---
title: "AI Search Is Changing Everything—Here’s the New Go-To-Market Playbook"
episode: 72
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Mike Head"
guest_title: "Chief Revenue Officer, PartnerStack"
date_published: 2026-05-15
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:49:34
word_count: 7306
topics: ["gtm-strategy", "ai-in-gtm", "demand-generation", "brand-positioning", "sales-leadership"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/mike-head-ai-search-playbook/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# AI Search Is Changing Everything—Here’s the New Go-To-Market Playbook — Full Transcript

> Episode 72 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Mike Head.
> Published May 15, 2026 · 00:49:34 · 7,306 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/mike-head-ai-search-playbook/

## 00:00 — Meet Mike Head: Impact.com \#10 to PartnerStack CRO

**[0:00]** Today I'm sitting down with Mike Head, the CRO at Partner Stack, the world's largest B2B partner network. Mike's story is wild. He joined Impact.com as employee number 10 when they were pre-revenue, spent 14 years there building the sales org from scratch, left, came back as CRO, and helped scale it to a $1.5 billion valuation. Now he's at Partner Stack, and we're going to get into something that connects two of the biggest conversations happening right now. Partnerships and AI. Specifically, how partnerships are becoming the way companies show up in AI search results. If you've been hearing about AEO or GEO and wondering what it actually means

## 00:48 — The 85% rule: AI recommends third-party content

**[0:48]** for your go-to-market, this is the episode. Mike, you made an interesting comment that's really stuck with me, that up to 85% of what AI recommends comes from third-party content. Walk me through what that means and why it changes how companies think about marketing. Yeah, sounds good. The biggest change that we're seeing, and this data is coming from companies like AirOps, Profound, Evertune, that their sole purpose is helping companies improve when they're ranked and cited within the LLMs. They give insights into when certain prompts are happening, like what's the best HR software in the US for a 50-person

**[1:41]** company. They are able to run analytics and show you what the LLMs are actually looking at to source their information, and then ultimately provide their short list of recommendations. And this is where 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, you know, first-party your own website overall. That third-party content, you know, people are hearing about things like Reddit. And Reddit's had this crazy arc where it was being cited a lot, now it's being cited a lot less. LinkedIn is the opposite, where it continues to grow

## 02:28 — Where LLMs source: reviews, YouTube, publications, integrations

**[2:28]** in importance in making sure that you have content there, because LLMs are able to read and utilize a bunch of that content that's put out. That said, a majority of it actually comes from mid- and long-tail sites. And so that means a number of different areas become very important opportunities for marketers to focus on. And we break them down into a couple of different categories. So of course you have to work with review sites. You know, review sites like a G2, quite often they're looking to see what customers are actually saying, they're incorporating that so they can understand really the validity of the

**[3:07]** claims. You know, you say your software is good for certain things, let's fact check that with what users are actually saying about your software. It could be small influencers. YouTube is a huge channel for this. Not surprisingly, Google and Gemini obviously, you know, very very big player in the space right now. Being able to, the LLMs can read what's happening within those YouTube videos that you're putting out. And when you have a third party that's talking about it, it weights it pretty heavily because it looks like trusted third-party review as opposed to just what the brand is saying overall. There's also a number of

**[3:49]** different digital publications, blogs that you can be on where they're writing about your category, they're writing about your competitors and you need to ultimately show up there. And then the final one and one of the areas where it really connects to partnerships is whenever you're doing integrations with other vendors, when you're writing blogs about one another and how the product works together, that's another area that's quite often cited and utilized by the LLM. So that was a lot. I'll take a pause there. No, I think it's really interesting because I've seen, just like anything, if you take bad strategy and

## 04:30 — Bad strategy + AI = a brick wall; organic beats spam

**[4:30]** throw the accelerant of AI on top of it, you could really start putting your brand into a brick wall. And what I've seen a lot of companies do is say, "Okay, great. I have all these AI tools. Let me spin up a thousand landing pages and write a bunch of blogs on our own." And if I'm hearing what you're saying right, hey, AI is smart enough to know that that content is just produced by you. You can probably tell that it's AI produced as well. And what it's really looking for is the most organic type of content that they can find. Organic and fresh. And one of the things that also doesn't play as strong a role today as it did with SEO,

**[5:16]** it could change because this face is evolving very rapidly, but domain authority doesn't matter as much as it used to. And so now because you don't have to just focus on those with the absolute highest amount of domain authority and you need to have a lot of different queries, FAQs, content really covered, 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. And you mentioned an important thing around not just being there, you also want to make sure you're represented in the most accurate way. And

## 06:07 — Partnerships as the AEO channel: joint content

**[6:07]** so that's why it's really important to make sure that you're monitoring this content, you understand what they're saying, if you've made product changes or pricing changes like many technology companies have over the last 12 months, it's really important to make sure that that content is accurate because it will be used by the alarms for these recommendations. And when you're tying this to partnerships, I feel like that's something, it's something here at Lean Scale we've actually invested in, we didn't do it thoughtfully with an AEO strategy necessarily, but we always thought one of the best ways we can

**[6:43]** collaborate with our partners is putting together content. So working with the partners put together joint content pieces, whether it's a podcast, it's a webinar, it's a full walkthrough and then co-promoting on LinkedIn or any other channels that we have. It's been a really good strategy for us just for visibility, but how have you seen people take their partnership strategy, partnership approach to optimize for AEO? Yeah, I think so. We always look at, start with the AI visibility platform and use their recommendations on the sites that you should be working with overall. And so when you run an AI visibility

**[7:29]** platform analysis, you can end up getting thousands of potential URLs that you probably should be working with in some way. And you also get recommendations on the types of content that you don't currently have that you should have. And so using those two things together can really help inform your partnership strategy. So something like super low-hanging fruit, you know, you notice you have a partnership somewhere, they're actually being cited in these recommendations. You haven't done content together. That's obviously a no-brainer to make sure that you then formulate a content strategy. More often than not, you

**[8:15]** probably have some of that low-hanging fruit already. You can start to expand upon it by figuring out what content do you not have that you should be speaking about together. And you want to make sure it stays relevant to the actual use case and the partnership that you have formed, because 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, in my opinion. And so you can start to look at, well, oh, we don't have an FAQ. Our customers or our competitors do have an FAQ. I want to make sure that I am doing some joint collaboration with

**[8:56]** my partners where we're helping answer questions about how it works together or maybe how their technology works or how our technology works. And the more that you start to think and work through those things, you can get some really good fresh content that not only helps inform the LLMs, but we all know humans, their buying journey, 85% online as well. And so making sure that you have more of that content out there also helps the traditional buyers journey. And one other thing that I'll say that I think is a really good example is going back to the YouTube and building content and talking about the value of a

## 09:35 — Long-term strategy vs. chasing quick wins

**[9:35]** partnership together, demonstrating that technology and how it actually works together. If you're putting that out on YouTube or to your point on podcasts as well, that can also be really powerful content that is picked up by the LLMs. You said something earlier that I want to double click on. And I think this is true almost any aspect of your business, but investing in the long-term strategy. So I think a lot of people are always looking for quick wins. How can you start to lay the foundation the right way to where you're investing for the long term and you're not sabotaging yourself by doing something that you think is going

**[10:20]** to get you a quick win? Always to me goes back to customer value and thinking about that buyer's journey with the customers ultimately care about how your customers are ultimately using your product and writing about things in a very authentic way. I think if you start to just try and attach yourself to something that is a fad or a hot trend for the current moment that doesn't really align with who you are as a company or an organization, long term that's not going to serve you. Maybe it'll get you a quick increase in the short term, but long term that won't be sustainable as well. I do think, you know,

**[11:10]** I mentioned the domain authority and how it's a lower threshold right now. Making sure that you're also picking the right sites that you want to partner with long term. And there are some sites out there that, you know, they've realized this opportunity. They're willing to write about anyone and anything even if it doesn't fully align with their actual audience. I would expect over time those type of tactics to not work long term as well. Who knows I could be wrong, but so I would think about the content needs to be authentic, truly relevant to your actual products, customers use case overall and its publications and

## 11:50 — The best first content step is unique to you

**[11:50]** partners that you want to work with and they're going to be going about this in the right way writing authentic content that also can sustain long term. And when you're thinking about building content with partnerships, maybe specifically if somebody's thinking about launching one of these programs, is it thought leadership content? Is it demoing products with each other? What's the best first step to take towards that direction of building that authentic content? Because I think some people have a tough time wrapping their heads around exactly what it might look like in practice. Sure, and this might

**[12:38]** not be helpful, but the best first step ends up being pretty unique to the specific vendor because all of us have different content that's already out there. So everyone already has a baseline of content that's being picked up both from their website as well as from initiatives that they've already done to help with SEO and other content that is already out there. And so some may have great thought leadership that's already being picked up, but they don't have a lot of the technical FAQs. And so you most likely want to address that gap because you're showing up strong in one area and you need to actually improve

**[13:24]** where you are in other areas overall. And so that's what I would look like, like the examples that you gave around thought leadership, demos, FAQs, tutorials, customer reviews, all of it broadly is incredibly important. And what you need to work on is where you have the biggest gaps. The other area that we see a lot of people wanting to start with is they have certain competitors where they feel like those competitors are showing up more highly in rankings where they actually believe they have a better solution. And so depending on what your ultimate strategy would be and where you want to start to see improvements in LLMs

**[14:09]** and how they're raking you and recommending you, you will have a different content strategy that you need to deploy to be able to address those specific things. And then one other final piece like around the strategy, there could be a negative brand sentiment, you know, and you want to address that negative brand sentiment and that's most important to you. Or you've launched a new product or you've pivoted your company and so they're speaking about you in a way that is no longer true with who you are. And so this is why it's a very long-winded way of saying it's actually very unique to whatever

## 14:49 — LeanScale's content-and-partnerships bet

**[14:49]** you want to achieve as a vendor or software company, you'll have different first steps that you need to address to improve in certain areas in LLM rankings. No it makes sense and I know it's really unique and even if I'm reflecting on our strategy here at LeanScale, we have invested heavily in content early on in our journey. So we started in 2021, in 2022 we were regularly producing content and it's really become our main strategy. It's content and partnerships so this is a timely conversation for me too. And it's a it's a long-term game. You have to, in my opinion, you have to just get started and just cranking volume and

## 15:36 — The ROI of partnerships & the Emailage story

**[15:36]** then seeing what works and then you'll start to get good at it over time. But it does take a long a long time to start seeing the fruits of that labor. And I don't know about you, I'm assuming, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but sitting in a partner stack I'm sure a big conversation is around the ROI of partnerships. And in my experience there's two camps of people. There's people who just get it, they're not worried about you know tracking all the attribution and the details, they just intuitively understand the investment and then people who just can't wrap their heads around it. And to share an

**[16:13]** experience I was at a company called Emailage. During the scaling process I got there around 4 million in revenue, we got to 40-45 million in revenue, exited for half a billion to LexisNexis. And throughout that journey two things happened. One, 45% of our revenue came through partnerships, whether it was referral reseller or affiliates. Two, at the end of the process during the acquisition it turned into a competitive situation between companies that we were partnering with. So it really framed our entire acquisition and exit strategy too. So I've seen it, I felt it and had experience with it. For those that maybe

## 17:00 — Making the ROI case like TAM math

**[17:00]** haven't, how do you get the ROI conversation with the team? Yeah it's a fantastic question you know and I've personally been there where you can see the funnel on marketing and you can understand dollar in, X amount of dollars out you know similar in sales. You can see like sales level investments, bookings relative to those investments calculated in ROI very efficiently and partnerships for whatever reason and I think we've done it to ourselves in some ways isn't as easy to understand. And I think sometimes it's because it's one of two challenges. One, you only pick the long-term biggest possible home runs and

**[17:52]** you set your partnership program up for failure. Two, you could also be looking at the metrics in the wrong way that you know a CRO or a CEO isn't necessarily looking at the funnel in the same way that the partnerships team is looking at. One of the biggest debates is around partner-influenced revenue, right? If you too much focus on partner-influenced revenue and you have a CRO who's looking at I need more pipeline, I need more bookings, influence is great but you're not helping us get to our ultimate number. That's where you start to have like friction around this overall. I think one of the best ways to think about

**[18:31]** it is try to emulate the same way that you would think about a TAM, TAM penetration pipeline, pipeline conversion rates with your partner program and the same way that you would do it in thinking about upon prospecting or marketing. For example, here's how I think about partnerships overall. Of course we want to do account mapping and understand where we have overlap but if we're doing account mapping and I have access to the technical buyer, you have access to the marketing buyer, that's really a pointless exercise. You know maybe we'll have some success but we're so misaligned at the persona level that

**[19:19]** it doesn't really show we'll have a great way to actually generate pipeline together and so I think you need to look at TAM and personas in the same way that the marketing team would be doing it and look at the overlap there. Then you can start to look at okay we have you know a thousand organizations where we have persona overlap we think for any given quarter we can get 5% of that and then we can convert of that 5%, 50% in the pipeline and then we'll convert that 30% win rate into actual new bookings. That's a way where I feel like if a partnership leader comes and they're talking to senior leadership or the board they can

## 20:03 — The overlooked dimension: partnerships lift NDR

**[20:03]** much more effectively communicate the ROI of the investments and speak the same language that the other tactics and channels are speaking and help to help set yourself up for success. The other area where ROI I think is very important in my experience as well as you know our vantage point across a lot of partner programs at partner stack, net dollar retention is higher when you have partners involved and so if you can really show that not only you can have an efficient bookings formula, if you also can show that you have higher net dollar retention and potentially even reduced cost to service that customer

**[20:49]** because partners are involved then you have a mathematical way to really prove that this strategy will be a no-brainer. That's a piece that almost everybody leaves out. Everybody's looking for the top of funnel, lead gen, conversion rate, reducing sales cycle. I rarely hear people talk about the net dollar retention component of partnerships. Can you and before doing RevOps I ran customer success too and often it's just an overlooked function and I think the power that you can have if you can keep churn really really low, you just keep compounding and stacking as you close new business. Can we double click

**[21:41]** there and share a little bit of stats or where you see that coming up and how maybe a partnership team or a customer success team can lean into the partnership program more because I think that's when it gets a little bit more holistic across your entire GTM strategy. You're not solely thinking of this investment as how many leads did we get? You're now thinking of it as supporting the entire GTM lifecycle. Yeah so one I agree across the board NDR especially like 2010 to 2020 wasn't heavily weighted in go-to-market strategies. I think this decade we're starting to see more people talk about it, more investors

**[22:29]** care about it, and understand the efficiency that if your existing customers can grow on their own what that does for the business overall. And so I do feel like more leaders are thinking about it, talking about it. That said your comments on customer success and just less investments there definitely resonates with me. I've you know led that team frequently in my career and I'm currently leading that here at partner stack overall. And so the way that you know we work with clients as well as you know we think about it here internally is just the same way that you would segment portfolios based

**[23:07]** off of whether you have an ICP score, whether you have segmentation, whether you have different tiers for how you manage customers, you should be applying the same data set across partners that are managing your business. And I would look at it in two different ways. There are some partners who refer you business but don't manage the customer versus those that refer you the business and manage the customer. And potentially those that don't even refer you the business, they just manage the customer. And anytime you're doing your NDR cohort analysis, make sure that you're including those variables in the analysis overall.

**[23:51]** I think it's just quite often an overlooked dimension that does if you actually take a look at it. You know we're seeing not flight gains like 105 is our benchmark for NDR and partner sourced or partner managed revenue is 108. We're seeing 105 for the core business and 130 for the partner managed business. Typically you do see across the board better GDR, gross dollar retention, so better churn overall. And because their knowledge and understanding of how to use your product you actually see more expansion that comes through it. Of course it's not always true across the board all

## 24:37 — Staging a partnership program by company stage

**[24:37]** individual use cases but at an aggregate level and in my personal experience I have seen this. What's your recommendation for a company trying to build out a partnership team, a partnership program. We work with tons of companies that are maybe at that Series A, Series B stage and they're just starting to think about that partnership motion. And I get this question a lot about RevOps as well like how much RevOps do you need at each stage of company and who do you hire first. I think a lot of people just don't have the experience building out this type of function. So what if you were to stair-step it

**[25:19]** throughout a company's growth journey, what does a proper investment in partnerships look like? Yeah zero to one maybe zero to five as you're figuring out PMF probably don't need a partnerships resource. You could if it's a certain vertical or industry where you know the primary go-to-market method is going to be through partnerships. But in general as you're trying to figure out your product market fit I think the founders, the smaller team, the technology team like you're really just trying to confirm that you have a product offering that can deliver value for customers. It's once you start to exit that phase

**[26:03]** of the business and you can really understand more about the best fit type of customers and then map that to partners that make sense that have access to your persona overall then you can really start investing overall. I look at it as you know you have sales marketing and partnerships as your you know primary pillars of how you want to go to market. You know you mentioned the stat I think you said 45% or 40 somewhere around there. I've personally experienced that as well. You know but in general you do kind of see on average good partnership organizations are delivering 30 to 40% of total company

**[26:49]** revenue. And so I would look at investing and thinking about it along those lines overall. What I think companies fail at early stage is they don't do it early enough. So whereas you can spend money on marketing and you can start to see that funnel relatively quickly, partnerships can take a little bit more patience and you have to make sure that you actually stick through to those investments. So I wouldn't invest 30% of your go-to-market spend initially when you're just exiting that product market fit validation but I would make sure that you are investing in it in some way so that you're starting to

## 27:33 — "Run your business as if you'll own it forever"

**[27:33]** build that strategy for your business overall. I was at a VC Summit, Radian Capital was putting on we work with a lot of their portcos and their managing director Jordan Bettman said run your business as if you're going to own it forever or else you will. And I think of things like this where you know people are just looking for such a quick win, they're looking for immediate stats, like you have to make some bets for the long term and investments in the long term and give it time to come to fruition or else if you don't start early enough you're just never gonna have a chance to do it. Agreed and I think you can take

**[28:23]** that mentality to the partnership program itself. So in general partnership program takes longer to incubate once it does start get getting up and running you can really see compounding very efficient impact and so making sure you're investing for the long term is important there but then also within your partnership strategy there are some home runs you should go for but you can't only go for those long-term home runs with the biggest players in your space. You have to complement that strategy with other types of partnerships that you believe won't take as long and can provide more traction

## 29:09 — Partnerships touch the whole GTM lifecycle

**[29:09]** and more value in the short term. I also think making sure that you set up the right expectations with your leadership team on milestones and leading indicators that you want to hit along the way really help you manage the expectations and ensure that your leadership will stay committed to the strategy long term. Well and I think this is interesting what we've gone through to where people haven't really thought of the full value of partnerships so of course number one everybody's thinking lead gen pipeline helping the funnel metrics reduce sales cycle increase conversion rate but now when you throw in

**[29:50]** another angle the increasing net dollar retention that's really interesting I am taking this back to our customers now and cohorting the turn analysis to see what it looks like for our customers I can't wait to see that data because then that's a really interesting thing and then now hey also you need to be invested in your partnerships to also create beneficial content for the market that will increase your AEO and now so now this investment isn't just okay how many leads did I get no it's touching every single component of the GTM lifecycle correct and other things I would add on content and things I've

## 30:31 — Mutual accountability across partners

**[30:31]** personally experienced co-branded content helps make your BDRs more effective when they're reaching out to customers of your technology integration partners and so it's not even that it just helps with these new initiatives I've also seen it help make all the other go-to-market more effective if you have marketing and ads targeting customers of your partner talking about how your partnership works together those ads are also more effective well and I think at the core of it you have at least two companies that are invested in the customer success and can hold each other accountable because I cannot tell you

**[31:19]** how many times when I was at emailage the head of partnerships there they actually created it you see it in some companies he was chief partnerships officer at that company and if there was anything going wrong with the smallest customer or the smallest account it wasn't really just about that account anymore it meant the integrity of the entire partnership so you saw us invest insane amount of resources that might you might not normally do for a smaller customer because so much more was at stake and I think at the end of the day as a customer if you get two companies holding each other accountable mutually

**[31:58]** invested in your success it's only good for you yep agreed I have seen that as well and in my past it's also why when you think about customer success organizational design you can align that with your partnership strategy and the reason that you would want to do that is talk about the small customer maybe on their own they're not very important to your business overall of course every customer is important but in the grand scheme of your revenue they could be on the lower end but if you look at the portfolio and what that total partner is managing or working with you on then it becomes much more important and if you

**[32:44]** have your success and support team aligned and they understand the value of that agency and the value of each customer within that portfolio you can actually provide a better experience for your mutual customers as well which ultimately can help mitigate some of those issues that may come up that your your chief partnerships officer was dealing with sure sure and we see it here too one of our main partnership categories is vcpe firms and if we have an issue going on with an insight partners customer or a radiant capital customer I mean it's a big deal because now everything that we've been working

## 33:28 — Reinvention: "I know that I know nothing"

**[33:28]** on for years with that partnership could be at stake yeah yeah absolutely I want to transition a little bit into because I know this AEO thing is a new thing right now but you are not a stranger to reinventing yourself reinventing your role reinventing go-to-market strategy especially during your time at impact calm before coming over to partner stack I'm curious what's your approach and knowing that there's gonna be new new stuff coming in the future how do you stay ahead of it and what's your approach to tackling it every time it comes up yeah there was a quote that stuck with me and it's the only thing I

**[34:18]** know is that I know nothing and so really just trying to always have that beginner's mindset be humble about the things that I am approaching has really helped me go into different stages of different companies as well as take on a wide variety of different roles overall so you of course want to lean on your experience and where you have experience it can potentially help you it can also blind you to certain things if you just take that oh this is how I did it in the past and so this is how we're gonna do it here and so having that right balance between I will have a beginner's mindset I will be flexible and adaptable to

## 35:07 — Sales to customer success, and how RevOps changed

**[35:07]** change overall and I will use my experience where it makes sense I think is the right balance and really thinking about how you would go about change overall what are some of the biggest paradigms that have shifted throughout your career where you had to really overcome your biases what worked for you isn't gonna work now what are some of those examples and and how did you tackle so partner stack first impact 14 years at a company versus starting at a company that have been in business for 10 years and having all those people who knew everything about the company and so just the difference in mindset you know

**[35:54]** I whenever I took a new role at impact I had such a strong baseline experience across teams people relationships all that stuff versus now needing to step into a new organization and so the way that I would step into it was obviously very different you know when I came into partner stack it had to be much more learn investigate consume get as much possible information because I didn't have that baseline overall I also had to like really monitor as much of well we did this before this is how we used to do it and make sure that I was always thinking about it from the new lens not the old ones overall I think one of the

**[36:37]** other bigger shifts for me was when I went from sales to customer success and in sales you got to sell the dream like the amazing product vision all of that stuff you also have a certain type of persona that works in sales and not everyone's the same but they have some commonalities amongst them and then going over to a customer success organization where you're known for being in sales you're known for not really understanding what they do and now you're no longer selling the dream you're trying to deliver it and that was probably the most eye-opening experience like oh sell all the different

**[37:27]** combinations and permutations of things that you can do and then get into success and delivery and now understanding wait this doesn't actually always work the way that it's intended and you have to really like temper those expectations and work with customers in a different way that that ability for my career to be across both to understand the dynamics understand the people understand like the nuances operationally all of that I think was really one of the most powerful things for me and like broadening my depth of understanding and my empathy for the different types of teams managing

**[38:06]** customers at different life cycles it is a totally different mindset and I think you know wanting to maintain the integrity of the promises that were made and sometimes those promises are bigger than reality and then you're on the hook to deliver it can be remarkably challenging I think I think it's just knowing that you're gonna have these experiences though where you're going to have to reinvent yourself you're gonna have to reinvent your approach and the market is also gonna shift like things will change I when I started lean scale in 2021 RevOps was totally different than what RevOps means now like back then it

**[38:51]** was hey you're implementing Salesforce and HubSpot now it's oh are you implementing you know an instance of cloud code and building these automated workflows and also back then was still kind of in that growth at all cost mindset and now it's hey how can we be as efficient as possible but investors still want lots of growth too so how do you marry those but it's just gonna keep happening too yeah yeah agreed yeah the change is constant you know and we're experiencing it at a rapid pace overall and so being flexible being willing to roll up your sleeves as a leader now I think is really important you know we

## 39:34 — Stop doing last year's job; stepping into the CRO seat

**[39:34]** were even talking in our ELT meeting this morning about AI Claude specifically and how we need to be leading from the front and actually doing that and I think at any time in your career making sure that you know whatever role whatever initiative whatever thing you're doing and you're willing to roll up your sleeves and be shoulder-to-shoulder is really important especially during times of change one other framework I think one of the hardest things as you're growing within an organization is to stop doing the job you did the year before because it's so easy to take a promotion you have what you had been

**[40:22]** doing and then now you just keep operating in that way with a different title you know but you really as you're taking these new roles do need to take a step back you know I mentioned the whole learning curve that I needed at partner stack but every time there was a new role I still would do that in some form at impact to make sure okay do I understand what's happening within this department do I understand what I need to do to help this department overall as opposed to just come in and this is how I've done things for the last eight years and I'm gonna continue to do it that way so I think getting out of your

**[40:59]** own way changing your habits and taking that step back is also really important what was the biggest thing that was different for you when you first stepped into a chief revenue officer role I love deals love it I will sit there workshop focus on the narrative how are we gonna present it what does the customer care about I loved it but you know as a CRO of an organization of 250 or so at that point in time that's not my job I have other people that are supposed to do it so finding the right balance because I do think it's important make sure you do the things that fill your cup up that you enjoy but

**[41:50]** only do it to a certain degree that it's not preventing you from really thinking about the systems of tooling the framework all of that stuff you know fortunately for me it wasn't a jump from sales manager directly to CRO so I had been kind of building to that path but I think that that's the biggest thing of don't always get sucked into the things that you gravitate towards you know make sure that you're really thinking about systems processes tooling what's gonna happen four quarters from now not what's gonna happen this quarter I think that's that's really wise and I think it's tough to change when you get in

**[42:36]** those new roles and realize that your responsibility has broadened or shifted or changed and but I do I do love that you spend some time in customer success because it's pretty rare I I podcast with quite a few CRO's and very few have had a stint in that department but then they end up taking it over so hopefully that was a good experience that gave you that more holistic perspective yeah absolutely it was a fantastic experience absolutely tell me a little bit more about partner stack now the mission you're on the journey the vision that you have for where partner stack can be to preface we're huge fans we've done

## 43:17 — PartnerStack's vision: the platform that does both

**[43:17]** multiple implementations of partner stack we think it's provided tremendous value for the companies that we've integrated it with we're huge believers in the partnership motion in general but what's what's the vision of partner stack now and what's happening next yeah sounds good so mission changed the way the world sells software it's been the same mission for the company of the entire 10 plus years in existence the interesting thing to me in stepping into the role is I think in the market they think about us either in one of two ways because we have two core use cases and usually you know us for one but not the

**[43:59]** other one is to the marketing buyer and it is more around affiliate marketing and influencers so really fits with this AEO narrative around getting content and others to write about you overall and then the other side of the business which I think is what you're most familiar with which is around you know a PRM or channel or co-sell relationships we are the only platform that does both and so the way you can think about it is anyone who wants to send you traffic refer you business co-sell with you we are the single unified platform to be able to help you distribute your software through any of those channels

**[44:50]** and then you add on top of it now we can help you distribute through robots or LLMs and so our whole focus is helping you drive more pipeline bookings higher NDR by connecting with any of the different partnership entities whether it's an influencer a youtuber a digital review site a RevOps agency you know global systems integrate or whatever it may be we are that unified platform to manage the discovery of finding those partners as well as all the workflows to ensure they're enabled productive sending you business and they get paid if there's a commercial relationship I think I think it's amazing and I think

## 45:37 — The 12-month forecast: ecosystem as the moat

**[45:37]** you've partner stack has done a tremendous job of helping customers see the value and also I just appreciate the perspective on leaning into the partnership motion in general like I said we're big believers in it it's a big part of our own go-to-market motion it's the companies that we work with that do it well see incredible results so I think getting the right infrastructure to discover and manage that motion it's just critical to success agreed and we very much appreciate the partnership of course of course well we've covered a lot I was hoping to maybe pick your brain on one more thing you're sitting

**[46:25]** at the intersection of AI and partnerships if we fast forward and I know things are changing so much so do your best but if we fast forward a year from now what do we think will be different in the B2B world when it comes to partnerships and AI what's your forecaster anticipation oh really good question overall so this whole aeo world is gonna evolve and I think the things we know right now will be very different if you take the parallel between Google Google SEO and their algorithm changes we just have to expect that there's gonna be a roller coaster and chat GPT is gonna handle things different than

**[47:11]** Claude and so really the dynamics and the different types of content and how things are going to be recommended I think will be different 12 months from now overall I would expect the along the lines of more authentic like more trust I think it's gonna be going around that way versus just having content that a robot can read I think because of the prevalence of building applications now and the low cost to build applications that an ecosystem will be a moat and the more people that you have within your partnership ecosystem who are evangelists those are gonna be the companies that are most successful because they have

**[48:05]** created such a diverse and broad moat overall I think those that solely rely on sales and marketing are gonna have a much harder time continuing to be successful in the market overall so I would expect the trend around more ecosystems more markets more focusing on partnership distribution channels will be much larger 12 months from now well time will tell but I think I agree with and I hope it leads towards more authenticity and finding ways to get companies working together to create a better experience for their customers and holding each other accountable and really being invested in each other to make that

## 48:51 — Close

**[48:51]** happen so Mike this has been amazing thank you so much for sharing everything from how to leverage partnerships to optimize your entire go-to-market lifecycle it's not just lead gen it's not just pipeline it's increasing ndr it's increasing your aeo your story and reinvention cycles time and time again I'm sure this will not be the last time the only thing that's certain is things will change so being adaptable and agile to that is important and I just appreciate everything you're doing a partner stack and sharing everything you did today thank you for the time Anthony I appreciated the conversation and as I

**[49:30]** mentioned appreciate the partnership with y'all likewise