largest B2B partner network. He built his career at impact.com (formerly Impact Radius), which he joined pre-revenue as employee #10 and where he spent 14 years building the sales organization from scratch across sales and customer success; he left, returned as CRO, and helped scale the company to a $1.5 billion valuation before moving to PartnerStack. A leader who has repeatedly reinvented his role — from selling the dream in sales to delivering it in customer success — he operates by a beginner's-mindset creed ('the only thing I know is that I know nothing') and is one of the clearest voices on how AI search is reshaping go-to-market: his thesis is that up to 85% of what LLMs recommend comes from third-party content, which makes partnerships and a broad, authentic ecosystem the new distribution and defensibility layer.
“85% of the time it can be off of your websites. And off of your websites is a very broad term — that's why we call it third-party content, as opposed to first-party, your own website.”
“Domain authority doesn't matter as much as it used to. You want to make sure you're very widely distributed across all the different types of content sites that are talking about your category and your competitors.”
“It's my belief that over time any of this inauthentic, spam-type content won't be picked up long-term. And so you want to be building for a long-term strategy.”
“Try to emulate the same way that you would think about TAM, TAM penetration, pipeline, pipeline conversion rates with your partner program — the same way you would in prospecting or marketing.”
“We're seeing 105 for the core business and 130 for the partner-managed business. Typically you do see better gross dollar retention, and because of their knowledge of how to use your product, you actually see more expansion.”
“Good partnership organizations are delivering 30 to 40% of total company revenue. What I think companies fail at early stage is they don't do it early enough.”
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing. Really just trying to always have that beginner's mindset has helped me go into different stages of different companies.”
“In sales you get to sell the dream — the amazing product vision. Going over to customer success, you're no longer selling the dream, you're trying to deliver it. That was probably the most eye-opening experience.”