Paul Higgins Podcast

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 Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 706 - Your P&L Is Lying About Your Margin
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
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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 Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 705 - Being a certified partner is not a business.
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
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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 Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 704 - You Can Beat Them At Everything And Still Lose
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
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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 Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 703 - You Can Beat Them At Everything And Still Lose
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
• Join our newsletter
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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 Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 702 - Firing Your Agency Won't Get You More Leads
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
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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 Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 701 - Why AI Makes You More Valuable, Not Less, with Sarah McDevitt
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
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Why you should listen

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 McDevitt
• Hubspot.com
• Sarah McDevitt on LinkedIn
• 20VC podcast
• Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 694 - The 60% Shift
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
• Join our newsletter
• Suggested 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 Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 699 - AI will expose you
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
• Join our newsletter
• Suggested resources

You've picked a real niche, built a real list, and spent real money, so why are there still zero sales calls on your calendar? In this episode, I break down what happened with a SaaS partner I'll call Dan, who sent 91 cold emails and dropped $6,000 on an association deal and still got nothing, all while quietly avoiding the one activity that fills a pipeline. I share the moment an investor offered to strip him down to less than half his own company just so he could keep not selling, and why I told him to go get a job instead. Then we dug into what he really meant when he said he despised sales, and he turned out to be one lens away from the trap he'd built for himself. If picking up the phone still feels like the call center you escaped years ago, this one is for you.

Resources and Links

• Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 699 - AI will expose you
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
• Join our newsletter
• Suggested 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 Widmayer
• Need help with your WHO and WHAT decisions? Apply for a FREE Multiplier Call
• Book a Decision Session here
• Previous episode: 698 - SaaS is Dead
• Check out more episodes of the Paul Higgins Podcast
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoring
• Join our newsletter
• Suggested resources