Podcasts about qbr

133 million learners. 100% of the Fortune 100. And the woman steering go-to-market behind those numbers will tell you to stop chasing churn. Monika Saha, CCO of Articulate, doesn't trade in best-practice platitudes. In this episode she takes the sacred cows out back: why "customer education is a cost center" is half-wrong instead of all-wrong, when fighting retention is a flat waste of energy, and why PLG companies are quietly light-years ahead while everyone else optimizes the wrong thing. Host Josh Schachter pokes the bear. Co-host Samantha Murray pushes back. Monika doesn't blink. If you run customer success, education, or GTM and you're tired of being told what you already know, this one's built to make you uncomfortable in the good way.Josh is writing a book on building customer relationships. Follow his journey and insights at www.joshschachter.com---What You'll Learn- Why "customer education is a cost center" is partly true- How to standardize and modularize content so you stop reinventing the wheel- When improving churn is actually a waste of energy- How to segment a long tail so you invest where returns are real- Why PLG companies dominate in-app and digital motion- A simple QBR exercise to find AI-ready process bottlenecks- How to structure a number across a core product plus early cross-sells---Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.---Timestamps0:00 - Preview and Meet Mac, Monika's dog1:08 - Meet Sam Murray, Gainsight & Monika Saha, Articulate2:11 - Articulate's Overview4:20 - Monika's remit as Chief Commercial Officer: trial to renewal5:37 - Lessons from her Gainsight CMO days9:00 - Customer education & internal enablement14:53 - Debate: is customer education a cost center?20:30 - Controversial take: when fixing churn is pointless23:43 - Why digital motion is foundational at a PLG company26:56 - Can non-PLG B2B companies experiment like this?28:48 - Embracing efficiency with AI32:30 - Hitting the number: core product vs cross-sell---Where to Find the GuestSamantha Murray: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-murray613/Monika Saha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monikasaha/---Where to Find Josh:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/

On this episode of Gov Tech Today, hosts Russell Lowery and Jennifer Saha discuss common private-sector sales behaviors that can offend or erode credibility with government clients. They argue titles matter (e.g., “Vice President of Capture” feels cringey), caution against pushing “land and expand” too early, and warn that ghosting after a contract—often driven by commission and renewal structures—damages long-term relationships unless there's a strong handoff to implementation and support. They explain why end-of-quarter discounts and quota-driven deadlines irritate agencies that expect best pricing upfront, and why posting lavish “President's Club” or QBR trips can look like spending public dollars. They also critique generic “discovery” and meet-and-greet meetings as outdated when public plans and budgets are online, and urge respect for workload seasons like budget cycles, new roles, or audits. 00:00 Welcome to Gov Tech Today 01:09 Cringey Sales Titles 03:14 Land and Expand Timing 04:30 Don't Ghost After Sale 08:27 Discounts and Fake Deadlines 10:42 Stop Posting Lavish Wins 12:50 Discovery Sessions Are Dead 14:35 Informed Discovery Done Right 17:32 Don't Go Over Their Heads 22:09 Respect Government Timing 23:24 Keep Learning and Listening

-Colandrea was listed in Tier 6: Welcome to the big leagues, alongside 2 other QBs….Auburn's Byrum Brown (from USF); and OklahomaState's Drew Mestemaker (from North Texas). David Hale's article points out that Colandrea's 74.9 QBR last season would have beenthe best for any Husker QB since at least 2004 (yes, we know---the Mountain West isn't the B1G….but still)….-Colandrea also went up 27.8 in QBR from 2024 to 2025…going from Virginia to UNLV can do that…how does he stack up vs. the rest?Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this episode, we explore the mistakes MSPs make with client retention, why the traditional QBR approach needs to change, and a few simple ways to add more value in every client interaction.  >>> Here are 4 ways we can help you reach your revenue goals faster...#1 Unlock the full potential of your marketing engine. We'll provide you and your team with the direction, insights, and tools necessary to excel in the complex landscape of modern marketing. - Marketing Advisor On Call#2 Discover the marketing strategies & tactics that will guide your next quarter and unlock explosive growth in 90 minutes. - Quick-Start Marketing Strategy Game Plan#3 Discover a tailor-made strategy for unprecedented growth to transform your marketing in 30 days. - Unlock Your Growth Opportunities#4 If you need guidance on the most effective direction for your marketing, then schedule a call with us today! - Get Your Free Discovery Call Now

Heading to Vegas this May? Join Josh at Pulse 2026 and come say hi—your oversized fluorescent daiquiri is on him. No catch.Grab your ticket at gainsightpulse.com and use code UNCHURNED for a special rate.Most CS teams are stuck in a loop. Monitor the health score. Chase the red account. Run the QBR. Hope the renewal sticks. Adnan Rahman saw the loop. And broke it.As the Head of Customer & Partner Success at Paycor, Adnan manages 35,000 customer relationships across different segments with a team of nearly 100 CSMs. That kind of scale forces clarity fast. And what became clear? The problem was never the metrics. It was the conversation.In this episode, Adnan breaks down the value realization framework his team built from scratch that is now deployed across 28 enterprise CSMs and 17 mid-market CSMs, with a goal of 75% active success plans by year end. He gets into the exact discovery questions that replaced fear with candor, why executives are now showing up to meetings they used to skip, and how joint success plans replaced the product demo masquerading as a QBR.Josh is writing a book on building customer relationships. Follow his journey and insights at www.joshschachter.com. ---Timestamps0:00 - Preview & introduction1:17 - Meet Adnan Rahman & Overview of Paycor4:50 - The value realization framework explained7:07 - Do customers arrive knowing their outcomes?8:05 - Bob London's UBR method & the most disruptive questions CSMs ask9:06 - Implementing the framework & outcomes11:56 - How to build your own value framework from scratch16:31 - How Paycor is drawing insights & enhancing efficiency with AI 18:38 - Paycor's agentic future: renewals, expansions, risk20:40 - Paycor's learning & community inititative24:29 - Where Paycor CS is headed by year end---What You'll Learn- How to build a value realization framework- The exact disruptive questions that unlock executive conversations- What a joint success plan looks like vs a traditional QBRHow to connect every CSM touchpoint back to measurable business outcomes- How to ask about renewal without making it awkward- Where AI agents will hit CS teams first- What community looks like when answer engines exist- How to scale personalized outreach without scaling headcount---Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.---Where to Find the GuestAdnan Rahman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adnan-rahman-irvine/---Where to Find Josh:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/

Cameron Tousley, director of MSP channels for ESET North America For most MSPs, the quarterly client conversation looks something like this: here are the alerts we handled, here is your uptime number, here is a dashboard of things we blocked. Useful, certainly – but not exactly the stuff of trusted advisor relationships. Cameron Tousley, director of MSP channels for ESET North America, has a phrase for the upgrade: move from statistical talks to threat briefings. In this episode of In The Channel, he and Pedro Kertzman, threat intelligence specialist at ESET, join host Robert Dutt to explain what that actually looks like in practice – and why the window for MSPs to make that transition may be narrowing. Pedro Kertzman, threat intelligence specialist at ESET The occasion is ESET’s eCrime Reports, a threat intelligence offering that tracks cybercriminal activity at the affiliate level – the individuals buying malware-as-a-service and executing the actual attacks. Kertzman explains why that granularity matters: affiliates signal tactical shifts before attacks scale, giving security-forward MSPs a genuine early-warning advantage. Tousley adds the client conversation layer: knowing that a specific threat group is targeting your customer’s vertical via a specific attack method is a meaningfully different conversation than “we blocked 4,000 threats this month.” There’s also an uncomfortable wrinkle for MSPs specifically: as Pedro notes, affiliates increasingly exploit MSP tooling itself as a vector – compromising credentials to access managed environments quietly, hitting dozens of small clients while staying well below the radar of law enforcement attention focused on high-profile infrastructure targets. For the smaller MSP without a dedicated analyst, the entry point is more accessible than it sounds. Indicators of compromise can be automated directly into client firewalls without a full threat intelligence platform. WeLiveSecurity and the live threat feed built into ESET Protect offer a low-barrier starting point for shops that are earlier in their security maturity journey. Tousley’s closing frame is the one worth sitting with: the Canadian MSP market is being reshaped by consolidation at a pace that isn’t slowing. The independents that survive will be the ones having more sophisticated conversations with their clients. Evolve or sell. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Cyber Threat Intelligence, CTI, has long been framed as an enterprise discipline. Dedicated team, security operations center, analysts who live in the data. But the threat landscape doesn’t really respect that boundary anymore. The tooling is getting more accessible, the attacks are getting more targeted at smaller organizations, and as we’ve talked about on the show before, the MSP stack itself has become a threat vector. So the question for the typical Canadian MSP isn’t really “Is threat intelligence relevant to me?” It’s “What do I actually do with it?” To dig into that, I sat down with two people from ESET. Cameron Tousley is director of MSP channels for ESET North America, and he lives squarely in the business conversation around what MSPs need to grow and differentiate. Pedro Kertzman is ESET’s resident CTI subject matter expert, and I’ll note that Pedro usually sits on the other side of the interview chair as the host of his own podcast on threat intelligence. So this was a bit of a role reversal for him. We talked about ESET’s eCrime reports, the idea of tracking cyber criminal activity at the affiliate level rather than just the group level, what proactive threat intelligence actually looks like for a 15-person MSP shop, and what Cameron described as the “evolve or sell” reality facing the MSP market right now. Let’s get right into it. Cameron, Pedro, thanks for joining us. I appreciate it. Cameron Tousley: Thanks for having us. Pedro Kertzman: Great to be here. Robert Dutt: Before we get into what ESET is specifically bringing to market, Cameron, can you give our listeners a sense for where the threat intelligence conversation is right now in the channel? Is this still primarily an enterprise kind of discussion or has something really shifted in terms of how MSPs and MSSPs are thinking about and talking about CTI? Cameron Tousley: I think that the market is evolving as a whole, no matter if you’re in the SMB segment or enterprise. I mean, it’s evolving everywhere. The beautiful thing is technology is getting cheaper, it’s getting more accessible. People are able with the advent of AI to kind of do more with less staff and things like that, and then allow their staff to kind of become more specialized. Enter in the topic of CTI. I just think that there’s an appetite from certain, and probably more evolving larger MSPs, to start incorporating more for their clients. I think they’ve always probably wanted to educate them, but it’s always that, “Hey man, just make sure I have uptime and the help desk is active when I need it.” And that’s the conversation. Fast forward to now and it’s becoming a little bit more relevant to want to consume CTI. So I’ll kind of start there and I’ll take a pause. I don’t know if Pedro’s got any other comments on that. Pedro Kertzman: No, I 100% agree. I think the threat landscape now with the maturity of the CTI offerings, MSPs can see that the things they’re trying to protect their customers against are more clearly explained and delivered in a way that they can see through CTI offerings now. So I think it’s just a natural evolution within the cybersecurity space to start leveraging that expertise as well. Robert Dutt: Without getting too far into pure positioning, how would you characterize what differentiates your approach to threat intelligence, sort of at the methodology level? What’s the philosophy behind how you’re researching and tracking threats and what you’re bringing to market with this CTI package? Cameron Tousley: Yeah, I’d say first off, our reach. We’re a global company. We have a product line, yeah, but we have 11 threat intel centers and those are also R&D centers too. So it’s a wealth of knowledge. Then we have researchers outside of that that are just remote, and so our tentacles are everywhere and that means something for somebody choosing a cybersecurity vendor or a platform because our researchers, they’re looking at a bunch of different avenues. They’re looking at the major threat acting groups. We have an offering we’ll talk about here in a few minutes, that centers on tracking affiliates because malicious activity, malware-as-a-service, is just like MSPs provide a service. So if I’m an affiliate—and I’ll define that real quick, an affiliate being the people that are buying the malware service and then going and distributing it and causing zero-day attacks—those are affiliates. So the real key part is what they do, not necessarily always the major malware-as-a-service group because that’s just one large avenue, but then you can’t predict what your customers are going to go and do on the black market. So yeah, I think we have a really exciting offering on our threat intelligence called eCrime and it comes in a feed and reports and it’s amazing. It really centers on the affiliate level and that is going to help get the conversations to be more quality with customers. It’s going to help an MSP who provides more, let’s call it reactive security at best, generalized services—which no knock against them, that’s just the model—and that’s going to help propel them into the more proactive security and having more quality cybersecurity-forward conversations with their customers of all sizes. Robert Dutt: Let’s delve a little bit more into that. Can you walk me through a scenario, even hypothetical or composite, where that affiliate-level insight would practically change the outcome for an MSP or one of their customers? How does this show up for an MSP basically? Pedro Kertzman: Yeah. So basically, I’ll take a step back a little bit just to explain how this threat ecosystem works. So the affiliates will be the ones really on the end of the line bringing that malware they got from a quote-unquote threat actor market or affiliate programs, more technically speaking per se, but they will be the ones delivering or sending that payload forward to whatever companies that they are trying to attack. So knowing how these guys work is basically going to give the companies, and the MSPs of course working for their security, the ability to stop the attack in the early stages, because the affiliates will be the ones trying to break in, acquire through whatever methods—credentials stolen or compromised credentials. So they are responsible, quote-unquote, within these affiliate programs to get the foot inside the door. So if you’re knowledgeable about how they act, what kind of techniques they use to get that foot in, you’re basically stopping the attacks before they actually become super massive, widespread attacks or super dangerous attacks. It’s kind of the proactive security instead of the reactive security. Cameron Tousley: Yeah, that’s a good comment. And then I’ll just throw one more little thing on that. I was talking about the conversations you can have with your clients, everything Pedro said, plus it’s like, you could have a specific conversation about, “Hey, this is what we blocked this month, but these are the threat acting groups, and here are the patterns, here’s the kind of malware that’s out there right now. By the way, you’re in the healthcare vertical, this threat acting group is targeting healthcare and doing this specific type of attack—happens to be phishing or fileless or whatever the complex attack is.” So they got to get really granular in the conversation. It can’t just be a super high-level one, because then your user’s not going to know what to do with that information. But if you coach them on the end-of-the-line issue and where it’s sourcing from, to Pedro’s point, you get ahead of that attack early, you might even prevent stuff that would have normally been a real headache. Robert Dutt: And you need to position yourself at least somewhat as the hero in so much as you’re saying, “Here’s the people who are attacking you, here’s what they’re doing, here’s what we’re doing proactively to counter that.” Cameron Tousley: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a huge value to your end customer. The one that normally would have not cared about security and it’s more of an annoyance, now they’re paranoid about it, just like the MSP, just like the vendors, we’re all trying to get ahead of it. So I think that that provides a lot of value, and the average MSP is probably not going to do that. So you don’t necessarily have to go spend a ton of money, you just have to consume the information that’s out there maybe for free, and then maybe some of the paid services like the eCrime reports without buying our full threat intelligence platform, you can just do that. And that is like a huge value on its own to track exactly what we’re talking about right now. Robert Dutt: So taking a step back, I think some of this certainly informs and colors the question we go to ask, but I’m a 15-person MSP somewhere. I’ve got solid endpoint protection, an RMM stack I like, maybe managed SOC coverage, that kind of model. What’s the case, in addition to what we’ve already discussed, for why threat intelligence should be on my radar as a distinct capability I need to think about, bring to my customers and offer? Pedro Kertzman: Yeah, I think especially because again, talking specifically about the eCrime reports, we’re talking about the ones that are really perpetrating the attacks or executing the attacks. When you understand how your adversaries really act, you don’t need to always rely on the expertise of a super senior CTI analyst. There are ways that also, depending on your vendor, you can automate the expertise to just be pumping, let’s say, IOCs or IP addresses into your existing end users’ firewalls. If you manage a bunch of other firewalls for your end users, you can pump that eCrime knowledge into those firewalls in the form of IP addresses, domains, and things like that. But understanding that it’s going to be a proactive approach so they don’t get a foot in the door first, it’s kind of that decision beforehand that will give the MSPs, or MSSPs with 15 or so employees, that kind of extra leverage against those frontline attackers. Robert Dutt: I’m really interested in the idea of using intelligence and these eCrime reports as a client-facing tool, not just something that’s consumed internally, especially for that smaller MSP—something that you’re using in your QBR or whatever business review you have with customers to show your value. I’m curious, is that something you’re seeing happening today or is it a realistic use case, or is it a stretch for most MSPs right now? Cameron Tousley: I think it’s realistic. Now, let’s set the tone here. An MSP, they may not have the budget nor the expertise nor the staff to be buying a full-blown threat intelligence offering even like ours, but they can use certain parts of it like the eCrime reports. So that’s a good jumping-in point for the MSPs that are growing, or if you have 15 people on staff and there’s a good deal of them on the technical side, you may want to run your SOC in-house. Maybe that’s something you want to do. I think for them, the maturing MSP and definitely the MSSP, a threat intelligence offering is something that you will probably want to consume if you’re doing everything in-house. Now, I think there’s an argument for even if you’re going to go out-of-house and use the vendor, I still think there are free sources. We have customers that are using free platforms but running a paid feed through it. This is really dynamic. It’s flexible. It can fit to every different audience for the most part, except for the ones who are just not staffed for it and they’re probably outsourcing everything and they just don’t want to do it. They know that they are never going to be able to staff a 24×7 team and they’re also never going to be able to consume as much information as is coming in. But there are also other free resources, like I said, associated with our threat intelligence platform, like the eCrime reports, but there’s white papers that we produce. There are periodic threat reports. We do all kinds of analysis. And then on our welivesecurity.com blog, we publish all kinds of free information. And the really cool thing for existing ESET customers is through our ESET security platform, ESET Protect, we run a live feed through there and it shows you like, “Hey, here’s the latest news on WeLiveSecurity. Here is something you need to be aware of, there’s a vulnerability in the wild.” So we run some of the security stuff and this news right through a window inside of our platform, which I think is really big value added. Pedro Kertzman: Awesome. Yeah, I would add, if I can, Rob, we do have monthly digests as well on the CTI offerings, even for not super deep-down technical people. Let’s say more executives or CSMs, let’s say account managers on the MSSP or MSP side. It’s kind of an executive-ready type of report. So it’s more about the threat landscape overview. I think it helps them show that they are expanding their offerings on the security side and they’re knowledgeable about it as well. Again, doesn’t need to go in the nitty-gritty like in the weeds of IOCs and all that, but understanding, for example, that now the ecosystem on the other side is somebody providing the malware, somebody going and executing it. So just to show how they see these movements, I think it’s sometimes important enough to show that they are expanding their coverage for their end users. Robert Dutt: The reports, the eCrime reports, have been in the market about a month now, I guess. I’m curious what you’re actually hearing from MSPs and MSSPs as they’re digging into them. Are people using them the way you expected or are there surprises that you’re seeing in how they’re engaging, what they’re doing, how they’re thinking about this information? Pedro Kertzman: That’s a good question. I think because of the name, we got out of the gate with police forces reaching out to us, but in theory, it’s not the best kind of deep analysis that we’re going to give them, because they have a lot of expertise. So then we have the APT reports that would bring more detailed analysis for them. So it was interesting to see that people are kind of eager on the end-user side to see how the threat landscape, especially related to financial crimes or eCrime, are really, let’s say, hot right now. The MSPs are kind of following that trend, not as jumping on like the police forces were, but they are starting to inquire about the new eCrime reports for sure. Cameron Tousley: Yeah, I’d agree. I think the defender agencies, I’ll call them, the ones that are fighting the same battle we are, but maybe physically, but now they’re fighting the eCrime too. As they’re learning, this is a great tool for them. We find that they’re excited about it. It’s relatively new, so we’re going to see more and more adoption of it. But plenty of people who are in evaluation are like, “Hey, can I run a free month of this? I want to check it out and see what I’m going to get.” And we’re getting a lot of good feedback on it right now. I’d say on the MSSP/MSP side, again, it’s new for them too. And they do a lot of different things. So for them, they’re like, “I need to slice out some time to check this out as well because this is interesting. I don’t know if anybody else is really doing anything quite like this.” So for them to be able to check it out and add it to their offering, I think what’s going to happen is that they’ll get hooked on something like that and they’ll want more. And we’re already working on more. So our teams are hard at work. We’re adding new feeds, new reporting structures, new ways to consume it. And reasonably priced packages and things like that. Even ones where you have somebody on retainer where you can go to and get a very long deep dive on what you’re reading periodically throughout any given month. So I think with that, you’ll see a lot of internal IT large agencies adopt it. I think you’ll see some MSSPs adopt it. And you might even see some general MSPs who are evolving up that chain do the same thing. So it’s kind of a report and an offering for everybody there. Pedro Kertzman: Yeah, I think you mentioned something important, Cam. We do offer trials for the eCrime reports as well, right? If they want to test it out. Cameron Tousley: Yeah, try it before you buy it. Yeah. Robert Dutt: It sounds like you’re also thinking about ways that you can slice this, dice this, package it out to that smaller MSP or that MSP who’s not a pure-play security player going forward. I was going to ask, what do you see as coming next in CTI and in your eCrime reports? I think that’s certainly a hint. Anything else that you see sort of in the pipeline or where you’d like it to go, where partners would like to see it go? Cameron Tousley: Yeah, I’ll take a stab at this one because my heart’s near and dear to the MSP community. That’s what I’ve been working in. That’s a segment for quite a long time now for ESET. And so what I’m reading and what I’m theorizing on is that there’s other kinds of technologies that are pretty complex, have gotten more simple in the way that they’re still doing complex processes, like an EDR, right? It’s an investigative tool, and then you pair it with AI and then things become easier for the team managing it. I think it’s going to be the same thing here where you’re going to have an AI paired with it, which we have our own agentic AI agent in this offering now, which is very, very cool, and it’s built in our security platform. But for this, I think it’s going to make consuming information easier, generalizing it, summarizing it, and making sure you can spin it into a quick executive summary. My theory is click of a button, right? So I’m going to have a dashboard. I’m going to say, “Hey, I want an executive summary on this event.” So you’re basically just filtering, and then the end result is you hit that AI generate button and then it generates something that’s quality, and you can do it at various user levels, maybe various role levels. I’ll hit the CTO button or I’ll hit the CEO button and they’ll be a little bit different, obviously. So I think that it’s going to get simpler and managed intelligence as a service, that’s next. It’s already a term that’s being thrown out there a little bit if you look for it. So it’s just not mainstream yet. And I think it will be here in a short period of time. Pedro Kertzman: A hundred percent. And just to double down a little bit as well, Rob. I think especially for the smaller MSPs, let’s say you hit a critical infrastructure, you stop a pipeline or anything like that, you’re going to have federal agencies going after you, right? But then when you hit a mom-and-pop shop, nobody really cares. And those guys are often served through these smaller MSPs. So I think getting a better understanding of the threat landscape that especially targets those small businesses, I think it’s just a natural progression of the change in the threat landscape. Robert Dutt: Well, and you bring up a point that I kind of pulled on a little bit with your friend, Tony Anscombe, not too long ago. There’s so much data about how many attacks right now are taking advantage of the MSP tooling as a threat vector. And so I think that also speaks to a need for an MSP who wants to be mature and responsible about these kinds of things to have a better grip on who’s looking, what they’re looking at, and how that maps to what they’re doing. Pedro Kertzman: A hundred percent. And just to link this specifically about eCrime and affiliates, affiliates would be the ones exploiting those RMM tools, right? Because it’s something that is already deployed in the environment. If they get the credentials that got stolen for whatever reason, they have access to those tools and then they can deploy malware that they bought from those affiliate programs inside of the victim’s networks. Robert Dutt: And it’s funny, almost a reversal of back in the day, I can remember as a Mac user, there was a saying that Apple engaged in security through obscurity. What you describe is almost the opposite of that. It’s insecurity to a degree through obscurity. In that if I’m an attacker, I know that if I go after Colonial Pipeline to use your example, I’m all over the front page and there’s going to be a lot of government agencies who have a lot of serious, serious questions for me. If I take out an MSP tool that gives me access to a bunch of very small clients though, maybe I fly under the radar just a little bit more. Cameron Tousley: Oh yeah. Robert Dutt: This is my last question. If there’s one shift in thinking that you’d want a Canadian MSP to walk away with after this conversation, in terms of how they think about these reports, in terms of how they think about the role of threat intelligence in their business, you know, one thing they should reconsider about how they’re approaching their security practice, what would that be? Pedro Kertzman: So I think first, Rob, that’s kind of more of a mindset type of thing. CTI still sounds super complex to a lot of people. I would say there are two main flavors. One, if you really want to dig into techniques and all that, yes, you can get fairly technical and sophisticated, but there are really simple ways to ingest cyber threat intelligence into existing automated tools. You can, of course, do a POC with one, two, whatever vendors you want to do. Once you find that real value for your customers, your end users, then it’s automated. We’re talking about data feeds ingesting directly into a firewall. If you don’t have a CTI central brain kind of thing, which the market knows as a TIP (threat intel platform), you don’t need to go that route, the sophisticated route. There are simple ways to use threat intelligence. And honestly, it’s super valuable because it’s just, again, automated. You’re outsourcing the knowledge to the vendor directly who’s going to execute that, like a firewall, for example. Cameron Tousley: Yeah, I think that’s some really good commentary. And I have a lot of business conversations with MSP business owners and I follow the market, and the consolidation, there’s tons of it. And there has been for a few years, but it’s just insane right now. And I think that there’s this thing going around, it’s like, look, evolve or sell. Because you have the advent of AI and that’s speeding everything up tenfold. And just don’t be afraid. If you want to continue to run your business, don’t worry, you’re going to have clients out there in your locale that probably love you. But they’re also going to have people calling them as these other MSPs get bigger, and these national ones that swallow other little smaller companies and then their go-to market will be, “Well, let’s go down market, down market,” because we can’t always go up market, that’s pretty hard to do. But down market is like shooting fish in a barrel kind of thing. So that means it’s a risk for the smaller MSPs that are not going to sell out, that want to be in business another 10 or 15 years. So don’t be afraid, utilize AI to research it. They say don’t use AI as Google, I disagree a little bit, but you can use it for a lot of things. This can summarize: what is this offering? Can I use it? Ask it really basic questions to get acquainted, and then take the next step and call your vendor and just have a conversation with them and say, “What are all my options? I am in this locale, I serve these kind of verticals, here’s my sizing, here’s the tools I use.” You’ve got to throw everything out on the table because then your vendor, somebody like a technical or business contact, can jump in and say, “Look, I think that you should check out this part of this larger offering. And here’s what I’ll do for you. And here’s what you’re going to do. We’ll give you a game plan, right? You’re going to trial it in the following ways, we’re going to pair you up with a technical person to teach you a little bit and be your co-pilot—Microsoft gets enough press.” But really kind of jump in, try it out. Don’t be afraid. Because if you want to be around another 10 or 15 years, you have to make the leap. And you don’t have to do anything big, but you have to start adopting some of this security-forward thinking so that you can have threat briefings with your clients and not statistical talks. There was just that MSP summit and there was actually a panel on what the next gen of MSPs is doing. And it was funny to hear it because they’re like, “Well, we’re focused on outcomes.” And I totally agree, but I know some of the older MSPs are like, “Well, we’re focused on outcomes too.” But I think it’s the talk track. You’re all saying the same thing, but you need some more complex tools in some ways to be able to have these more outcome-based discussions. Like, “Hey, I not only blocked X amount of threats, I kept your uptime up in this way, and that allowed you to keep productivity up. So by my clock here, you were able to achieve all those things that you wanted to achieve in our initial meeting, we’re on track.” That’s the conversation you want to have in addition to that little bit of the threat briefings peppered in. Robert Dutt: All right. Some great advice there. Gentlemen, thank you both for taking the time. I appreciate it. Cameron Tousley: Thank you, Rob. Pedro Kertzman: Great to be here. Cameron Tousley: Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thanks so much. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Cameron Tousley and Pedro Kertzman from ESET. I’d like to thank both Cameron and Pedro for their time. They did exactly what we set out to do with this conversation, kept it firmly in the strategy lane with technical depth in service of the business point rather than the other way around. A few things to leave you with. The framing that stuck with me most was Cameron’s distinction between statistics talk and threat briefings. The idea that your quarterly client review shifts from “here’s how many threats we blocked” to “here’s the specific group targeting your vertical right now. Here’s how their affiliate operates, and here’s what we’ve already done about it.” That’s a real upgrade in how an MSP demonstrates value. It moves you from uptime vendor to trusted advisor and that’s a conversation your competitors probably aren’t having yet. On the technical side, Pedro’s explanation of affiliate-level tracking is worth sitting with. The headline ransomware groups get the attention, but it’s the affiliates, the ones buying malware-as-a-service and doing the actual execution who determine the tactics on the ground. Tracking them is what gives you an early warning before the attack scales. And as I noted during the conversation, there’s a certain logic in how attackers exploit the MSP model specifically. Go after the tooling, stay under the radar, quietly compromise a hundred small clients instead of one high-profile target. Obscurity in that scenario is working against you. For the smaller MSP who’s heard all of this and thought, “I’m not staffed for this,” Pedro’s entry point is worth considering. You don’t need a full threat intelligence platform or a dedicated analyst to start. Automate the ingestion of indicators of compromise directly into your clients’ firewalls. Let the tooling do the work. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real, actionable and it’s a lot more than most of your competitors are doing. And Cameron’s closing thought, “evolve or sell,” is the frame I’d put around all of it. The consolidation wave hitting the MSP market right now is not slowing down. The shops that survive as independents will be the ones that have more sophisticated conversations with their customers. Threat intelligence is one of the things that helps you have those conversations. If you found this one useful, please follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, all the major podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Steve Petryschuk, vice president of product and market strategy at Auvik Every year brings a new wave of IT industry reports, but Auvik’s 2026 IT Trends Report – titled “Beyond the Hype: The Real State of IT in 2026” – lands as something of a reality check. The headline finding is striking: while 67% of IT professionals say they are optimistic about AI’s potential, only 5% say it is actually core to their daily operations. That gap between ambition and execution is what Auvik is calling the “Maturity Mirage.” The governance picture is even more telling. Auvik’s research found that 76% of IT leaders believe their organization has an AI policy in place – but only 42% of frontline help desk staff agree. That disconnect isn’t just a communications problem. It’s the open door through which Shadow AI enters the environment, and Auvik’s own platform telemetry counted over 100,000 shadow AI applications discovered in customer networks in 2025 alone. In this episode of In The Channel, Steve Petryschuk, vice president of product and market strategy at Auvik, joins Robert Dutt to dig into what the data actually means for Canadian MSPs. They discuss why documentation is the unglamorous foundation that any real AI readiness strategy has to be built on, what the MSP execution advantage looks like in the numbers, and how the “Maturity Mirage” framing can help partners have more honest – and more productive – conversations with clients about where they actually stand. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Every year we look to the major vendor reports to see where the industry’s head is at, but Auvik’s 2026 IT Trends Report, titled “Beyond the Hype,” feels a little different this time around. It’s a bit of a reality check for the AI era. We’ve been hearing about the AI revolution for some time now, but Auvik’s data shows a massive gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what’s actually hitting the help desk. We’re talking about a world where 76% of executives swear they have an AI policy, while more than half of their frontline staff have never even seen it. That disconnect isn’t just a communications problem. For an MSP, it’s a massive opening for shadow AI to walk in through the front door. To dig into this maturity mirage and what it means for your service desk – and your bottom line – I’m joined today by Steve Petryschuk. Steve is vice president of product and market strategy at Auvik, and he’s been at the center of translating this data into a roadmap for partners. We talk about why documentation is actually the most important AI tool, the rising risk of competency debt in junior techs, and why the Canadian mid-market might actually have an execution advantage over the big enterprise players. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Steve Petryschuk. [MUSIC] Robert Dutt: Steve, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Steve Petryschuk: Thanks so much for having me. Robert Dutt: The report highlights a significant gap in AI policy awareness – something we’re seeing across multiple industry reports. In this case, 76% of leaders believe they have a solid AI policy in place, while only 42% of frontline staff agree that policy even exists. Is that a communication failure, or is the policy just not mapping to how people are actually doing the work? Steve Petryschuk: I think it’s a bit of both. I’d start with communication failure as the primary driver. We don’t always have visibility into when policy violations are occurring, so how do you enforce that policy – or even communicate that enforcement – without that visibility? It starts with just making sure people know the policy exists, and then building some implementation around enforcement. Robert Dutt: Only 5% of respondents say AI is core to their operations today, despite plenty of optimism in the data. What are the specific readiness hurdles keeping AI in the pilot phase for so many MSPs? Steve Petryschuk: This is probably one of the most interesting findings in the report – that disconnect between enthusiasm around AI and how little has actually been operationalized. I think it starts with trust. Most MSPs don’t yet have the trust to let AI operate solo, and that makes sense, because we’re the ones managing the client relationships and the consequences when things go wrong. Until we build that trust, we’ll remain at that pilot stage. So I see it as a phased approach. You start in areas where humans remain in the loop – at least for now – so you can build comfort with the system. But equally important is ensuring you’re giving AI good inputs, because this is still very much a garbage-in, garbage-out situation. If your inputs aren’t clean, your outputs won’t be either, and that’ll hold you back from ever making AI a core part of operations. Robert Dutt: Does the fact that most tools MSPs are using today are either adding AI functionality or on the roadmap to do so – does that help build that trust, or does it require something more fundamental? Steve Petryschuk: There are a lot of vendors adding AI on top of their tools, but I think the more useful question is: how do you embed AI into the existing workflows your team is already using? Rather than treating it as a bolt-on, think about the processes you’re already familiar with – can AI assist you within those workflows and demonstrate value day to day? That’s how you start to build trust incrementally. Once you see it working in familiar territory, you can expand from there. Robert Dutt: And as you build that trust – once you’ve got those first steps working the way you want – how does an MSP move from having an AI policy on paper to implementing the technical controls a client or auditor can actually verify? Steve Petryschuk: It starts with visibility. Before you can enforce a policy, you need to uncover all the AI tools in the environment – both sanctioned and shadow. As shadow IT has evolved into shadow AI, that discovery step is critical. From there, you can move toward real-time policy reminders before committing to more active, automated guardrails. Eventually, you get to a point where you’re blocking non-sanctioned AI tools and allowing sanctioned ones. Most MSPs I talk to are still a long way from that, but they’re at least starting with the visibility angle – and that’s the right starting point. Robert Dutt: On that topic, Auvik’s telemetry found over 100,000 shadow AI applications in customer networks last year. Is shadow AI replacing shadow IT as the primary risk, or is it effectively the same problem in a new form? Steve Petryschuk: It’s a problem that’s evolved. Shadow IT and shadow AI are directly related, but you can’t just do a find-and-replace on the terminology – the risks aren’t identical. A lot of the core concerns are the same: understanding what applications are in use, where data is going, what’s being ingested. But the business impact of shadow AI gone wrong is significantly higher. Think about LLMs being trained on data you didn’t know was out there, or agents with access to multiple systems inadvertently moving sensitive client data – or worse, surfacing Client A’s data in a report for Client B. The risks aren’t entirely new, but the consequences of something going wrong are considerably greater. Robert Dutt: That’s an interesting angle – it’s not just that the data is out there, but that it can be actively executed against you. The accidental cross-contamination between clients is a particularly pointed example for MSPs. The report also found that around 60% of IT teams discover unauthorized SaaS at least monthly. From a visibility standpoint, does this signal that the perimeter approach is effectively dead? And if so, what does a modern visibility strategy look like for an MSP managing, say, 50 clients? Steve Petryschuk: The traditional perimeter has been eroding for a while. Work happens at the endpoint now, and that’s where visibility needs to focus – continuous discovery of the applications end users are running day to day. It doesn’t mean you’re auditing every minute of every day, but it’s not a point-in-time snapshot either. It’s an ongoing picture that gives you something useful whether you’re responding to a support ticket or walking a client through a QBR – “here’s all the shadow AI we’ve uncovered.” That discovery needs to happen as close to where work is actually getting done as possible: within the applications being used, and on the endpoints where people are working. Robert Dutt: Interestingly, despite all the shadow AI conversation, MSPs in the report still ranked shadow IT as the number one underestimated risk. Why do you think business leaders continue to miss the gravity of it, even as sensitive data flows into AI tools? Steve Petryschuk: I think it’s one of those areas where it’s easier to turn a blind eye until there’s a triggering security incident. Until something actually happens to you, it’s always someone else’s problem. You hear about it, you read about it, but “it’s not going to happen here.” The honest version of that is: it hasn’t happened here yet. And until you’ve had that personal experience where shadow IT – or shadow AI – bites you, the tendency is to underestimate the risk. Robert Dutt: There’s an interesting budget paradox in the data – almost half of IT teams said their budgets were growing, but a similar proportion cited lack of time as their biggest blocker. Where’s the money going if it’s not buying back time for staff? Steve Petryschuk: It’s a great question, and the report didn’t specifically dig into the causes of that disconnect. But based on conversations with partners and broader industry trends, I think a lot of those budget increases are simply going to maintain the status quo – salary increases, rising tooling costs, price increases still catching up from the inflation cycle of a couple of years ago. The budgets are growing, but that growth is being absorbed by keeping the lights on: keeping the tools running, keeping the teams intact. The magnitude of the increases isn’t enough to fundamentally change how work gets done, and without changing how you work, you won’t get that time back. Robert Dutt: Here’s one where MSPs can take a bit of a victory lap – corporate IT teams are apparently half as likely to be making new investments compared to MSPs. Does that suggest the managed services model is structurally better at converting budget into operational progress, or is this more of a “you have to automate to survive” story? Steve Petryschuk: Part of it is the MSP’s willingness to adapt and experiment – we tend to be a little ahead of the curve on new technology adoption. But I also think it’s a macroeconomic confidence indicator. Historically, MSPs tend to hold up better – and even do well – in times of broader economic uncertainty. So when there’s turbulence around them, MSPs are more likely to say, “We’ve seen this before, we’ll be okay,” and that confidence translates into a willingness to make new investments even when others are pulling back. Robert Dutt: And there’s something to be said for the maturity of the managed services model at this point – you can look at a rough environment, recognize the pattern, and not panic. Steve Petryschuk: That’s exactly right. Robert Dutt: The report found that just over 50% of IT teams are still spending ten or more hours a week on basic user tickets. What role do you see AI playing in actually moving that needle – going from hyped solution to genuinely freeing up technician time? Steve Petryschuk: Let’s set aside the panacea of fully automated ticket resolution for now – the scenario where a ticket comes in and no one ever touches it. Maybe we get there eventually, and for simple things like password resets, some level of automation is already feasible. But the more realistic near-term win is using AI to gather all the context a technician would normally have to collect manually. Agents can pull together that background information and surface a recommended next action, so that by the time a technician picks up the ticket, their job is less “figure out what to do” and more “confirm this is the right call and execute.” That’s an easier step, it’s probably already happening in some service desks today, and it starts to build trust in AI recommendations over time – which feeds back into that adoption flywheel we talked about earlier. Robert Dutt: And as those recommendations get better, you get more comfortable with the idea that yes, that’s the right answer for this type of issue – and eventually that trust extends further. Steve Petryschuk: Exactly. Robert Dutt: On the workforce side, the report showed a hollowing out of the hybrid model in favour of office-first or remote-first. From a network management perspective, does office-first actually make IT any simpler, or is distributed support just the permanent baseline now? Steve Petryschuk: I think distributed support is the permanent baseline. For MSPs, it doesn’t really matter whether the client is in the office or working from home – we’re still supporting them remotely either way. Network complexity doesn’t change much. And even in a fully return-to-office environment, users are still moving around, travelling to events, going on the road. Looking at the Canadian context specifically – we’re still laggards in the office-first shift compared to some of our global peers, despite what you hear in the media. There’s still a significant amount of distributed work happening here, and I think the problem of managing that distributed environment is a long way from going away. Robert Dutt: You’ve framed AI as a “senior IT associate in your pocket” for junior techs – which is a much more interesting way to look at it than “it’s going to eliminate entry-level jobs.” But even with that framing, is there still a risk of competency debt? Where the next generation of technicians ends up leaning so heavily on AI diagnostics that they lose the ability to evaluate whether the recommended action is actually right? Steve Petryschuk: The risk is absolutely there. But it’s not entirely a new problem – technology has always built on previous technology, and skills evolve accordingly. How many technicians today can troubleshoot at the processor level? Not many. The craft changes. What matters is teaching junior technicians the right fundamentals for the AI era: basic problem-solving skills, the ability to recognize a plausible answer from an implausible one, and how to use AI tooling effectively. The actual knowledge base evolves, but you still need a baseline of IT competency to function well. And that pipeline from junior to senior really matters – if we hollow out the junior tier, we’ll eventually run out of senior technicians too. Robert Dutt: Since we’re both flying the Maple Leaf – did you see anything specifically Canadian in the data? Anything unique or peculiar to the Canadian market? Steve Petryschuk: The survey data doesn’t specifically break out geographies, but based on conversations with MSPs across Canada, the US, and Europe, I don’t think we’re significantly ahead or behind on AI adoption – we’re facing many of the same governance challenges. Policies aren’t always making it to day-to-day operations, and visibility into which AI tools are actually in use remains a challenge for most. Where I do see a Canadian distinction is in the regulatory and legal landscape. I was recently at an event for professional engineers in Ontario where AI regulation came up – and the picture is interesting. The EU is taking an aggressive regulatory stance; the US is moving toward a more relaxed one. Canada, unsurprisingly, is finding its way somewhere in the middle. That’s probably the most Canadian answer I can give. Robert Dutt: Hopefully the middle ground lands well. Last question – looking at all the data, if an MSP owner can only fix one thing in their operations this year, what yields the biggest ROI? Steve Petryschuk: Documentation. You need an up-to-date source of truth, because that’s what AI has to build on to operate effectively in your environment. Visibility actually improves when documentation improves – they’re closely related. But if you don’t have a solid, well-maintained source of truth, you’re going to get that garbage-in, garbage-out scenario no matter how good the AI tools are. So if there’s one thing to focus on, it’s making sure you know what your sources of truth are, and that they’re accurate and up to date. That gives you the foundation everything else builds on. Robert Dutt: I appreciate that bit of advice. Steve, thank you for taking the time and walking us through the numbers. Steve Petryschuk: Thanks so much for having me on. [MUSIC] Robert Dutt: There you have it – Steve Petryschuk from Auvik. I’d like to thank Steve for his time. And honestly, I think “AI as a senior associate in your pocket” is going to be the quote of the month. The big takeaway for me is that we need to stop thinking about AI as a cool project and start treating it as a documentation problem. If your source of truth is a mess, your AI is just going to be a very fast, very confident hallucination machine. For those of you running MSPs in Canada, the maturity mirage is your best sales tool right now. If you can show your client that their budget increase is being swallowed by reactive noise because they don’t have visibility, you’ve moved from being a vendor to being a business advisor. Thanks for spending some time with us today. If you found this conversation useful, you can find more in the full show notes at ChannelBuzz.ca. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and pretty much everywhere you get your audio. If you have a moment, leaving a rating or review really does help us reach more of the community. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Once you've sold the licenses you are done. Right? Well, not so fast, young Jedi. While the salesperson happily turns around and goes hunting elsewhere, the customer has high expectations about the treatment they get after the sale.Even today I see organizations who treat Customer Success teams as an afterthought and then wonder why they see churn or nastygrams from their customers. But it doesn't have to be this way. We discuss this topic with Chad Stephen.Chad has led cross-functional teams of 65, scaled Customer Success orgs through 4x ARR growth, cut renewal process complexity by two thirds, and reduced time-to-value by 50% — more than once, at different companies ranging from early-stage to scaled SaaS, across industries from FinTech to HealthTech to Restaurant & Hospitality.In this episode of the podcast, we talk about:What is customer success, really? — The most important definition centers on one thing: driving value for clients. Renewals, onboarding, and account management are elements of CS, not the definition of it.The buyer vs. the end user — The person who signs the contract is rarely the one logging in every day. A good CS function speaks to both audiences and translates value into something meaningful for each.CS as a function, not just a job title — Customer success can be owned by a team, a role, or — dangerously — "everyone," which usually means no one. The discipline matters regardless of what you call it.The QBR trap — Quarterly business reviews that run 80 slides and double as sales pitches miss the point entirely. The best QBRs focus on the customer's problems, not the vendor's product roadmap.Proactive vs. reactive CS — Waiting for a customer to come to you with a problem is reactive. True proactive CS means monitoring usage metrics, NPS surveys, and engagement signals before a crisis happens.The relay race handoff — The baton cannot hit the floor between sales, professional services, and customer success. There must always be a clear, singular point of contact at every stage of the journey.When to involve CS in the sales cycle — CS should never be absent from a deal entirely, but timing matters. Bringing them in too early creates confusion; the right moment builds the bridge between "excited to sign" and "ready to succeed."The hunter vs. farmer problem — When account executives are compensated only for net-new deals, they make poor customer success managers. Misaligned incentives produce misaligned behavior.Compensation drives behavior — If you want your CS team to own renewals and upsells, you have to pay them for renewals and upsells. Comp plans and job expectations must align, or you get animosity and dropped balls.Start CS early — even at Series A — Smaller organizations often default to the AE managing the account post-sale. The sooner a dedicated CS function exists, the better. Stickiness in SaaS is decreasing, making the long-term relationship even more critical.Onboarding is the most critical phase — Getting a customer up and running quickly, with a clear understanding of the value they bought, sets the tone for the entire relationship. A poor start rarely fully recovers.Keep it simple — Over-engineered CS motions with 12 segmentation layers and elaborate playbooks often collapse under their own weight. Always ask: How does this actually drive more value for the customer?You can find Chad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadstephen/. And he has a website at https://www.doublewindconsulting.com/.Reach out by emailing hello@whatsyourbaseline.com or subscribe to our newsletter and articles on Substack at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com.

The Scaling MistakeHightouch CRO, Josh Kanagy, showed me how companies scaling fastest right now are creating their biggest future leadership problem.Companies are obsessed with scaling:• systems• process• AI• automationYes, those things matter.BUT there's a real danger when leaders start believing scaling the system automatically scales the company.Josh learned that the hard way in a humbling quarterly business review early in his career.Because systems don't build judgment, create confidence, or develop leaders ready for the next level.People do.The best scaling companies aren't just building better systems.They're building people who can rise with the company.THE BEST SCALE PEOPLE.In this conversation Josh also shares:• The humbling QBR that changed how he leads.• Why great sales leaders think like community builders.• The AI battle most executives don't realize they're fighting.And once you hear where Josh learned that philosophy… it changes how you think about leadership.Are we scaling our systems faster than we're scaling our people?-----Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben FanningSpeaking and Training inquiresSubscribe to my Youtube channelLinkedInInstagramTwitter

Unlocking the Power of Frontier Partnerships Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this compelling discussion from the Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat, Microsoft GM Katharine Kennedy joins Vince Menzione to break down the operating models of “Frontier Firms.” Katharine shares her incredible journey of scaling the ServiceNow partnership from zero to $1 billion in TCV and reveals her current mission: building Adobe into the next great frontier firm for Microsoft. The conversation dives deep into the necessity of AI-led innovation, the critical importance of placing trust at the center of every technological stack, and why traditional quarterly business reviews are being replaced by real-time, constant connectivity. Whether you are an ISV, SDC, or channel partner, this session provides a roadmap for navigating the tectonic shifts in the AI ecosystem through organizational alignment and shared vision. Key Takeaways Frontier firms integrate AI up and down the UI, agent, and data layers while evolving their internal operating systems. Successful partnerships require a shared vision at the highest level that melds two mission statements into a single belief system. The traditional QBR is becoming outdated, replaced by real-time, constant communication across engineering and product teams. Trust must be the primary pillar of AI development, supported by core principles like fairness, reliability, and accountability. Leading with co-innovation and customer-centric data solutions is more effective than leading strictly with revenue goals. Strategic use of the Microsoft Marketplace remains a “hidden gem” for achieving scale and high-velocity growth. https://youtu.be/OU22MIfs-1A If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Frontier Firms, SDC, Microsoft GM, Adobe Partnership, ServiceNow, AI Operating Model, Responsible AI, Co-innovation, Partner Value Chain, Organizational Alignment, Microsoft Marketplace, TCV, Data Sovereignty, AI Agents, Adobe Firefly, Azure, Ecosystem Growth, Digital Transformation, AI Governance, Strategic Partnerships, Tech Leadership. Transcript: Katharine Kennedy Vince Menzione: [00:00:00] Honestly, it’s people. Yes, with agents. Um, and I know we hear that and it’s very like, oh, what does it mean? Are we really using it? I cannot tell you how many agents I use in a day. We just finished Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat here in beautiful Boca to a sold out crowd. Come join me now for a compelling discussion on the impacts of the tectonic shifts we’re all seeing. We, we’ve talked about MSP, we’ve talked about channel. We’ve talked about marketplace. We haven’t really dug deep into the SDC conversation, and I still, that doesn’t roll off my tongue. I still say ISV in my own mind, but the software development corporations, um, we’ve had several executives from that, from that world. Sandy Gupta has been. Um, many time guests, uh, at, at, at our events and we really wanted to double click. And I was so fortunate to meet Katherine Kennedy several months ago and learned about what [00:01:00] she’s doing and what the work that she’s driving. So I wanna invite her on stage ’cause we’re gonna have a very intimate conversation by Yeah, we call these so great to have you here. And, uh, you’re a GM at Microsoft, which is a big deal, by the way. A lot of people don’t know that. Thank you. And you’re running, uh, two of, I’d say two of the most significant partners within the Microsoft ecosystem. I would say obviously two. Now. Just one. Okay. We’re doubling down on focus. So nice to meet everybody. I, I wish there was a fire ’cause it did. What you Well come on. This goes off heat by the way. We get back off a little bit. This goes off our, so all good. So tell us, give us your, yeah. Give us your background and your role. Katharine Kennedy: Sure. So Catherine Kennedy. Nice to meet you all. Um, I’m a GM at Microsoft previously overseeing both the ServiceNow and the Adobe practice. Um, spent the last four years building ServiceNow too. What now our previous guests got to refer to as our REO, you know, exciting, uh, big growth [00:02:00] partnership. Um, so we took that from, for them from $0 in terms of shared revenue to a billion dollars in TCV. Um, and they have one of the largest Macs now with Microsoft. And we did that over the course of three years. So we’ll talk a little bit about. Um, the mindset, uh, and the operating models and things that we implemented with ServiceNow. Um, and then at the time, um, they asked me to take on Adobe as well. And when we saw the opportunity at Adobe, we said, wow, we really need to focus here. And so I have the privilege of being able to focus on Adobe this year. And, um. What I’m most excited about is the ecosystem and the ecosystem opportunity with Adobe as we build them into the next frontier firm or Microsoft. Vince Menzione: And of course we use the term spark, the ecosystem, so yes. Um, so let’s, let’s dive in [00:03:00] here. Use the term mindset. I was thinking about mindset. Market shift, frontier Firm, how do those things align together? Microsoft has been talking, I mean, Judson up on stage and Ignite talking about frontier firms. Nina’s talked about frontier firms. This is a shift in how organizations operate. Yes. In for some, yes. Uh, for others. I was thinking, what are you seeing across the SDC community specifically where you’ve managed before, where you’re managing now, but with ServiceNow and Adobe as an examples? What defines a company that’s truly making this leap? Katharine Kennedy: So as we’re looking at these frontier firms, uh, especially in the S-D-C-I-C spaces, we’re looking at, um, how do they implement AI up and down their stack, but then across the operating system, um, and. I refer to it in our business as the partnership value chain. ’cause we look at our SDCs and ISVs as partners. Um, and so the partner operating model between Microsoft and in this [00:04:00] case, Adobe or ServiceNow, has to be solely in lockstep and moving at warp speed. It’s as, as we’ve been talking about all day, it’s just moving so fast and so the tighter. We’re connected. The Cohesity across the company, um, is absolutely critical, but it’s AI up and down, AI across, um, and what I mean by that is, uh. That’s from the UI layer to the agent layer down to the data layer. So unlocking all of the layers of the stack. And then across the operating model, how are we empowering each executive to buy in on that North star or that strategy that we have jointly? And then how do we drive that operationally to execute at the field level? And that’s. Probably the biggest undertaking, um, I’ve ever done because it’s really you, your team becomes, uh, [00:05:00] these we’re like ants running between two giant companies. I mean, it’s just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And um, that’s really the art and the science of it is that honestly it’s people. Yes. Um, and I know we hear that and it’s very like, oh, what does it mean? Are we really using it? I cannot tell you how many agents I use in a day. It’s truly remarkable. Vince Menzione: You mentioned North Star, so I wanted to Yeah. Can I double click on it? Katharine Kennedy: Please do. Yes. Happy to. Vince Menzione: Yeah. I think about mission and purpose and all that tying into North Star. Are, are you implying that an organization needs to get its North Star, right? First and then how, how, and what, what are most of these organizations you’re seeing today, not the ones you manage, but other organizations in the SDC portfolio? Like where are they in terms of the continuum? How are, how are they moving along and what’s your guidance to them? Katharine Kennedy: It’s a good question. So I’ll start by saying my observation, my opinion is [00:06:00] as I’m looking across the companies that are successful and the ones who are yet to be successful, um, the key differentiator is that there is a shared vision at the highest level of the company that drives all the way down to the field. And what I mean by that is we’re taking two mission statements and we’re melding them together. Then we’re creating a belief system and it becomes a cultural shift across two companies versus, Hey, we’re gonna have all of these siloed, tactical, yeah. Operating units and they’re gonna do their own thing and maybe they’ll be successful over here. Maybe they’re doing something different over here, but we’re really. I think I heard Nina say this also, we’re pulling that red thread through the company. Yes. Um, which is critical. And I’ve seen so many companies just show up for the revenue. And yes, that’s an absolute outcome and it’s a [00:07:00] tremendous outcome if you do it right, but you have to do it right. You have to pull that red thread and you have to have every single part of the. Partner value chain buying into this strategy and this North Star, and if they don’t, if one piece of that chain is not bought in, you fail. Yeah. Vince Menzione: Organizational alignment is what you’re saying and what, what I’m hearing is in order, in terms of getting the AI Strat, the North Star aligned. Yes. You’ve gotta get the, I call the C-Suite aligned. Yes. You need to get all the functions of the organization aligned to the thread that you talked about. Yes. And then what does that look like? What does that North Star look like? What is it, what is the ideal example of what the North Star would look like? I’m, I’m a frontier firm. I brought in on ai, music agent ai. I’m doing all the things that we’ve talked about earlier. Katharine Kennedy: Yes. Um, so I think it, so operationally, um, it’s moving the operational rhythm from what used to be [00:08:00] qbr. Frankly, I think that’s outdated. Yes, it is. It is real time, constant communication. And yes, there will be checkpoints and they could be weekly, they could be monthly, they could be quarterly, but this is just real time constant communication because the pace of business, the pace of innovation is going so fast. We have to have that direct line of communication product to product team. We have to have that direct line of communication, engineering to engineering, because with everything going in on. Everything going on in the macroeconomic climate today, especially given concerns around sovereignty. Um, I run a global business, so we have customers saying, Hey, I don’t wanna host my data in a place where I don’t align with the values. That’s a real situation. That was actually a topic at Davos, as you mentioned, um, Nina. And so, um, we’re rapidly addressing these concerns with our customers and meeting our customers where they are. [00:09:00] Um, but it’s that real time constant connectivity. Um, and we’re frankly. We’re seeing it across the board. Um, but the operating model has to change. We have to look at more advanced, modern models, uh, for these partnership businesses to sustain in this next wave of transformation. Frankly, Vince Menzione: you know, it’s, so, you talked about values? Yes. This is, this leads into another conversation, right? When we talk about ai, we talk about, we talk about AI and the use, use cases. We skip over things like values and trust and governance. Katharine Kennedy: Oh, good segue. This is, this is my passion, please. Oh, I get so worked up about this. Good. So I, I had the privilege of, um, sitting, uh, with our SLC community a couple weeks ago, and, uh, they introduced, oh, here’s our amazing new, uh, pitch. We were just [00:10:00] speaking about it in the back actually. And, and it is, it’s amazing. And, uh, they said, do you have any feedback? And I was like, oh. And I waited and I saw everybody, every, you know, oh, we need to change this or tweak that. And I, and I waited. And then at the last moment I stood up. I was like, okay, I gotta say it. I was like, you say intelligence and trust. I, this is a small tweak, but trust has to be first, foremost, first, last, center, everything. Trust has to be everything. And, um, and I truly mean that. And I think, you know. Of all the companies I’ve worked for and I’ve worked for quite a few, um, Microsoft is the company that I believe in the most that can do the most good in society and in the global. Macroeconomic economy, a anything right in the world, in your communities. Um, and so one of the things that really struck me, and I keep coming back to with Microsoft and the, the topic of trust is how Microsoft, [00:11:00] um, was first to the table in this, in this, um, moment of ai. You know, introduction a few years ago to say, Hey, we need a set of core values and ethics and principles that we’re all gonna, we’re all gonna marshal around and I haven’t heard it as much recently, and now it’s coming back. And, uh, you know, the, the six core principles that Microsoft used is, I’m just gonna tell you right now, our fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusivity, um, transparency and accountability. And it’s not. Just six principles that you see on a poster in the offices. These are embedded, again, back to the operating model across every single aspect of our business. So within our product, within our engineering, even just in our collaboration tools, you could be sending a teams message and you’ll get a notification, Hey, this is not aligned to the Microsoft. Core [00:12:00] values of ai. And so there are gates and governance and guardrails built into every layer of our technology stack and then across the company in our operating rhythms. And that is what gets me so excited and gets me up at, at out of bed in the morning. Um. I actually got a call from Sila. No one wants a call from Sila. Does anybody know Sila? Uh, yeah. Yes. Okay. That’s our legal, that’s our legal team. Legal affairs. Sila. Yeah. No one wants that call. Uh, I actually, I got so excited. I was like, are you calling about responsible ai? ’cause I was one of the first, um, I was one of the first to raise my hand to say. We will sign up. Was it Brad Smith calling you? Oh gosh. Oh, that would be a dream. I think he’s so, I’m, I love him. I think he’s so cool. Um, I love that you actually, sorry, side, I’m gonna take you on a side tour. Next slide. Um, my favorite thing to do is pull up the news and you’re seeing something from the Prime Minister in, you know, Germany and Brad [00:13:00] Smith’s in the foreground Yes. Of every photo. You’re just like, wow, we’re influencing at such a global. Um, base that I could just, it’s hard to wrap your head around sometimes, but, so anyways, going back, I’m gonna take us back to trust. Um, please. Vince Menzione: Well, I just think we need to apply it back to ai, right? Because it is so important. It is. It is. These agents are out there and if they’re not governed and if you don’t Yeah, yeah. Katharine Kennedy: I’m so, so, yeah, thank you. Keeping me on track. So, so why I am excited about it is, is because, um. As we’re going out into our communities, um, we’re here in the southeast and one of the biggest issues that comes up over and over again is, how do I trust that AI is not gonna learn off my data? How am I gonna trust that it’s telling me the right information? And so on and so forth. And that’s when I get to this great conversation about trust and our responsible AI pact and, um. This is, this is truly what I mean, that it can be a force [00:14:00] multiplier, but it can be a force for good. And if you don’t have those guardrails and that governance and those principles aligned across the companies. You fall down, right? You fall down with the customers, you fall down with the organizations you’re serving. And so going back to our North Star two, we align there, we align with the values and the ethics, and then we can start to really build a business together. And that’s how we were able to do it so fast. And so, um, at such scale, at such global scale, um, with. ServiceNow, but now we’re going to take a mature partner in Adobe and we’re gonna take them to the frontier in a way you haven’t seen before. So. Just a little commercial. Adobe is gonna be announcing their Adobe marketing agent. I love it as GA next month. So they are a frontier firm for us. Yes, very exciting round of applause for Adobe there. For Adobe. Yeah. And more to come. So we’ll be [00:15:00] having, uh, their firefly, uh, video models coming out on Azure and available through Marketplace as well, um, coming soon. So lots of exciting things happening. Vince Menzione: Sounds exciting. So let’s talk about those partner big wins that you’re saying. Give us some examples of those. Katharine Kennedy: Now are you talking about from a Microsoft and Adobe co-innovation perspective? Yes, from the co-innovation perspective. Okay. Yeah. Um, so from a co-innovation perspective, this is. This is a labor of love. Um, I approach it in a very disciplined manner. The way that we look at, um, these frontier firms is we’re leading with co-innovation versus leading with revenue. And it’s a, it’s, it’s a paradigm shift that takes everyone to buy in back to my earlier point, but also, um, the hardest part is. Teaching companies, um, to do things differently. Uh, so we start with [00:16:00] engineering and product. And actually before we get there, we start with customer and we sit with our customers. We understand what our customers are asking for. We’re understanding the value that they need unlocked, and typically it’s at the data data layer. And so what we’re doing is we’re seeing, okay, what are the data things? What are the data silos that need to be unlocked? And so we start to kind of build up from there, taking the customer perspective. Then we sit with engineering and product and we say, okay, what do we have on the truck today? How can we elevate this to an AI led AI first motion that meets our customers where they are in their AI journey? And delivers value and business outcomes day one versus, hey, we have to go through this laborous process. One of the other things we’re seeing is forward deployed engineers. Um, so thinking about, Hey, how do we sit with our customers and start architecting. What they need to address their business challenges today, um, because AI [00:17:00] can solve a lot of this, right? And so it’s a really interesting model shift that we’re seeing across the board within Microsoft, within our largest ISVs, and within our customer and our, um, ecosystem community with our GSIs, our sis, as well as our channel. Vince Menzione: So I know we were. You’ve had a lot. We, we had Jason up here talking about marketplace. Yes. And Jason Grey, Ja. Oh no, Jason. R Jason. R Jason. Yeah. We’ve had Jason Grey. He’s had Jason Grey. Yes. Well, we, um, you’re, you ServiceNow got called out in that last set session. I know. I was thinking about marketplace and co-selling. Yes. And then ecosystem. So I wanna like tie those three things together if that’s possible with you. Like what are you seeing from a best practice perspective. Obviously ServiceNow has been a top a top partner. We’re starting to see a lot of, well, channel D, channel [00:18:00] resellers, and the like. What are you seeing from a best practice perspective and is there yes. Central opportunities there? Katharine Kennedy: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. Three things. Um, one is AI led innovation. First and foremost, you gotta have the solution. You gotta have it. If you don’t have the solution, you don’t have something to sell. Second is a, um, AI led go to market hero motion. And what I mean by that, so in the, I’ll use ServiceNow as a, as a. Example ServiceNow. We created a, the first, uh, copilot plus, um, ServiceNow assist agent to agent go to market hero story. It landed really well with our customers and so we started to build off of that and we integrated across, um, up and down the stack. Like I mentioned, the data layer, the agent layer, and the ui. Um, and our customers were thrilled. They were like, wow. What else can we do with this? Can we unlock HR with this? Can we unlock. [00:19:00] What else can we do? Finance? Can we do finance? And so we started to see these, these moments in time where our customers were taking the technology and taking it to places we just hadn’t even thought about yet. Um, so I would say those two. And then the third would be, uh, making sure that we’re enabling the field. In a way that they know that story, they can tell that story, and then they have access to people to support that story. Um, and then wrap that in marketplace leverage micro, uh, marketplace as a scale motion. And now I know we still have opportunities to continue to improve around marketplace. Um, but we’ve come a long way and we’re seeing tremendous growth and scale out of this engine. So it’s, it’s definitely a hidden, um. I would say honestly, it’s still a hidden gem in the Microsoft. Uh. Bag, if you will. Vince Menzione: $300 billion in total.[00:20:00] Katharine Kennedy: Yeah, I seriously, yeah, but not anymore, I should say. Yes, I’ve been to Singing from the Rooftop. Yes. Vince Menzione: And you’re gonna be back this afternoon, right? Yes. A session with Ashley, so, oh, okay. I think, was it with Ash? Maybe? Oh know, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe. I’d be delighted it’ll be back the same. I’m happy to be back. I wanna make sure, I do wanna make sure, we’ll, we’ll cover some more of this there. Katharine Kennedy: And then the last thing, yeah. Shared KPIs. Yes. Shared KPIs. We gotta track it. We gotta be accountable. So get your vision aligned. Get your vision, get your organizations across all of the disciplines aligned. Yes. And then have a set of shared KPIs and owners for each of those KPIs. Yes. Right. And govern it. And govern it. Govern it, yeah. Report up to the CEO on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis. I started reporting up to our CEO and he was like. What is she doing? He’s like, this business is going really, it’s growing fast. What is she doing? Can we do this somewhere else though? Um, it’s, you know, making sure people know the story, um, [00:21:00] and everyone’s buying in and they’re accountable. It’s, um, it’s a simple thing, but it’s powerful. Thank you for having me. Vince Menzione: Thank you so much. I really, yeah. Appreciate it. Thank you everyone. Alright, thanks. You don’t forget, ultimate Partner Live is coming soon, May 11th through the 13th in beautiful Bellevue, Washington. I hope to see you there.

Dan Candee, CEO of Cork Cyber When Cork Cyber first showed up on the radar a few years ago, it was easy to file under “cyber warranty” and move on. But Dan Candee, who came in as CEO in mid-2024 from AWS and Dell, has been pushing the company well beyond that starting point. What’s emerged – a risk visibility platform, a scoring system, and now active remediation tools – looks less like a warranty company bolting on features and more like a deliberate platform play built on a foundation most vendors don’t have: financial skin in the game. Candee positions the warranty as Aflac for cyber insurance – a fast-response layer, not a replacement. But the more compelling moment was his account of a Canadian construction company that had every security check mark green and still got hit through a BEC attack because someone didn’t verify an ACH change by phone. Cork paid out. The MSP kept the client. The Cork Score is where things get practical for MSPs. Candee walked through showing a client they’re at a 350 because of incomplete MFA adoption, then demonstrating that three specific changes move them to a 700. It’s a QBR weapon, and the Credit Karma comparison holds up. On the business side, Vantage starts at a dollar per endpoint and scales to 35 cents. Financial protection comes in four tiers ($25,000 to $500,000), with the lower tiers designed for MSPs to absorb and bundle as a retention tool. Cork is active across Canada excluding Quebec, available through Pax8, and runs entirely through API integrations with no agent required. Candee teased an autonomous remediation engine for summer 2026. Whether Cork can deliver at the pace they’re promising is worth watching. Read Full Transcript TRANSCRIPT TO COME

Erin Gertner, vice president of the Partner Organization and SMB Sales at Cisco Canada When Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins told investors the campus and data centre refresh is at “the top of the first inning” of a multi-year, multibillion-dollar opportunity, it raised an obvious question for Canadian partners: what does that inning look like here? Erin Gertner, vice president of the Partner Organization and SMB Sales at Cisco Canada, says Canada is tracking with the global trend – and that the opportunity is being driven by a “perfect storm” of three converging forces: the largest last-day-of-support (LDOS) wave Cisco has seen in years, growing urgency around AI readiness, and increasing pressure around data sovereignty. The AI readiness gap is particularly striking. Only 7% of Canadian organizations say they’re fully prepared to deploy AI – down from 9% the previous year – while 96% say the urgency has increased. That tension is creating real opportunities for partners who can lead with outcomes rather than product. Gertner says the partners winning the biggest deals are those taking a consultative approach – running assessments, broadening the conversation beyond a like-for-like swap, and helping customers understand their full security and AI readiness posture. In one example, a security assessment nearly quadrupled the deal size compared to a straight hardware refresh. The conversation also touches on where vertical demand is hottest (financial services and healthcare are leading), how the Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA translates for mid-market partners, the role of data sovereignty in driving on-prem modernization, and what smaller MSPs should be doing to get in the game. Gertner’s advice to partners who haven’t started? Reach out to your Cisco partner account manager or distributor and get access to the PXP data – the opportunity is there, and Cisco wants to make it easy to find. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always, your host for the show. On Cisco’s most recent earnings call, CEO Chuck Robbins called the campus and data centre refresh the top of the first inning of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar opportunity. Double-digit growth in networking, six consecutive quarters. But that’s the global picture. What does the first inning look like in Canada? My guest today is Erin Gertner, VP of the Partner Organization and SMB Sales for Cisco Canada. Erin sees what she calls a “perfect storm” converging right now – a massive wave of aging infrastructure hitting last day of support, growing urgency around AI readiness, and increasing pressure around data sovereignty. We get into what Cisco Canada is seeing on the ground, where partners are finding the most traction, and what separates the ones winning those deals from the ones leaving the door open for somebody else. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Erin Gertner. Erin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Erin Gertner: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me, Robert. It’s nice to see you. Robert Dutt: Nice to see you as well. It’s been a little while since Partner Summit when last we sat down, but I wanted to chat because of Chuck’s comments on the earnings call, talking about the top of the first inning on a multi-year, multi-billion dollar opportunity around campus refresh. Double-digit growth in networking for six consecutive quarters. That’s the global picture. I guess to throw it open, what does that top of the first inning look like from where Cisco Canada sits? Are we tracking with the US on this one? Are we still back in spring training? What does the Canadian opportunity look like in this moment? Erin Gertner: I think we’re seeing something very similar to what Chuck spoke about on the earnings call. We are seeing a multi-year, multi-billion dollar refresh cycle taking place here in Canada. And I think it is the perfect storm of three things coming together. One, we have a lot of aged infrastructure out there. Sometimes we call it last day of support, or LDOS. When we look in our portfolio, we’ve got the largest LDOS opportunity that we’ve had in many, many years this year and next year. We’ve been working with many of our partners as well as our account teams to start going out and pursuing those opportunities because we really do need to get in front of them. But we’re also seeing the dynamics of a few other things taking place. One is AI readiness. I think you probably heard in our earnings call, Chuck talk about the success that we’re having in AI. A lot of that today is really centred in the world of the hyperscalers. In our last earnings call, I talked about doing over $2 billion worth of infrastructure with the hyperscalers. So there’s this huge influx of demand around AI. But where we haven’t really scratched the surface is AI in the enterprise. The hyperscalers are very well prepared, but now we’re starting to see this big wave of enterprise deployment, or at least enterprises thinking about the use cases and the ROI, because it is a board-level conversation. And then lastly, and this is probably a topic you hear a lot about working in Canada, is around digital resilience and data sovereignty. You need a modernized, secure network in order to deploy AI, and the network is more critical than it’s ever been as you think about the role it’s going to play in the next few years. The ability to fuse together security into the network is really unique and core for Cisco and driving refresh. I often talk to partners about the LDOS opportunity, and we used to get the question a lot of, “Why would a customer upgrade?” or, “How do I have this conversation with a customer?” because their response is often, “It all still works. Why bother?” I think AI especially is really giving them that reason to modernize, because while their network may work, it wasn’t necessarily built to run the applications that they’re going to need today and in the future. So it’s a really compelling conversation, and we’re seeing huge uptake and demand in networking. Robert Dutt: You touch on the customer size, especially on the AI side of things. Looking across the Canadian market in terms of customer size, vertical, geography – is the refresh opportunity relatively evenly distributed, or is it concentrated? Where’s the heat at right now? Erin Gertner: It’s been interesting. All of our account teams, some of which are verticalized, others which are organized geographically, talk a lot about where they’re seeing refresh opportunity. A great example is what we’re hearing from financial services organizations. We had that long period of COVID, and then there’s been a ton of conversation around return to office. Our financial services team will tell you that there’s massive demand because if you listen to what the banks or insurance companies are doing, they’re asking people to come back to the office. Those networks, many of which were built in 2018 or 2019, can’t support the applications that are being driven in today’s world. They can’t even support the number of people they have anymore. [A lot of those organizations saw a boom.] So there’s a huge network refresh taking place right now in that specific vertical. We’re also hearing a lot about mission-critical verticals like healthcare, where uptime is hugely important and security and resilience are top of mind. But it’s really spread throughout. Many companies had a long period of time where they spent a good majority of their budget on work from home and getting people set up for different use cases. Now that we’re living in this hybrid world, or a lot of organizations are back to work, that’s putting a huge change in demand on what is being asked from the network, plus everything that’s happened from the AI perspective. Robert Dutt: You bring in a lot of different threads in terms of things that are driving this – AI readiness at the top of the list, aging infrastructure, data sovereignty, security modernization, probably a few more. What’s actually leading the charge in this moment for the conversations you’re having with Canadian partners and customers? I’m curious if one of those things is the leader and the others follow, or if there’s really a convergence where this is a big pile of conversation topics at the same time. Erin Gertner: I think it’s a big pile of conversation topics at the same time, and it also depends on the partner you talk to and how they’re approaching a customer. Every partner has got a really interesting and different approach, especially when it comes to AI, and I love that about our partner community. A lot of them are taking, for example, an advisory services-led approach, or they’re taking the approach of – I hate this expression, but it’s one that makes sense – eating your own dog food. I was with a partner last week and they were talking about a lot of the work that they had done to embed AI into their own workflows. Then they were taking their success out into the market and starting new conversations with customers they hadn’t historically had access to. All of that was leading to a network refresh conversation, because customers are excited about the opportunity with AI, and then the partner was able to embed the question around, “Well, are you ready? Do you have the right infrastructure in place?” The conversation often is bigger than that, and obviously security is a huge area of concern when it comes to AI. I think that’s where Cisco is very uniquely positioned to win in this space. We’re seeing a lot of our competitors try to bring network and security together, and we’re really the only organization who can truly embed network and security together and then traverse it from the campus to the data centre. Robert Dutt: To your point on dog food, I learned from a partner years ago that the way to phrase it is “drinking one’s own champagne.” Erin Gertner: Oh, I like that expression a lot better. Thank you for that. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about the AI side of things. Cisco’s own AI Readiness Index showed that 7% of Canadian organizations feel they’re fully prepared to deploy AI, and that’s actually down a couple of points from 9% in 2024. 96% say it’s more urgent than ever. That’s a pretty big gap. How’s that tension showing up in the conversations that partners are having with their customers? Erin Gertner: I’ve spoken to a lot of partners in the last little while, and again, each are taking a very individual approach. I think leading with outcomes and that consultative mindset – and it looks very different for each partner – but they’re all trying to understand what outcome a customer is trying to deliver, or what is the ROI, or what is that metric that’s going to help move a CEO’s agenda forward, or help them understand how they can build a true business case to build out a full AI deployment. It’s hard, right? We’re going through our own transformation at Cisco. We’ve got a team of individuals who work with us internally building out our AI workflows, and even on my own team, we’re trying to do all these things to help our team adopt AI tools to make their lives easier and more efficient. You often hear that somebody’s job is not going to be taken by AI – it’ll be taken by somebody who knows how to use AI. It is even more critical than ever that organizations figure it out. A lot of our partners have deployed some interesting things for themselves or worked through really interesting consulting engagements where they have use cases they can take out to market and help customers build that business case for themselves. They need to start small, they need to define what success looks like, and I think many customers have a long road there, but there’s certainly hope that we’re headed in the right direction. Robert Dutt: Raj, the president of Cisco Canada, wrote an op-ed recently saying that Canadian businesses risk – I think the quote was – “Blockbuster-style failure” without having the right AI infrastructure. For a partner who’s sitting across the table from a customer who feels that urgency but hasn’t really started yet, what do you counsel that partner to advise the customer on? What’s the practical starting point? Where do you begin? Erin Gertner: It’s tough. Again, it depends what type of customer they are and what their use case looks like. But I think for that customer, it’s really leaning back to outcomes – what is going to demonstrate success for that organization? The last thing you want anybody to do is go out and deploy an AI application and see absolutely no success out of it. That will move that executive’s agenda back probably a couple of years. But we are also really encouraging partners to talk through: Are they ready? You can have the best use case out there, but do you have a good data strategy? Do you have a good security strategy? Have you thought about modernizing your network? Is sovereignty important to you? And if it is, do you want to start thinking about potentially building that on-prem, or taking a different approach than maybe what you have historically done, because there are new considerations being layered on top of all of that. Robert Dutt: Talk to me about the Secure AI Factory side of things. Tim Coogan called it the partner opportunity of this year. I’m curious how that translates practically for Canadian partners. Is this a play mostly for the big SIs, or are you finding mid-market partners who are finding a role in the AI infrastructure buildout? Erin Gertner: I think it’s a little bit of both. We’re having conversations around Secure AI Factory with some of our largest partners because it is really unique. Our relationship with NVIDIA is truly one of a kind, and we’re actually creating products together. I know everybody has done a great job of partnering with NVIDIA in the market, but our relationship with them is a little bit different. What I love about the whole notion of Secure AI Factory is the fact that it’s everything built together. We make it really easy. We’ve pre-built all the CVDs. We’ve essentially created a blueprint for partners and customers to go out and deploy an entire AI pod. That includes everything from networking to servers to security to observability. We can even include storage, even though we don’t make it – we’ve got a bunch of great storage partners. Is it going to work for a small customer being serviced by a small partner? Probably not. It might be outside the scope of what they’re doing. But for mid-sized customers who are running interesting workloads and they want them on-prem, and especially for bigger customers who want to scale and deploy really quickly, or partners who have a ton of depth and capability in that space, the Secure AI Factory is a great solution. Robert Dutt: For a Canadian partner who’s looking at this refresh opportunity, where are you seeing the most traction in terms of the technology stack? Is it campus switching, data centre modernization, Wi-Fi, security? What’s the entry point that’s helping partners produce pipeline right now? Erin Gertner: We’ve done a lot of work with partners. We’ve got a tool called PXP – I think you’ve probably had some exposure to it – but we’ve been doing quite a few workshops with our partners to help them understand where their opportunity is. PXP does a great job of being very data-rich and data-centric. As we go through the enablement with partners, it gives them a good sense of what their refresh opportunity looks like. Then we are trying to make sure we enable them around the broader conversation. You don’t want to just be refreshing a switch for a switch. Our best partners are taking that data and – again, to your question, some partners, let’s say their history was really in the data centre – data centre networking is probably their biggest opportunity because that’s where they’ve sold the most in the past. For more broad-scale partners, it could be a combination of two or three different things. What we’re really trying to coach them to do is take that opportunity and don’t refresh a switch for a switch. Help the customer understand what outcome they’re trying to achieve. Do they have the right security posture? What’s their Wi-Fi strategy? What’s their device strategy? We’re trying to help them take that data and broaden the conversation into something that’s more outcome-driven. Our best partners are doing an excellent job of that and building really big, interesting deals alongside their customers. Robert Dutt: In doing that, when you’re looking at the services layer, are there any particular areas that you find are especially productive? Assessments, design, migration, managed services post-deployment – where are partners getting the most return from focusing their energy? Erin Gertner: Consulting services has been a huge one. We’ve got a great assessment program and we have some partners who are doing a great job leveraging it and seeing a ton of success. I was in a partner QBR the other day and they were giving an example of having done a security assessment with a customer that significantly broadened the scope of the deal and helped the customer understand where they had some vulnerabilities in their current infrastructure. That deal almost quadrupled in size. Partners are doing a great job with that. What we’re really trying to encourage partners to do is make sure we’ve got an adoption plan for every software deal out there upfront, because we want to make sure anything our customers buy from our partners, they have a great experience with. If they aren’t doing a good job of adopting that and showing value all the way throughout the chain, we’re not going to see a renewal at the end. The other thing we’ve been talking a lot about with our leadership team is some of what’s happening in the industry right now with some of the shortages that are industry-wide. In COVID, we saw something similar happen – a lot of supply chain constraints. Then there was this really long ingest period that happened afterwards because customers just had so much technology. We are really encouraging our partners and our teams to make sure we’re leading with services, so there is an outcome attached to the end and there is a plan with the customer to consume the technology so they can get the most out of what they’ve bought from us. Robert Dutt: We talked a little bit about the big guys, the SIs, and the opportunity around AI Factory. For the smaller partner, that long-tail 15-to-20-person MSP that’s living in Meraki and maybe doing some security, is this a real opportunity for them, or is this fundamentally a larger VAR and SI play? Where it is accessible to that SMB-focused partner, what does the on-ramp look like? Erin Gertner: It’s absolutely accessible for that SMB partner. I also have the SMB part of our business, so this conversation is very close to my heart. Given the IT skills shortage that is very dominant in the Canadian market, we are seeing a lot of customers who don’t want to manage their own network. As customers grow – let’s say they were a very small customer four or five years ago and they chose more of a consumer-grade solution at that time – as they want to move into a more enterprise-type solution with security and all the other bells and whistles embedded in it, a lot of those customers are choosing not to manage that themselves. But they want to be in the same place as their competitors, because the expectation is they grow and scale just as fast, probably faster in fact, as a big company. A lot of those companies are born in the cloud, leveraging tons of cloud applications, so the way they create their foundation is even more critical than ever. We have a bunch of great small to mid-size partners who are doing awesome things in that space and growing pretty significantly, actually gaining a lot of market share because of their agility and their ability to manage something at a cost-effective price. Robert Dutt: You mentioned the importance of data sovereignty in the conversation. The federal government has launched a call for proposals for sovereign AI data centres of over 100 megawatts, and we’ve seen Cohere get a lot of federal backing for their data centre build. Is data sovereignty a driver in this enterprise refresh, or is it a parallel conversation that’s happening at the same time? Erin Gertner: I think it’s a bit of a parallel conversation, but it’s certainly driving a huge – not even refresh – just huge modernization effort. A lot of it is centred around Canadian organizations who are worried about data sovereignty, or who are worried that sovereignty requirements might hit them in the next few years. They’re trying to prepare themselves by building out new types of data centres on-premise – new data centres to support applications coming back on-prem. While maybe they haven’t built everything on-prem today, we are seeing a massive surge in companies starting to think about what that might look like. For customers who had almost all of their applications in the cloud previously, their data centre network didn’t necessarily support the low-latency, really high-bandwidth requirements that would come into play if they start putting mission-critical applications back on-prem. We are seeing a lot of customers starting to think about what they would need to build to support sovereignty requirements, or if they’re going to continue to live in a hybrid world – which, let’s be honest, the majority of Canadian organizations are probably going to live in that world, and that’s all good – the network they have today probably doesn’t support that in the way they’d like either. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about what you’re doing to support partners through this process. What are the incentives, enablement resources, the programs that are particularly relevant to Canadian partners who are looking at this opportunity and going after it? Erin Gertner: I think we’ve been pretty declarative about wanting to be the critical infrastructure for the AI era. We’re doing a lot of enablement with our partners. We’ve aligned our incentives, both front-end and back-end, to this opportunity. We’re doing a lot of workshops to help our partners understand where those opportunities lie and help them understand how to go out and capture them. We’ve also been running a lot of demand generation alongside our partners around our AI strategy, what that looks like, as well as showcasing the innovation that Jeetu has put forward in our portfolio around network and security coming together, because I do think it’s a great story and one that maybe not everybody knew. Some people probably think we’ve still got two different platforms with Catalyst and Meraki, where the truth is those have come together in the last year. With our acquisition of Splunk, there’s a lot that’s been infused into the network. Jeetu has also done a fantastic job of creating a really innovative security portfolio, a lot of which is actually embedded into the network layer. So there’s been a lot of education that we’ve had to do with both our partners and our customers to make sure they’re able to go out and tell that story to the market. I think Tim Coogan said this best – our job is to create that innovation, and then our job is also to help enable our partners to go out and be an extension of our sales force and help them deliver value to customers based on that innovation. Robert Dutt: What do you see as separating the partners who are winning these refresh deals from those who aren’t? What are the best partners doing differently? Erin Gertner: Again, I think really leading with that outcomes-based conversation and not just doing a like-for-like refresh. The ones who are going out and really taking a consultative approach, they’re winning a lot more and they’re winning much larger deals. I was on with a partner yesterday who was showcasing some of the work they’d been doing around AI and sharing with us some of the success they had just recently had, and they’re winning amazing deals by taking a very consulting-led approach. What we have seen in the past from certain partners is they go in and focus very much on that refresh opportunity, and then they almost leave the door open for another partner to come in and have a conversation around networking, observability, and all the other aspects around that critical infrastructure. So the best partners are the ones who are leading with the whole portfolio. I know we’re going to talk about 360 as well, but we’re really trying to incentivize our partners to build a lot of skills and technical depth around our solutions, and the ones who are really good at being able to tell the story of how our whole portfolio comes together – that “One Cisco” story that we often talk about – they’re the ones who are winning the most. Robert Dutt: If I’m a Canadian partner listening to this and I haven’t really started leaning into that refresh opportunity yet, what should I be doing about this on Monday morning when I show up to work? And looking further out, we’re in the top of the first – what do you see the second and third innings looking like here in Canada? Erin Gertner: Firstly, reach out to us. However you engage with Cisco, whether it’s through one of our distributors – who are amazing and have access to all of our tools – or reach out to your partner account manager at Cisco. We can provide all the training required on how to have the right conversation, as well as access to all the data you need to help you figure out where you should start and which customers are due for a refresh or have a refresh opportunity in the next six months. We can make it really easy for our partners to know where to spend their time and get a pretty fruitful payoff, both on the front-end and the back-end with us. What do I think the second and third innings might look like? I think we’re still really at the infancy of that. We’ve seen a few customers go down the refresh path – probably our largest customers have gone down the refresh path. Some of them have modernized networks or they’ve gotten to where they think they need to be to support AI applications. But I do think we’re going to see some of our smaller customers start to catch up. I also think we’re still really at the infancy of the success of AI. We talk a lot about the role of agentic AI and how that’s going to proliferate through organizations in the future. I don’t know that many customers have figured that out yet today. There are some who are really at the edge of innovation and who’ve done an amazing job with that, but it isn’t mainstreamed yet. As agentic AI really starts to roll out, the demands on your network and the demands around security especially become even more complex and even more critical. I think that’s going to be the next wave. A lot of companies have done a good job of finding one or two use cases, maybe small ones, that have delivered value for them in AI. But there are very few organizations – and we talked about it through the AI Readiness Index – very few organizations who have really found tremendous value from AI today, but they will in the future. Robert Dutt: I think you’ve done a great job of setting up the game for Canadian partners here. Good luck with the rest of the ballgame, and thanks so much for taking the time. Erin Gertner: Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Erin Gertner from Cisco Canada. I’d like to thank Erin for her time on this one, and thank you for listening. A couple of things that stood out to me. First, how strongly the consulting and assessment-led approach is paying off. Partners who are going in and helping customers understand the full picture – security, AI readiness, network modernization – aren’t just winning deals. They’re winning deals that are three and four times the size of a like-for-like refresh. And the other is something Erin said that I think is worth sitting with: there’s no AI without a network. Simple statement, but it reframes the entire refresh conversation for partners who aren’t sure where AI fits into what they do. If you’re enjoying In The Channel, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. Follow, subscribe, leave a rating or a review if you’re feeling generous. It all helps. Till next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

On this episode of Buck’s Beat, Buck Belue breaks down what the Bulldogs’ starting quarterback is focused on during spring practice, from improving his intermediate passing to pushing the ball downfield and becoming more comfortable in the pocket. After finishing top 6 nationally in QBR with 25 TDs and just 5 interceptions, Stockton’s production wasn’t the issue — but Georgia fans want more explosive plays. So what’s next? Buck explains:• The criticism Stockton faced after Year 1• Why working the middle of the field isn’t as easy as fans think• How footwork, anticipation, and vision impact QB play• The importance of building chemistry with a brand new WR group• Why more aggression could mean more interceptions (and why that’s OK) With new weapons like Isaiah Canyon, Talon Taylor, and a reloaded tight end room, Georgia’s passing game could take a big leap this season — if Stockton makes the right adjustments.

On this episode of Buck’s Beat, Buck Belue breaks down what the Bulldogs’ starting quarterback is focused on during spring practice, from improving his intermediate passing to pushing the ball downfield and becoming more comfortable in the pocket. After finishing top 6 nationally in QBR with 25 TDs and just 5 interceptions, Stockton’s production wasn’t the issue — but Georgia fans want more explosive plays. So what’s next? Buck explains:• The criticism Stockton faced after Year 1• Why working the middle of the field isn’t as easy as fans think• How footwork, anticipation, and vision impact QB play• The importance of building chemistry with a brand new WR group• Why more aggression could mean more interceptions (and why that’s OK) With new weapons like Isaiah Canyon, Talon Taylor, and a reloaded tight end room, Georgia’s passing game could take a big leap this season — if Stockton makes the right adjustments.

Ever felt like you're constantly playing catch-up in customer experience? What if you had an AI assistant working proactively for you, around the clock? In this episode we dive deep into the game-changing potential of agentic AI, specifically highlighting the new scheduling feature within Claude Cowork.Until recently, true agentic AI was largely reserved for technical experts. But with Claude Cowork, it's now accessible to the masses, allowing you to automate repetitive, insightful tasks – from daily health reports to weekly QBR prep and churn signal digests. Alex explains how this isn't just about simple automation; it's about spinning up a full agentic loop that reads context, calls tools, and adapts its output. While some limitations exist (hello, Mac desktop app!), the ability to schedule recurring, complex tasks in natural language is a massive unlock for anyone in CX. Get ready to shift from reactive to proactive and reclaim your time!Download our Digital CX Claude Plugin Suite: shop.digitalcustomersuccess.com Support the show+++++++++++++++++Like/Subscribe/Review:If you are getting value  from the show, please follow/subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and consider leaving us a review.  Website:For more information about the show or to get in touch, visit DigitalCustomerSuccess.com. Buy Alex a Cup of Coffee:This show runs exclusively on caffeine - and lots of it. If you like what we're, consider supporting our habit by buying us a cup of coffee: https://bmc.link/dcspThank you for all of your support!The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic

First Take resumes with the Drake Maye dilemma. He racked up the 3rd worst QBR in a playoff run ever (min. 3 starts). The dichotomy of him finishing second in MVP but leaving a terrible taste in our mouths with a mediocre playoffs has Jeff and Stephen A. befuddled! (0:00) Then, the NBA MVP is a prestigious award that should only be bestowed upon players who win games, AND put up big stats. Windy joins to make the case for SGA while Chiney picks Cade! (15:10) Next, Mad Dog is mad about Mike Vrabel's coaching and tanking in the NBA. (33:30) Trivia: Which two QBs finished with a worse QBR than Drake Maye in a single playoff run (Min. 3 playoff starts). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this engaging episode of MSP Business School, host Brian Doyle takes listeners through a comprehensive exploration of Technology Business Reviews (TBRs) and their evolving role in the MSP industry. TBRs have shifted from data-heavy presentations to become more strategic and client-focused, addressing clients' growing needs around cybersecurity, compliance, and risk management. Brian Doyle delves into a structured approach to Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), breaking down the process into four distinct phases. Each phase targets specific aspects of technology management—from setting a solid foundation in Q1 to addressing security and risk in Q2, examining health and assets in Q3, and culminating in a year-end summary. By consistently updating scorecards, roadmaps, and strategic plans, MSPs can provide clients with a clearer view of progress and maintain transparency and trust in their business relationships. Key Takeaways: Brian Doyle emphasizes the need for MSPs to transition TBRs from sales meetings to strategic planning sessions to better engage clients. Implementing a quarterly QBR cadence helps in systematically addressing security risks, assets, and compliance, ensuring consistent client engagement. The joint strategic plan is crucial for aligning technology goals with business objectives, providing clarity on project impacts and fostering better decision-making. Regular feedback loops, such as CSAT and Net Promoter Score surveys, are vital for maintaining strong relationships with key stakeholders in client organizations. Documenting risk assessments and client decisions is essential for liability protection and demonstrating value in MSP services.   Show Website: https://mspbusinessschool.com/ Host Brian Doyle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandoylevciotoolbox/ Sponsor vCIOToolbox: https://vciotoolbox.com

On this episode of Buck’s Beat, Buck Belue breaks down the Atlanta Falcons hiring Kevin Stefanski as head coach and bringing in Tommy Rees as offensive coordinator — and what it all means for franchise quarterback Michael Penix Jr. Falcons President of Football Matt Ryan has been aggressive this offseason, locking in Stefanski, retaining Jeff Ulbrich on defense, and reshaping the organization’s leadership. But Buck doesn’t sugarcoat the concerns: Stefanski’s recent record, his long list of quarterbacks in Cleveland, and the PR challenge Falcons fans are wrestling with after eight straight losing seasons. The focus then turns to the most important piece of the puzzle — Michael Penix Jr. Buck dives into Penix’s early NFL tape, advanced metrics, pocket presence, and overall skill set, explaining why he believes Penix can become a top-10 quarterback in the league. He also breaks down Stefanski’s Kubiak-Shanahan West Coast system, heavy play-action concepts, under-center usage, and why this offense could be a strong schematic fit for Atlanta’s offensive talent. After doing the homework, Buck explains why he’s feeling better about the hire — not because of blind faith, but because the system finally matches the quarterback.

On this episode of Buck’s Beat, Buck Belue breaks down the Atlanta Falcons hiring Kevin Stefanski as head coach and bringing in Tommy Rees as offensive coordinator — and what it all means for franchise quarterback Michael Penix Jr. Falcons President of Football Matt Ryan has been aggressive this offseason, locking in Stefanski, retaining Jeff Ulbrich on defense, and reshaping the organization’s leadership. But Buck doesn’t sugarcoat the concerns: Stefanski’s recent record, his long list of quarterbacks in Cleveland, and the PR challenge Falcons fans are wrestling with after eight straight losing seasons. The focus then turns to the most important piece of the puzzle — Michael Penix Jr. Buck dives into Penix’s early NFL tape, advanced metrics, pocket presence, and overall skill set, explaining why he believes Penix can become a top-10 quarterback in the league. He also breaks down Stefanski’s Kubiak-Shanahan West Coast system, heavy play-action concepts, under-center usage, and why this offense could be a strong schematic fit for Atlanta’s offensive talent. After doing the homework, Buck explains why he’s feeling better about the hire — not because of blind faith, but because the system finally matches the quarterback.

Munaf Manji talks betting for Tuesday Jan 13. The Houston Texans closed Super Wild Card Weekend with a dominant 30 to 6 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday night, a game defined far more by defensive control than offensive rhythm. Houston's defense scored twice in the fourth quarter, turning a competitive contest into a rout and pushing the Texans into the divisional round. The Steelers managed only two field goals, while their offense struggled to sustain drives or protect the football against relentless pressure. C J Stroud finished 21 of 32 for 250 yards with one touchdown, but the stat line masked a turbulent night that included multiple fumbles and an interception. Despite those mistakes, Houston's defense consistently erased momentum and ultimately decided the outcome. Christian Kirk emerged as the offensive standout for the Texans, hauling in eight receptions for 144 yards and a 46 yard touchdown, providing the lone passing score of the game. On the ground, Woody Marks and Nick Chubb combined for 160 rushing yards, with Marks breaking through repeatedly as the Steelers' defense failed to contain the run. Pittsburgh's offense never found an answer, as Aaron Rodgers was held to 146 passing yards, sacked four times, and finished with a QBR of 14.3. A strip sack returned for a touchdown and a late pick six sealed the result, fueling speculation about whether this marked the final game of Rodgers' career and raising broader questions about the Steelers' direction moving forward. Houston now advances to face New England, with attention turning to the health of Nico Collins after he exited with a concussion. Around the NBA, the Utah Jazz earned a road win in Cleveland behind 32 points from Keyonte George, while the Pacers edged the Celtics at home and Philadelphia handled Toronto in a game highlighted by a late Kyle Lowry appearance. Sacramento outscored the Lakers 124 to 112 as Malik Monk delivered a sharp shooting performance, continuing Los Angeles' defensive struggles. The Clippers also picked up a home victory over Charlotte with strong nights from Kawhi Leonard and James Harden. As the calendar moves deeper into January, both leagues showcased familiar themes, defense dictating postseason football outcomes and midseason NBA games exposing teams still searching for consistency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/vEdq8rpBM3I In this data-rich keynote, Jay McBain deconstructs the tectonic shifts reshaping the $5.3 trillion global technology industry, arguing that we are entering a new 20-year cycle where traditional direct sales models are obsolete. McBain explains why 96% of the industry is now surrounded by partners and how successful companies must pivot from “flywheels and theory” to a granular strategy focused on the seven specific partners present in every deal. From the explosion of agentic AI and the $163 billion marketplace revolution to the specific mechanics of multiplier economics, this discussion provides a roadmap for navigating the “decade of the ecosystem” where influence, trust, and integration—not just product—determine winners and losers. Key Takeaways Half of today's Fortune 500 companies will likely vanish in the next 20 years due to the shift toward AI and ecosystem-led models. Every B2B deal now involves an average of seven trusted partners who influence the decision before a vendor even knows a deal exists. Microsoft has outpaced AWS growth for 26 consecutive quarters largely because of a superior partner-led geographic strategy. Marketplaces are projected to grow to $163 billion by 2030, with nearly 60% of deals involving partner funding or private offers. The “Multiplier Effect” is the new ROI, where partners can make up to $8.45 for every dollar of vendor product sold. Future dominance relies on five key pillars: Platform, Service Partnerships, Channel Partnerships, Alliances, and Go-to-Market orchestration. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Keywords: Jay McBain, Canalys, partner ecosystem, channel chief, agentic AI, marketplace growth, multiplier economics, B2B sales trends, tech industry forecast, service partnerships, strategic alliances, Microsoft vs AWS, distribution transformation, managed services growth, SaaS platforms, customer journey mapping, 28 moments of truth, future of reselling, technology spending 2025, ecosystem orchestration, partner multipliers. T Transcript: Jay McBain WORKFILE FOR TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: Just up from, did you Puerto Rico last night? Puerto Rico, yes. Puerto Rico. He dodged the hurricane. Um, you all know him. Uh, let him introduce himself for those of you who don’t, but just thrilled to have on the stage, again, somebody who knows more about what’s going on in, in the, and has the pulse on this industry probably than just about anybody I know personally. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: J Jay McBain. Jay, great to see you my friend. Alright, thank you. We have to come all the way. We live, we live uh, about 20 minutes from each other. We have to come all the way to Reston, Virginia to see each other, right? That’s right. Very good. Well, uh, that’s all over to you, sir. Thank you. [00:00:35] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you so much. [00:00:36] Jay McBain: I went from 85 degrees yesterday to 45 today, but I was able to dodge that, uh, that hurricane, uh, that we kind of had to fly through the northern edge of, uh, wanna talk today about our industry, about the ultimate partner. I’m gonna try to frame up the ultimate partner as I walk through the data and the latest research that, uh, that we’ve been doing in the market. [00:00:56] Jay McBain: But I wanted to start here ’cause our industry moves in 20 year cycles, and if you look at the Fortune 500 and dial back 20 years from today, 52% of them no longer exist. As we step into the next 20 year AI era, half of the companies that we know and love today are not gonna exist. So we look at this, and by the way, if you’re not in the Fortune 500 and you don’t have deep pockets to buy your way outta problems, 71% of tech companies fail over the course of 10 years. [00:01:30] Jay McBain: Those are statistics from the US government. So I start to look at our industry and you know, you may look at the, you know, mainframe era from the sixties and seventies, mini computers, August the 12th, 1981, that first IBM, PC with Microsoft dos, version one, you know, triggered. A new 20 year era of client server. [00:01:51] Jay McBain: It was the time and I worked at IBM for 17 years, but there was a time where Bill Gates flew into Boca Raton, Florida and met with the IBM team and did that, you know, fancy licensing agreement. But after, you know, 20 years of being the most valuable company in the world and 13 years of antitrust and getting broken up, almost like at and TIBM almost didn’t make payroll. [00:02:14] Jay McBain: 13 years after meeting Bill Gates. Yeah, that’s how quickly things change in these eras. In 1999, a small company outta San Francisco called salesforce.com got its start. About 10 years later, Jeff Bezos asked a question in a boardroom, could we rent out our excess capacity and would other companies buy it? [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Which, you know, most people in the room laughed at ’em at the time. But it created a 20 year cloud era when our friends, our neighbors, our family. Saw Chachi PT for the first time in March of 2023. They saw the deep fakes, they saw the poetry, they saw the music. They came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:02:58] Jay McBain: And that consumer trend has triggered this next 20 years. I could walk through the richest people in the world through those trends. I could walk through the most valuable companies. It all aligns. ’cause by the way, Apple’s no longer at the top. Nvidia is at the top, Microsoft. Second, things change really quickly. [00:03:17] Jay McBain: So in that course of time, you start to look at our industry and as people are talking about a six and a half or $7 trillion build out of ai, that’s open AI and Microsoft numbers, that is bigger than our industry that’s taken over 50 years to build. This year, we’re gonna finish the year at $5.3 trillion. [00:03:36] Jay McBain: That’s from the smallest flower shop to the biggest bank. Biggest governments that Caresoft would, uh, serve biggest customer in the world is actually the federal government of the us. But you look at this pie chart and you look at the changes that we’re gonna go through over the next 20 years, there’s about a trillion dollars in hardware. [00:03:54] Jay McBain: There’s about a trillion dollars in software. If you look forward through all of the merging trends, quantum computing, humanoid robots, all the things that are coming that dollar to dollar software to hardware will continue to exist all the way through. We see services making up almost two thirds of this pie. [00:04:13] Jay McBain: Yesterday I was in a telco conference with at and t and Verizon and T-Mobile and some of the biggest wireless players and IT services, which happen to be growing faster than products. At the moment, there is more work to be done wrapping around the deal than the actual products that the customer is buying. [00:04:32] Jay McBain: So in an industry that’s growing at 7%. On top of the world economy that’s grown at 2.2. This is the fastest growing industry, and it will be at least for the next 10 years, if not 2070 0.1% of this entire $5 trillion gets transacted through partners. While what we’re talking to today about the ultimate partner, 96% of this industry is surrounded by partners in one way or another. [00:05:01] Jay McBain: They’re there before the deal. They’re there at the deal. They’re there after the deal. Two thirds of our industry is now subscription consumption based. So every 30 days forever, and a customer for life becomes everything. So if every deal in medium, mid-market, and higher has seven partners, according to McKinsey, who are those seven people trying to get into the deal? [00:05:25] Jay McBain: While there’s millions of companies that have come into tech over the last 10 to 20 years. Digital agencies, accountants, legal firms, everybody’s come in. The 250,000 SaaS companies, a million emerging tech companies, there’s a big fight to be one of those seven trusted people at the table. So millions of companies and tens of millions of people our competing for these slots. [00:05:49] Jay McBain: So one of the pieces of research I’m most proud of, uh, in my analyst career is this. And this took over two years to build. It’s a lot of logos. Not this PowerPoint slide, but the actual data. Thousands of people hours. Because guess what? When you look at partners from the top down, the top 1000 partners, by capability and capacity, not by resale. [00:06:15] Jay McBain: It’s not a ranking of CDW and insight and resale numbers. It is the surrounding. Consulting, design, architecture, implementations, integrations, managed services, all the pieces that’s gonna make the next 20 years run. So when you start to look at this, 98% of these companies are private, so very difficult to get to those numbers and, uh, a ton of research and help from AI and other things to get this. [00:06:41] Jay McBain: But this is it. And if you look at this list, there’s a thousand logos out of the million companies. There’s a thousand logos that drive two thirds of all tech services in the world. $1.07 trillion gets delivered by a thousand companies, but here’s where it gets fun. Those companies in the middle, in blue, the 30 of them deliver more tech services than the next 970. [00:07:08] Jay McBain: Combined the 970 combined in white deliver more tech services. Then the next million combined. So if you think we live in an 80 20 rule or maybe a 99, a 95 5 rule, or a 99 1 rule, we actually live in a 99.9 0.1 parallel principle. These companies spread around the world evenly split across the uh, different regions. [00:07:35] Jay McBain: South Africa, Latin America, they’re all over. They split. They split among types. All of the Venn diagram I just showed from GSIs to VARs to MSPs, to agencies and other types of companies. But this is a really rich list and it’s public. So every company in the world now, if you’re looking at Transactable data, if you’re looking at quantifiable data that you can go put your revenue numbers against, it represents 70 to 80% of every company in this room’s Tam. [00:08:08] Jay McBain: In one piece of research. So what do you do below that? How do you cover a million companies that you can’t afford to put a channel account manager? You can’t afford to write programs directly for well after the top down analysis and all the wallet share and you know exactly where the lowest hanging fruit is for most of your tam. [00:08:28] Jay McBain: The available markets. The obtainable markets. You gotta start from the community level grassroots up. So you need to ask the question for the million companies and the maybe a hundred thousand companies out there, partner companies that are surrounding your customer. These are the seven partners that surround your customer. [00:08:48] Jay McBain: What do they read, where do they go, and who do they follow? Interestingly enough, our industry globally equates to only a thousand watering holes, a thousand companies at the top, a thousand places at the bottom. 35% of this audience we’re talking. Millions of people here love events and there’s 352 of them like this one that they love to go to. [00:09:13] Jay McBain: They love the hallway chats, they love the hotel lobby bar, you know, in a time reminded by the pandemic. They love to be in person. It’s the number one way they’re influenced. So if you don’t have a solid event strategy and you don’t have a community team out giving out socks every week, your competitors might beat you. [00:09:31] Jay McBain: 12% of this audience loves podcasts. It’s the Joe Rogan effect of our industry. And while you know, you may not think the 121 podcasts out there are important, well, you’re missing 12% of your audience. It’s over a million people. If you’re not on a weekly podcast in one of these podcasts in the world, there’s still people that read one of the 106 magazines in the world. [00:09:55] Jay McBain: There are people that love peer groups, associations, they wanna be part of this. There’s 15 different ways people are influenced. And a solid grassroots strategy is how you make this happen. In the last 10 years, we’ve created a number of billionaires. Bottom up. They never had to go talk to la large enterprise. [00:10:15] Jay McBain: They never had to go build out a mid-market strategy. They just went and give away socks and new community marketing. And this has created, I could rip through a bunch of names that became unicorns just in the last couple of years, bottoms up. You go back to your board walking into next year, top down, bottom up. [00:10:34] Jay McBain: You’ve covered a hundred percent of your tam, and now you’ve covered it with names, faces, and places. You haven’t covered it with a flywheel or a theory. And for 44 years, we have gone to our board every fourth quarter with flywheels and theory. Trust me, partners are important. The channel is key to us. [00:10:57] Jay McBain: Well, let’s talk at the point of this granularity, and now we’re getting supported by technology 261 entrepreneurs. Many of them in the room actually here that are driving this ability to succeed with seven partners in every deal to exchange data to be able to exchange telemetry of these prospects to be able to see twice or three times in terms of pipeline of your target addressable market. [00:11:26] Jay McBain: All these ai, um, technologies, agentic technologies are coming into this. It’s all about data. It’s all about quantifiable names, faces, and places. Now none of us should be walking around with flywheels, so let’s flip the flywheels. No. Uh, so we also look at, and I sold PCs for 17 years and that was in the high times of 40% margins for partners. [00:11:55] Jay McBain: But one interesting thing when you study the p and l for broad base of partners around the world, it’s changed pretty significantly in this last 20 year era. What the cloud era did is dropped hardware from what used to be 84% plus the break fix and things that wrap around it of the p and l to now 16% of every partner in the world. [00:12:16] Jay McBain: 84% of their p and l is now software and services. And if you look at profitability, it’s worse. It’s actually 87% is profitability wise. They’ve completely shifted in terms of where they go. Now we look at other parts of our market. I could go through every part of the pie of the slide, but we’re watching each of the companies, and if you can see here, this is what we want to talk about in terms of ultimate partner. [00:12:43] Jay McBain: Microsoft has outgrown AWS for 26 straight quarters. They don’t have a better product. They don’t have a better price, they don’t have better promotion. It’s all place. And I’ll explain why you guess here in the light green line. Exactly. The day that Google went a hundred percent all in partner, every deal, even if a deal didn’t have a partner, one of the 4% of deals that didn’t have a partner, they injected a partner. [00:13:09] Jay McBain: You can see on the left side exactly where they did it. They got to the point of a hundred percent partner driven. Rebuilt their programs, rebuilt their marketplace. Their marketplace is actually larger than Microsoft’s, and they grew faster than Microsoft. A couple of those quarters. It is a partner driven future, and now I have Oracle, which I just walked by as I walked from the hotel. [00:13:31] Jay McBain: Oracle with their RPOs will start to join. Maybe the list of three hyperscalers becomes the list of four in future slides, but that’s a growth slide. Market share is different. AWS early and commanding lead. And it plays out, uh, plays out this way. But we’re at an interesting moment and I stood up six years ago talking about the decade of the ecosystem after we went through a decade of sales starting in 1999 when we all thought we were born to be salespeople. [00:14:02] Jay McBain: We managed territories with our gut. The sales tech stack would have it different, that sales was a science, and we ended the decade 2009, looking at sales very differently in 2009. I remember being at cocktail parties where CMOs would be joking around that 50% of their marketing dollars were wasted. They just didn’t know which 50%. [00:14:23] Jay McBain: And I’ll tell you, that was really funny. In 2009 till every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker who walked in with 15,348 SaaS companies in their MarTech and ad tech stack to solve the problem, every nickel of marketing by 2019 was tracked. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, driving this industry. [00:14:50] Jay McBain: Now, we stood up and said the 28 moments that come before a sale are pretty much all partner driven. In the best case scenario, a vendor might see four of the moments. They might come to your website, maybe they read an ebook, maybe they have a salesperson or a demo that comes in. That’s four outta 28 moments. [00:15:10] Jay McBain: The other 24 are done by partners. Yeah, in the worst case scenario and the majority scenario, you don’t see any of the moments. All 28 happen and you lose a deal without knowing there ever was a deal. So this is it. We need to partner in these moments and we need to inject partners into sales and marketing, like no time before, and this was the time to do it. [00:15:33] Jay McBain: And we got some feedback in the Salesforce state of sales report, which doesn’t involve any partnerships or, or. Channel Chiefs or anything else. This is 5,500 of the biggest CROs in the world that obviously use Salesforce. 89% of salespeople today use partners every day. For the 11% who don’t, 58% plan two within a year. [00:15:57] Jay McBain: If you add those two numbers together, that’s magically the 96% number. They recognize that every deal has partners in it. In 2024, last year, half of the salespeople in the world, every industry, every country. Miss their numbers. For the minority who made their numbers, 84 point percent pointed to partners as the reason why they made their numbers. [00:16:21] Jay McBain: It was the cheat code for sales, so that modern salesperson that knows how to orchestrate a deal, orchestrate the 28 moments with the seven partners and get to that final spot is the winning formula. HubSpot’s number in separate research was 84% in marketing. So we’re starting to see partners in here. We don’t have to shout from the mountaintops. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: These communities like ultimate Partner are working and we’re getting this to the highest levels in the board. And I’ll say that, you know, when 20 years from now half of the companies we know and love fail after we’re done writing the book and blaming the CEO for inventing the thing that ended up killing them, blaming the board for fiduciary responsibility and letting it happen. [00:17:06] Jay McBain: What are the other chapters of the book? And I think it’s all in one slide. We are in this platform economy and the. [00:17:31] Jay McBain: So your battery’s fine. Check, check, check, check. Alright, I’ll, I’ll just hold this in case, but the companies that execute on all five of these areas, well. Not only today become the trillion dollar valued companies, but they become the companies of tomorrow. These will be the fastest growing companies at every level. [00:17:50] Jay McBain: Not only running a platform business, but participating in other platforms. So this is how it breaks out, and there are people at very senior levels, at very big companies that have this now posted in the office of the CEO winning on integrations is everything. We just went through a demographic shift this year where 51% of our buyers are born after 1982. [00:18:15] Jay McBain: Millennials are the number one buyer of the $5 trillion. Their number one buying criteria is not service. Support your price, your brand reputation, it’s integrations. The buy a product, 80% is good as the next one if it works better in their environment. 79% of us won’t buy a car unless it has CarPlay or Android Auto. [00:18:34] Jay McBain: This is an integration world. The company with the most integrations win. Second, there are seven partners that surround the customer. Highly trusted partners. We’re talking, coaching the customer’s, kids soccer team, having a cottage together up at the lake. You know, best men, bate of honors at weddings type of relationships. [00:18:57] Jay McBain: You can’t maybe have all seven, but how does Microsoft beat AWS? They might have had two, three, or four of them saying nice things about them instead of the competition. Winning in service partnerships and channel partnerships changes by category. If you’re selling MarTech, only 10% of it today is resold, so you build more on service partnerships. [00:19:18] Jay McBain: If you’re in cybersecurity today, 91.6% of it is resold. Transacted through partners. So you build a lot of channel partnerships, plus the service partnerships, whatever the mix is in your category, you have to have two or three of those seven people. Saying nice things about you at every stage of the customer journey. [00:19:38] Jay McBain: Now move over to alliances. We have already built the platforms at the hyperscale level. We’ve built the platforms within SaaS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot. Every buyer has a set of platforms that they buy. We’ve now built them in cybersecurity this year out of 6,500 as high as cyber companies, the top five are starting to separate. [00:20:02] Jay McBain: We built it in distribution, which I’ll show in a minute. We’re building it in Telco. This is a platform economy and alliances win and you have alliances with your competitors ’cause you compete in the morning, but you’re best friends by the afternoon. Winning in other platforms is just as important as driving your own. [00:20:20] Jay McBain: And probably the most important part of this is go to market. That sales, that marketing, the 28 moments, the every 30 days forever become all a partner strategy. So there’s still CEOs out there that believe platform is a UI or UX on a bunch of disparate products and things you’ve acquired. There’s still CFOs out there that Think platform is a pricing model, a bundle model of just getting everything under one, you know, subscription price or consumption price. [00:20:51] Jay McBain: And it’s not, platforms are synonymous with partnerships. This is the way forward and there’s no conversation around ai. That doesn’t involve Nvidia over there, an open AI over here and a hyperscaler over there and a SaaS company over here. The seven layer stack wins every single time, and the companies that get this will be the ones that survive this cycle. [00:21:16] Jay McBain: Now, flipping over to marketplaces. So we had written research that, um, about five years ago that marketplaces were going to grow at 82% compounded. Yeah, probably one of the most accurate predictions we ever made, because it happened, we, we predicted that, uh, we were gonna get up to about $85 billion. Well, now we’ve extended that to 2030, so we’re gonna get up to $163 billion, and the thing that we’re watching is in green. [00:21:46] Jay McBain: If 96% of these deals are partner assisted in some way, how is the economics of partnering going to work? We predicted that 50% of deals by 2027. Would be partner funded in some way. Private offers multi-partner offers distributor sellers of record, and now that extends to 59% by 2030, the most senior leader of the biggest marketplace AWS, just said to us they’re gonna probably make these numbers on their own. [00:22:14] Jay McBain: And he asked what their two competitors are doing. So he’s telling us that we under called this. Now when you look at each of the press releases, and this is the AWS Billion Dollar Club. Every one of the companies on the left have issued a press release that they’re in the billion dollar club. Some of them are in the multi-billions, but I want you to double click on this press release. [00:22:35] Jay McBain: I’m quoted in here somewhere, but as CrowdStrike is building the marketplace at 91% compounded, they’re almost doubling their revenue every single year. They’re growing the partner funding, in this case, distributor funding by 3548%. Almost triple digit growth in marketplace is translating into almost quadruple digit growth in funding. [00:23:01] Jay McBain: And you see that over and over again as, as Splunk hit three, uh, billion dollars. The same. Salesforce hit $2 billion on AWS in Ulti, 18 months. They joined in October 20, 23, and 18 months later, they’re already at $2 billion. But now you’re seeing at Salesforce, which by the way. Grew up to $40 billion in revenue direct, almost not a nickel in resell. [00:23:28] Jay McBain: Made it really difficult for VARs and managed service providers to work with Salesforce because they couldn’t understand how to add services to something they didn’t book the revenue for. While $40 billion companies now seeing 70% of their deals come through partners. So this is just the world that we’re in. [00:23:44] Jay McBain: It doesn’t matter who you are and what industry you’re in, this takes place. But now we’re starting to see for the first time. Partners join the billion dollar club. So you wonder about partnering and all this funding and everything that’s working through Now you’re seeing press releases and companies that are redoing their LinkedIn branding about joining this illustrious club without a product to sell and all the services that wrap around it. [00:24:10] Jay McBain: So the opening session on Microsoft was interesting because there’s been a number of changes that Microsoft has done just in the last 30 days. One is they cut distribution by two thirds going from 180 distributors to 62. They cut out any small partner lower than a thousand dollars, and that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s over a hundred thousand partners that get deed tightening the long tail. [00:24:38] Jay McBain: They we’re the first to really put a global point system in place three years ago. They went to the new commerce experience. If you remember, all kinds of changes being led by. The biggest company for the channel. And so when we’re studying marketplaces, we’re not just studying the three hyperscalers, we’re studying what TD Cynic is doing with Stream One Ingram’s doing with Advant Advantage Aerosphere. [00:25:01] Jay McBain: Also, we’re watching what PAX eight, who by the way, is the 365 bestseller for Microsoft in the world. They are the cybersecurity leader for Microsoft in the world and the copilot. Leader in the world for Microsoft and Partner of the Year for Microsoft. So we’re watching what the cloud platforms are doing, watching what the Telco are doing, which is 25 cents out of every dollar, if you remember that pie chart, watching what the biggest resellers are converting themselves into. [00:25:30] Jay McBain: Vince just mentioned, you know, SHI in the changes there watching the managed services market and the leaders there, what they’re doing in terms of how this industry’s moving forward. By the way, managed services at $608 billion this year. Is one and a half times larger than the SaaS industry overall. [00:25:48] Jay McBain: It’s also one and a half times larger than all the hyperscalers combined. Oracle, Alibaba, IBM, all the way down. This is a massive market and it makes up 15 to 20 cents of every dollar the customer spend. We’re watching that industry hit a trillion dollars by the end of the decade, and we’re watching 150 different marketplace development platforms, the distribution of our industry, which today is 70.1% indirect. [00:26:13] Jay McBain: We’re starting to see that number, uh, solidify in terms of marketplaces as well. Watching distributors go from that linear warehouse in a bank to this orchestration model, watching some of the biggest players as the world comes around, platforms, it tightens around the place. So Caresoft, uh, from from here is the sixth biggest distributor in the world. [00:26:40] Jay McBain: Just shows you how big the. You know, biggest client in the world is that they serve. But understand that we’re publishing the distributor 500 list, but it’ll be the same thing. That little group in blue in the middle today, you know, drives almost two thirds of the market. So what happens in all this next stage in terms of where the dollars change hands. [00:27:07] Jay McBain: And the economics of partnering themselves are going through the most radical shift that we’ve seen ever. So back to the nineties, and, and for those of you that have been channel chiefs and running programs, we went to work every day. You know, everything’s on fire. We’re trying to check hundred boxes, trying to make our program 10% better than our competitors. [00:27:30] Jay McBain: Hey, we gotta fix our deal registration program today, and our incentives are outta whack or training programs or. You know, not where they need to be. Our certification, you know, this was the life of, uh, of a channel chief. Everybody thought we were just out drinking in the Caribbean with our best partners, but we were under the weight of this. [00:27:49] Jay McBain: But something interesting has happened is that we turned around and put the customer at the middle of our programs to say that those 28 moments in green before the sale are really, really important. And the seven partners who participate are really important. Understanding. The customer’s gonna buy a seven layer stack. [00:28:09] Jay McBain: They’re gonna buy it With these seven partners, the procurement stage is much different. The growth of marketplaces, the growth of direct in some of these areas, and then long term every 30 days forever in a managed service, implementations, integrations, how you upsell, cross-sell, enrich a deal changes. So how would you build a program that’s wrapped around the customer instead of the vendor? [00:28:35] Jay McBain: And we’re starting to hear our partners shout back to us. These are global surveys, big numbers, but over half of our partners, regardless of type, are selling consulting to their customer. Over half are designing architecting deals. A third of them are trying to be system integrators showing up at those implementation integration moments. [00:28:55] Jay McBain: Two thirds of them are doing managed services, but the shocking one here is 44% of our partners, regardless of type, are coding. They’re building agents and they’re out helping their customer at that level. So this is the modern partner that says, don’t typecast me. You may have thought of me in your program. [00:29:14] Jay McBain: You might have me slotted as a var. Well, I do 3.2 things, and if I don’t get access to those resources, if you don’t walk me to that room, I’m not gonna do them with you. You may have me as a managed service provider that’s only in the morning. By the afternoon I’m coding, and by the next morning I’m implementing and consulting. [00:29:33] Jay McBain: So again, a partner’s not a partner. That Venn diagram is a very loose one now, as every partner on there is doing 3.2 different business models. And again, they’re telling us for 43 years, they said, I want more leads this year it changed. For the first time, I want to be recognized and incentivized as more than just a cash register for you. [00:29:57] Jay McBain: I want you to recognize when I’m consulting, when I’m designing, when you’re winning deals, because of my wonderful services, by the way, we asked the follow up question, well, where should we spend our money with you? And they overwhelmingly say, in the consulting stage, you win and lose deals. Not at moment 28. [00:30:18] Jay McBain: We’re not buying a pack of gum at the gas station. This is a considered purchase. You win deals from moment 12 through 16 and I’m gonna show you a picture of that later, and they say, you better be spending your money there, or you’re not gonna win your fair share or more than your fair share of deals. [00:30:36] Jay McBain: The shocking thing about this is that Microsoft, when they went to the point system, lifted two thirds of all the money, tens of billions of dollars, and put it post-sale, and we were all scratching our heads going. Well, if the partners are asking for it there, and it seems like to beat your biggest competitors, you want to win there. [00:30:54] Jay McBain: Why would you spend the money on renewal? Well, they went to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and the people who lift trillions of dollars of pension funds and said, if we renew deals at 108%, we become a cash machine for you. And we think that’s more valuable than a company coming out with a new cell phone in September and selling a lot of them by Christmas every year. [00:31:18] Jay McBain: The industry. And by the way, wall Street responded, Microsoft has been more valuable than Apple since. So we talk in this now multiplier language, and these are reports that we write, uh, at AMIA at canals. But talking about the partner opportunity in that customer cycle, the $6 and 40 cents you can make for every dollar of consumption, or the $7 and 5 cents you can make the $8 and 45 cents you can make. [00:31:46] Jay McBain: There’s over 24 companies speaking at this level now, and guess what? It’s not just cloud or software companies. Hardware companies are starting to speak in this language, and on January 25th, Cisco, you know, probably second to Microsoft in terms of trust built with the channel globally is moving to a full point system. [00:32:09] Jay McBain: So these are the changes that happen fast. But your QBR with your partners now less about drinking beers at the hotel lobby bar and talking dollar by dollar where these opportunities are. So if you’re doing 3.2 of these things, let’s build out a, uh, a play where you can make $3 for every dollar that we make. [00:32:28] Jay McBain: And you make that profitably. You make it in sticky, highly retained business, and that’s the model. ’cause if you make $3 for every dollar. We make, you’re gonna win Partner of the year, and if you win partner of the year, that piece of glass that you win on stage, by the time you get back to your table, you’re gonna have three offers to buy your business. [00:32:51] Jay McBain: CDW just bought a w. S’s Partner of the Year. Insight bought Google’s eight time partner of the year. Presidio bought ServiceNow’s, partner of the year over and over and over again. So I’m at Octane, I’m at CrowdStrike, I’m at all these events in Vegas every week. I’m watching these partners of the year. [00:33:05] Jay McBain: And I’m watching as the big resellers. I’m watching as the GSIs and the m and a folks are surrounding their table after, and they’re selling their businesses for SaaS level valuations. Not the one-to-one service valuation. They’re getting multiples because this is the new future of our industry. This is platform economics. [00:33:25] Jay McBain: This is winning and platforms for partners. Now, like Vince, I spent 20 minutes without talking about ai, but we have to talk about ai. So the next 20 years as it plays out is gonna play out in phases. And the first thing you know to get it out of the way. The first two years since that March of 23, has been underwhelming, to say the least. [00:33:47] Jay McBain: It’s been disappointing. All the companies that should have won the biggest in AI have been the most disappointing. It’s underperformed the s and p by a considerable amount in terms of where we are. And it goes back to this. We always overestimate the first two years, but we underestimate the first 10. [00:34:07] Jay McBain: If you wanna be the point in time person and go look at that 1983 PC or the 1995 internet or that 2007 iPhone or that whatever point in time you wanna look at, or if you want to talk about hallucinations or where chat chip ET version five is version, as opposed to where it’s going to be as it improves every six months here on in. [00:34:30] Jay McBain: But the fact of the matter is, it’s been a consumer trend. Nvidia got to be the most valuable company in the world. OpenAI was the first company to 2 billion users, uh, in that amount of speed. It’s the fastest growing product ever in history, and it’s been a consumer win this trillions of dollars to get it thrown around in the press releases. [00:34:49] Jay McBain: They’re going out every day, you know, open ai, signing up somebody new or Nvidia, investing in somebody new almost every single day in hundreds of billions of dollars. It is all happening really on the consumer side. So we got a little bit worried and said, is that 96% of surround gonna work in ag agentic ai? [00:35:10] Jay McBain: So we went and asked, and the good news is 88% of end customers are using partners to work through their ag agentic strategy. Even though they’re moving slow, they’re actually using partners. But what’s interesting from a partner perspective, and this is new research that out till 2030. This is the number one services opportunity in the entire tech or telco industry. [00:35:34] Jay McBain: 35.3% compounded growth ending at $267 billion in services. Companies are rebuilding themselves, building out practices, and getting on this train and figuring out which vendors they should hook their caboose to as those trains leave the station. But it kind of plays out like this. So in the next three to five years, we’re in this generative, moving into agentic phase. [00:36:01] Jay McBain: Every partner thinks internally first, the sales and marketing. They’re thinking about their invoicing and billing. They’re thinking about their service tickets. They’re thinking about creating a business that’s 10% better than their competitors, taking that knowledge into their customers and drive in business. [00:36:17] Jay McBain: But we understand that ag agentic AI, as it’s going to play out is not a product. A couple of years ago, we thought maybe a copilot or an agent force or something was going to be the product that everybody needed to buy, and it’s not a product, it’s gonna show up as a feature. So you go back in the history of feature ads and it’s gonna show up in software. [00:36:38] Jay McBain: So if you’re calling in SMB, maybe you’re calling on a restaurant. The restaurant isn’t gonna call OpenAI or call Microsoft or call Nvidia directly. They’re running their restaurant. And they may have chosen a platform like Toast Square, Clover, whatever iPads people are running around with, runs on a platform that does everything in their business, does staffing, does food ordering, works with Uber Eats, does everything end to end? [00:37:08] Jay McBain: They’re gonna wait to one of those platforms, dries out agent AI for them, and can run the restaurant more effectively, less human capital and more consistently, but they wait for the SaaS platform as you get larger. A hundred, 150 people. You have vice presidents. Each of those vice presidents already have a SaaS stack. [00:37:28] Jay McBain: I talked about Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, et cetera. They’ve already built that seven layer model and in some cases it’s 70 layers. But the fact is, is they’re gonna wait for those SaaS layers to deliver ag agentic to them. So this is how it’s gonna play out for the next three and a half, three to five years. [00:37:45] Jay McBain: And partners are realizing that many of them were slow to pick up SaaS ’cause they didn’t resell it. Well now to win in this next three to half, three to five years, you’re gonna have to play in this environment. When you start looking out from here, the next generation, you know, kind of five through 15 years gets interesting in more of a physical sense. [00:38:06] Jay McBain: Where I was yesterday talking about every IOT device that now is internet access, starts to get access to large language models. Every little sensor, every camera, everything that’s out there starts to get smart. But there’s a point. The first trillionaire, I believe, will be created here. Elon’s already halfway there. [00:38:24] Jay McBain: Um, but when Bill Gates thought there was gonna be a PC in every home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 to hobbyists, that created the richest person in the world for 20 years, there will be a humanoid in every home. There’s gonna be a point in time that you’re out having drinks with your friends, and somebody’s gonna say, the early adopter of your friends is gonna say. [00:38:46] Jay McBain: I haven’t done the dishes in six weeks. I haven’t done the laundry. I haven’t made my bed. I haven’t mowed the lawn. When they say that, you’re gonna say, well, how? And they’re gonna say, well, this year I didn’t buy a new car, but I went to the car dealership and I bought this. So we’re very close to the dexterity needed. [00:39:05] Jay McBain: We’ve got the large language models. Now. The chat, GPT version 10 by then is going to make an insane, and every house is gonna have one of the. [00:39:17] Jay McBain: This is the promise of ai. It’s not humanoid robots, it’s not agents. It’s this. 99% of the world’s business data has not been trained or tuned into models yet. Again, this is the slow moving business. If you want to think about the 99% of business data, every flight we’ve all taken in this room sits on a saber system that was put in place in 1964. [00:39:43] Jay McBain: Every banking transaction, we’ve all made, every withdrawal, every deposit sits on an IBM mainframe put in place in the sixties or seventies. 83% of this data sits in cold storage at the edge. It’s not ready to be moved. It’s not cleansed, it’s not, um, indexed. It’s not in any format or sitting on any infrastructure that a large language model will be able to gobble up the data. [00:40:10] Jay McBain: None of the workflows, none of the programming on top of that data is yet ready. So this is your 10 to 20 year arc of this era that chat bot today when they cancel your flight is cute. It’s empathetic, it feels bad for you, or at least it seems to, but it can’t do anything. It can’t book you the Marriott and get you an Uber and then a 5:00 AM flight the next morning. [00:40:34] Jay McBain: It can’t do any of that. But more importantly, it doesn’t know who you are. I’ve got 53 years of flights under my belt and they, I’m the person that get me within six hours of my kids and get me a one-way Hertz rental. You know, if there’s bad weather in Miami, get me to Tampa, get me a Hertz, I’m driving home, I’m gonna make it home. [00:40:56] Jay McBain: I’m not the 5:00 AM get me a hotel person. They would know that if they picked up the flights that I’ve taken in the past. Each of us are different. When you get access to the business data and you become ag agentic, everything changes. Every industry changes because of this around the customers. When you ask about this 35% growth, working on that data, working in traditional consulting and design and implementation, working in the $7 trillion of infrastructure, storage, compute, networking, that’s gonna be around, this is a massive opportunity. [00:41:30] Jay McBain: Services are gonna continue to outgrow products. Probably for the next five to 10 years because of this, and I’m gonna finish here. So we talked a lot about quantifying names, faces, places, and I think where we failed the most as ultimate partners is underneath the tam, which every one of our CEOs knows to the decimal point underneath the TAM that our board thinks they’re chasing. [00:41:59] Jay McBain: We’ve done a very poor job. Of talking about the available markets and obtainable markets underneath it, we, we’ve shown them theory. We’ve shown them a bunch of, you know, really smart stuff, and PowerPoint slides up the wazoo, but we’ve never quantified it for them. If they wanna win, if they want to get access, if they want to double their pipeline, triple their pipeline, if they wanna start winning more deals, if they wanna win deals that are three times larger, they close two times faster. [00:42:31] Jay McBain: And they renew 15% larger. They have to get into the available and obtainable markets. So just in the last couple weeks I spoke at Cribble, I spoke at Octane, I spoke at CrowdStrike Falcon. All three of those companies at the CEO level, main stage use those exact three numbers, three x, two x, 15%. That’s the language of platforms, and they’re investing millions and millions and millions of dollars on teams. [00:42:59] Jay McBain: To go build out the Sam Andal in name spaces and places. So you’ve heard me talk about these 28 moments a lot. They’re the ones that you spend when you buy a car. Some people spend one moment and they drive to the Cadillac dealership. ’cause Larry’s been, you know, taking care of the family for 50 years. [00:43:18] Jay McBain: Some people spend 50 moments like I do, watching every YouTube video and every, you know, thing on the internet. I clear the internet cover to cover. But the fact is, is every deal averages around these 28 moments. Your customer, there’s 13 members of the buying committee today. There’s seven partners and they’re buying seven things. [00:43:37] Jay McBain: There’s 27 things orchestrating inside these 28 moments. And where and how they all take place is a story of partnering. So a couple of years ago, canals. Latin for channel was acquired by amia, which is a part of Informa Tech Target, which is majority owned by Informa. All that being said, there’s hundreds of magazines that we have. [00:44:00] Jay McBain: There’s hundreds of events that we run. If somebody’s buying cybersecurity, they probably went to Black Hat or they probably went to GI Tech. One of these events we run, or one of the magazines. So we pick up these signals, these buyer intent signals as a company. Why did they wanna, um, buy a, uh, a Canals, which was a, you know, a small analyst firm around channels? [00:44:22] Jay McBain: They understood this as well. The 28 moments look a lot like this when marketers and salespeople are busy filling in the spots of every deal. And by the way, this is a real deal. AstraZeneca came in to spend millions of dollars on ASAP transformation, and you can start to see as the customer got smart. [00:44:45] Jay McBain: The eBooks, they read the podcasts, they listened to the events they went to. You start to see how this played out over the long term. But the thing we’ve never had in our industry is the light blue boxes. This deal was won and lost in December. In this particular case, NTT software won and Yash came in and sold the customer five projects. [00:45:07] Jay McBain: The millions of dollars that were going to be spent were solved here. The design and architecture work was all done here. A couple of ISVs You see in light blue came in right at the end, deal was closed in April. You see the six month cycle. But what if you could fill in every one of the 28 boxes in every single customer prospect that your sales and marketing team have? [00:45:30] Jay McBain: But here’s the brilliance of this. Those light blue boxes didn’t win the deals there. They won the deals months before that. So when NTT and Software one walked into this deal. They probably won the deal back in October and they had to go through the redlining. They had to go through the contracting, they had to go through all the stuff and the Gantt chart to get started. [00:45:54] Jay McBain: But while your CMO is getting all excited about somebody reading an ebook and triggering an MQL that the sales team doesn’t want, ’cause it’s not qualified, it’s not sales qualified, you walk in and say, no, no. This is a multimillion deal, dollar deal. It’s AstraZeneca. I know the five partners that are coming in in December to solidify the seven layers, and you’re walking in at the same time as the CMOs bragging about an ebook. [00:46:21] Jay McBain: This changes everything. If we could get to this level of data about every dollar of our tam, we not only outgrow our competitors, we become the platforms of the next generation. Partnering and ultimate partnering is all here. And this is what we’re doing in this room. This is what we’re doing over these couple of days, and this is what, uh, the mission that Vince is leading. [00:46:43] Jay McBain: Thank you so much. [00:46:47] Vince Menzione: Woo. Day in the house. Good to see you my friend. Good to see you. Oh, we’re gonna spend a couple minutes. Um, I’m put you in the second seat. We’re gonna put, we’re gonna make it sit fireside for a minute. Uh, that was intense. It was pretty incredible actually, Jay. And so I’m, I think I wanna open it up ’cause we only have a few minutes just to, any questions? [00:47:06] Vince Menzione: I’m sure people are just digesting. We already have one up here. See, [00:47:09] Question: Jay knows I’m [00:47:10] Vince Menzione: a question. I love it. We, I don’t think we have any I can grab a mic, a roving mic. I could be a roving mic person. Hold on. We can do this. This is not on. [00:47:25] Vince Menzione: Test, test. Yes it is. Yeah. [00:47:26] Question: Theresa Carriol dared me to ask a question and I say, you don’t have to dare me. You know, I’m going to Anyway. Um, so Jay, of the point of view that with all of the new AI players that strategic alliances is again having a moment, and I was curious your point of view on what you’re seeing around this emergence and trend of strategic alliances and strategic alliance management. [00:47:52] Question: As compared to channel management. And what are you seeing in terms of large vendors like AWS investing in that strategic alliance role versus that channel role training, enablement, measurement, all that good stuff? [00:48:06] Jay McBain: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. So when I told the story about toast at the restaurant or Square or Clover, they’re not call, they’re not gonna call open AI or Nvidia themselves either. [00:48:17] Jay McBain: When you look out at the 250,000 ISVs. That make up this AI stack, there is the layers that happen there. So the Alliance with AWS, the alliance they have with Microsoft or Google is going to be how they generate agent AI in their platforms. So when I talk about a seven layer stack, the average deal being seven layers, AI is gonna drive this to nine, and then 11, then probably 13. [00:48:44] Jay McBain: So in terms of how alliances work, I had it up there as one of the five core strategies, and I think it’s pretty even. You can have the best alliances in the world, but if the seven partners trusted by the customer don’t know what that alliance is and the benefits to the customer and never mention it, it’s all for Naugh. [00:49:00] Jay McBain: If you’re go-to market, you’re co-selling, your co-marketing strategies are not built around that alliance. It’s all for naught. If the integration and the co-innovation, the co-development, the all the co-creation work that’s done inside these alliances isn’t translated to customer outcomes, it’s all for naugh. [00:49:17] Jay McBain: These are all five parallel swim lanes. All five are absolutely critically needed. And I think they’re all five pretty equally weighted in terms of needing each other. Yes. To be successful in the era of platforms. Yeah. [00:49:32] Vince Menzione: And the problem is they’re all stove pipe today. If, if at all. Yeah. Maintained, right. [00:49:36] Vince Menzione: Alliances is an example. Channels and other example. They don’t talk to one another. Judge any, we’ve got a mic up here if anybody else has. Yep. We have some questions here, Jacqueline. [00:49:51] Question: So when we’re developing our channel programs, any advice on, you know, what’s the shift that we should make six months from now, a year from now? The historical has been bronze, silver, gold, right? And you’ve got your deal registration, but what’s the future look like? [00:50:05] Jay McBain: Yeah, so I mean, the programs are, are changing to, to the point where the customer should be in the middle and realizing the seven partners you need to win the deal. [00:50:15] Jay McBain: And depending on what category of product you’re in, security, how much you rely on resell, 91.6%. You know, the channel partners are gonna be critical where the customer spends the money. And if you’re adding friction to that process, you’re adding friction in terms of your growth. So you know, if you’re in cybersecurity, you have to have a pretty wide open reseller model. [00:50:39] Jay McBain: You have to have a wide open distribution model, and you have to make sure you’re there at that point of sale. While at the same time, considering the other six partners at moment 12 who are in either saying nice things about you or not, the customer might even be starting with you. ’cause there is actually one thing that I didn’t mention when I showed the 28 moments filled in. [00:51:00] Jay McBain: You’ll notice that the customer went to AWS twice direct. AWS lost the deal. Microsoft won the deal software. One is Microsoft’s biggest reseller in the world. They just acquired crayon. NTT who, who loves both had their Microsoft team go in. [00:51:18] Question: Mm. [00:51:19] Jay McBain: So I think that they went to AWS thinking it was A-W-S-S-A-P, you know, kind of starting this seven layer stack. [00:51:25] Jay McBain: I think they finished those, you know, critical moments in the middle looking at it. And then they went back to AWS kind of going probably WWTF. Yeah. What we thought was happening isn’t actually the outcome that was painted by our most trusted people. So, you know, to answer your question, listen to your partners. [00:51:43] Jay McBain: They want to be recognized for the other things they’re doing. You can’t be spending a hundred percent of the dollars at the point of sale. You gotta have a point of system that recognizes the point of sale, maybe even gold, silver, bronze, but recognizing that you’re paying for these other moments as well. [00:51:57] Jay McBain: Paying for alliances, paying for integrations and everything else, uh, in the cyber stack. And, um, you know, recognizing also the top 1000. So if I took your tam. And I overlaid those thousand logos. I would be walking into 2026 the best I could of showing my company logo by logo, where 80% of our TAM sits as wallet share, not by revenue. [00:52:25] Jay McBain: Remember, a million dollar partner is not a million dollar partner. One of them sells 1.2 million in our category. We should buy them a baseball cap and have ’em sit in the front row of our event. One of them sells $10 million and only sells our stuff if the customer asks. So my company should be looking at that $9 million opportunity and making sure my programs are writing the checks and my coverage. [00:52:48] Jay McBain: My capacity and capability planning is getting obsessed over that $9 million. My farmers can go over there, my hunters can go over here, and I should be submitting a list of a thousand sorted in descending order of opportunity. Of where my company can write program dollars into. [00:53:07] Vince Menzione: Great answer. All right. I, I do wanna be cognizant of time and the, all the other sessions we have. [00:53:14] Vince Menzione: So we’ll just take one other question if there are any here and if not, we’ll let I know. Jay, you’re gonna be mingling around for a little while before your flight. I’m [00:53:21] Jay McBain: here the whole day. [00:53:22] Vince Menzione: You, you’re the whole day. I see that Jay’s here the whole day. So if you have any other questions and, and, uh, sharing the deck is that. [00:53:29] Vince Menzione: Yep. Alright. We have permission to share the deck with the each of you as well. [00:53:34] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you very much everyone. Jay. Great to have you.

You launched the experiments. You spent the budget. And now leadership wants answers. And suddenly every QBR feels like a fire drill.This is Stage 2 of the revenue leader's transformation—the moment when activity is high, effort is real, but impact is frustratingly hard to prove. You're working harder than ever, yet you can't confidently tie what your team is doing to pipeline, revenue, or real ROI.This episode is part two of a five-part series exploring the journey B2B revenue leaders go through as they move from reactive execution to full revenue visibility and executive-level confidence. Each stage represents a breaking point, where leaders either confront the real problem or stay stuck explaining away the same issues quarter after quarter.In this episode, we unpack Stage 2: The QBR Fire Drill—the phase where credibility, confidence, and career momentum are quietly put at risk.You're likely in Stage 2 if you've ever said, “Board decks take days to build and still don't tell a clean story.”What We Cover in This Episode:Why QBRs become fire drills and what that reveals about your data foundationThe hidden cost of stitching together spreadsheets, slide decks, and conflicting reportsHow legacy GTM data models quietly destroy credibility at the executive levelThe most common data architecture flaw preventing revenue visibility (and why it's so easy to miss)The moment leaders realize they can't survive another quarter operating this wayWhat it takes to shift from lagging, backward-looking metrics to forward-looking visibilityThis stage forces a hard reckoning.Not just with your systems, but with your willingness to challenge the status quo, speak uncomfortable truths, and admit that the current way of measuring GTM is no longer good enough.

In this episode of the Thread Podcast, Justin talks with Tyler Will, VP of GTM Strategy & Ops at Intercom, about how modern revenue organizations are evolving in an era defined by AI, PLG-to-enterprise transitions, and go-to-market speed.Tyler shares his journey from economic consulting and Bain, to GTM leadership at LinkedIn, to now scaling RevOps at Intercom. He breaks down the key differences between operating at a 20,000-person giant and a high-velocity SaaS company, why balancing PLG and enterprise sales motions requires intentional system and process design, and how Intercom rebuilt its routing, sales assist, and pricing guardrails to accelerate ACVs and bring clarity back to the customer journey.The conversation digs into how AI is reshaping selling—not by replacing reps, but by giving them time back. From auto-generating QBR decks to enriching data behind the scenes, Tyler explains why AI actually makes sales more human, not less. He also shares why the next generation of RevOps talent will shift from narrow specialists to curious generalists who leverage AI, understand the full GTM workflow, and act as true co-owners of the business.This is a high-signal episode for anyone thinking about PLG evolution, GTM design, AI-powered sales, and how RevOps must evolve to meet the moment.Chapters00:00 — Intro + Tyler's Background Justin sets up the episode; Tyler shares his path from consulting and Bain to LinkedIn to Intercom.02:00 — Early Career Lessons: From Consulting to GTM How economic consulting and strategy work shaped Tyler's analytical and leadership approach.03:30 — Operating at Scale: LinkedIn vs. Intercom Why large enterprise GTM is committee-driven, and how smaller SaaS companies require speed, adaptability, and influence without authority.06:00 — PLG, Sales-Led, and the Middle Ground How Intercom balances self-serve PLG customers with enterprise sales—and why a “Sales Assist” motion has become critical.08:30 — Redesigning Routing, Guardrails & ACV Growth How simplifying and separating motions helped Intercom lift sales-led logos and drive higher ACVs.10:45 — AI as an Amplifier, Not a Replacement Why AI frees reps from low-value tasks (QBR decks, data cleanup) and makes room for more human selling.13:20 — The Real Risk: Overvaluing Human Busywork Why reps aren't losing points for doing things manually—and why AI should elevate the conversation, not eliminate the human.15:00 — The Future of RevOps Careers Why RevOps is shifting from specialists to generalists who use AI, understand systems, and act like business owners.18:00 — What RevOps Leaders Should Learn Next Tyler's advice to aspiring operators—how to become more valuable by being curious across the entire GTM ecosystem.19:30 — Closing Thoughts + Intercom Hiring Tyler encourages RevOps pros to embrace the field and shape the future; Justin wraps the conversation.

After our last session in this series, many sellers now know how to write prompts. But not many know how to build full AI agents that run workflows end-to-end, safely, repeatably, and with human guardrails.For part 3 of our 3-part AI for Sales series, we took the final step: moving from single-use prompts to automated agents.Learn what an agent actually is (in seller terms), which tasks are safe to automate, and how to design workflows with the right triggers, constraints, and review steps in place.We also walked through plug-and-play agent examples, from post-call follow-up generators to CRM clean-up agents, that you can start testing immediately.You'll Learn:Plain-English definitions of agents and where they fit in salesA blueprint for safely automating workflows with guardrails and reviewsReady-to-use agent examples (follow-ups, briefs, CRM hygiene, QBR prep)The Speakers:Jed Mahrle and Greg KarelitzIf you want to catch The Daily Sales Show live, join hereFollow Sell Better to get the latest actionable tactics from sales pros at the top of their gameExplore our YouTube ChannelThank you to our sponsors: Gong and PredictLeads

Una delle più brutte partite di regular season mai viste. I Vikings vengono asfaltati 26-0 dai Seahawks. Minnesota per la seconda settimana consecutiva manda in campo un QB che termina il match sotto la soglia dei 40 punti di QBR. Erano quasi 20 anni che i Vikings non chiudevano una partita senza segnare. Brosmer riesce a far peggio di McCarthy, non entra praticamente mai in partita, anche perché è incapace di andare oltre la prima lettura e chiude con un 19 su 30 per 126 misere yard e ben 4 intercetto. Emblematica la prima, un pick-six su quarto e uno con una palla senza senso lanciata sottomano per sfuggire al sack direttamente tra le braccia di Ernest Jones. Unica nota positiva, come spesso accade nelle ultime settimane, la difesa di Flores, che guidata da Dallas Turner e Eric Wilson mette in seria difficoltà Darnold e contiene abbastanza bene il forte gioco di corsa degli uomini di coach Macdonald, cancellando dal campo anche il miglior ricevitore della lega quest'anno, Jaxon Smith-Njigba. Ora sfida il prossimo fine settimana con gli Washington Commanders. Oggi nel Valhalla insieme a Francesco Porciello, direttamente da Seahawks Nest Italia, c'è al microfono Simone Faccini. 

Buck Belue is back for Episode 166 of Buck’s Beat Podcast, and it’s rivalry time in the Peach State — Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate. Georgia has won seven straight, but last year’s eight-OT battle changed everything, and the Bulldogs know it. In this episode, Buck previews every angle of Georgia Tech vs. Georgia at Mercedes-Benz Stadium — matchups, key players, coaching edges, and the blueprint for a Jackets upset. ⛓ RIVALRY BREAKDOWN • Why last year’s 8-OT thriller changed Georgia’s mindset • Brent Key’s message after the Pitt loss — pressure off, rivalry on • The matchup of the night: Haynes King vs. UGA’s defense • King’s chase for 1,000 rushing yards & Tech QB history • How UGA plans to contain QB power, counter, RPO & designed runs

On Tuesday's   Daily Puck Drop, Jason “Puck” Puckett starts off Tuesday's show with headlines covering new injuries to the Seahawks secondary, the Cougars victorious in Maui, trade in MLB, Sheduer Sanders starting gig, and Pro Football Semifinalists announced.  Then, Puck turns his attention to college football and John Canzano from JohnCanzano.comdrops by for his weekly appearance.  They preview Washington vs. Oregon, future of Jedd Fisch, the Big Ten not accepting the Pac-12 schools, the Lane Kiffin mess, Kalen DeBoer and Penn State and breaking news on Oregon State's coaching search and could they get a major assist from the Oregon Ducks??Over to the NFL Puck goes next and he chats with Danny Kelly from The Ringer.  They revisit the Seahawks lackluster win vs. the Titans,  the coaching job of Brian Schottenheimer in Dallas, Pete Carroll's future, Geno Smith flipping off fans, the Seahawks desire for a number two receiver, Sheduer Sanders miserable QBR and Danny hates Thanksgiving food! “On This Day…”  The Kennedy's make multiple appearances, Joe Dimmagio and KING 5 TV! Puck wraps up the show with, “Hey, What the Puck!?”    John Schneider has taken calculated risks last two offseason's and it's paying off. (1:00) Puck (4:43) John Canzano, JohnCanzano.com (41:52) Danny Kelly, The Ringer (1:17:08) “On this Day….”  (1:23:32) “Hey, What the Puck!?” 

It's Overreaction Monday LIVE on The Sportsocracy from ESPN Radio Asheville, and Week 12 gave us EVERYTHING — chaos, upsets, blowouts, bad QB play, and fanbases losing their minds.Cowboy Zach Hurst join Tank Spencer and Jeremy Greene for a special kickoff to the holiday week.

Download The Objection Handling Guidebook for Customer Success: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/offers/Z6Ng26vg/checkoutIn this episode of The Customer Success Pro Podcast, Anika Zubair takes a deep dive into one of the most misunderstood tools in Customer Success: the Quarterly Business Review (QBR). Too often, QBRs turn into reporting sessions that fail to create impact or executive alignment. She shares her 5-step framework to elevate your QBRs from tactical updates to strategic, revenue-focused discussions that executives actually care about. You'll learn how to connect product outcomes to business value, align with executive priorities, and close each review with a clear call to action that opens commercial doors. The episode wraps up with a practical challenge for listeners to apply the framework and transform their next QBR into a partnership-driven session that drives growth.Chapters00:00 Welcome to The Customer Success Pro Podcast03:14 Why Most Business Reviews Fall Flat07:57 The Missed Opportunity in Every Business Review10:15 Mistake #1 – Treating QBRs Like Usage Reports12:36 Speaking the Executive Language: Revenue, Risk, and Efficiency14:52 Mistake #2 – Talking At the Customer Instead of With Them17:13 Mistake #3 – Ending Without a Clear Next Step19:28 Turning Objections into Opportunities21:41 The 5-Step Framework for Value-Led Business Reviews35:42 Listener Challenge: Reframe Your Next QBR37:41 Final ThoughtsConnect with Anika Zubair:Website: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/anikazubair/CSM RevUP Academy: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/revupGrab our FREE resources here: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/resources Want to be our next podcast guest? Apply here: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/podcast-guest Book Anika as a speaker at your next team event: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/team-event

Ty Simpson or Fernando Mendoza for 2026 NFL Draft QB1? I break down who fits today's NFL, how the current draft order shapes the board, and what it means for dynasty fantasy football. We hit Ty's rise at Bama, Mendoza's late-game composure at Indiana, why Dante Moore likely waits, and how metrics like QBR, PFF grade, and pressure-to-sack rate separate these two. Hit

Send us a text This is a practical, no-fluff masterclass on ten proven methods to finally take control of your to-do list—Pomodoro, Bullet Journaling, the Seinfeld streak, ABCDE prioritisation, RPM, Timeboxing, the 2-Minute Rule, Ivy Lee, Eat the Frog, and Time Tracking. You'll build a plug-and-play daily routine, get troubleshooting for real-world roadblocks, and hear corporate mirrors—from QBR weeks and Ramadan campaign sprints to bank system upgrades—so you can apply everything at work tomorrow. We finish with a 7-day challenge to lock the habit in and ship more of what matters. حلقة عملية ومليانة قيمة: بنمشي خطوة بخطوة عبر 10 طرق مثبتة للسيطرة على لستة المهام—من Pomodoro وBullet Journal وSeinfeld، لحد ABCDE، RPM، Timeboxing، قاعدة الدقيقتين، Ivy Lee، Eat the Frog، وتتبّع الوقت. رح تبني معنا وصفة يوم جاهزة، وتحصل على إسعافات أولية لأكتر المشاكل شيوعاً، مع أمثلة مؤسسية حقيقية (QBR، إطلاق حملات رمضان، وترقية أنظمة بالبنوك) لتشوف كيف بتتطبّق بالأعمال. وبالنهاية في تحدّي 7 أيام يثبّت العادة ويعطيك نتائج من أول أسبوع. Support the showSupport the Podcast on:https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/okuwatly?locale.x=en_UShttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/MaBa3refSubscribe to Maba3ref Newsletter:https://maba3refbranching.beehiiv.com/Connect with Maba3ref Podcast:https://www.instagram.com/maba3refbyomarConnect on TIKTOK:https://www.tiktok.com/@okuwatly

Want to win a free pair of airpod pros, sign up for a demo with Vitally: https://www.vitally.io/csproDownload The Value Storytelling Handbook: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/offers/bwVCZUYL/checkoutIn this episode of the Customer Success Pro Podcast, host Anika Zubair speaks with Sean Reid, an award winning CS leader. They explore why “green” health scores can mask real risk, how to spot hidden churn signals, and why renaming the metric to a Renewal Probability Score improves forecasting and cross functional alignment. Sean explains his model that blends human captured sentiment with product signals, how multithreading and stakeholder engagement change renewal odds, and why NPS should be treated as a trend over time rather than a single moment. The conversation offers practical guidance on structuring sentiment fields in your CRM, coaching teams to score consistently, avoiding a rushed rollout, and turning QBR data into executive ready value stories that drive renewals and expansion.Chapters:00:00 Introduction02:40 Meet Sean Reid10:11 Why “green” accounts still churn14:45 Multithreading and hidden influencers22:26 From health score to Renewal Probability Score25:28 Building the model, 60 to 40 sentiment to signals34:49 Value storytelling and outcome-focused QBRs37:10 Rethinking NPS as a trend, not a moment44:28 Lessons51:51 Wrap-upConnect with Anika Zubair:Website: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/anikazubair/RevUP Academy: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/revupConnect with Sean Reid:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-reid/Send Anika a text :) Grab our FREE resources here: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/resources Want to be our next podcast guest? Apply here: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/podcast-guest Book Anika as a speaker at your next team event: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/team-event

Philly Sports Now - Philly Sports podcast by Philly Fans for Philly Fans. Philadelphia Eagles win vs Minnesota Vikings. A perfect QBR from Jalen Hurts! Spotify! https://open.spotify.com/show/3Qow7JEqKGfMs8mUVFMOil Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@the_phillygamer Philly Sports Now X: https://x.com/Philly_SprtsNow The Philly Gamer: https://x.com/the_phillygamer Photo Information available upon request. No commercial affiliation or otherwise. Videos made for entertainment purposes. Please enjoy. #Philadelphia #Phillies #Eagles #phillysports #phillyphilly #philly #ringthebell #flyeaglesfly #mlbbshorts #MLB #baseball #philadelphiaeagles #philadelphiaphillies #superbowl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this engaging episode of MSP Business School, host Brian Doyle sits down with George Mellor, founder of VCIO Growth, to discuss transforming the roles of Virtual Chief Information Officers (VCIOs) within Managed Service Providers (MSPs). The conversation shines a light on the evolving landscape of QBR processes and the critical need for VCIOs to focus on client business outcomes rather than mere technical metrics. George shares insights from his journey in the MSP space, offering expertise on enhancing client relationships and maximizing business value. Throughout this episode, listeners are invited to explore how MSPs can avoid the commodity trap by emphasizing strategic client interactions. George discusses the pitfalls of focusing QBRs on ticket numbers and refresh cycles, urging a shift towards aligning technology initiatives with the client's business objectives. The discussion also delves into the potential of AI in MSP operations. By initiating AI conversations with clients, MSPs can harness new opportunities for business growth and demonstrate their value as trusted advisors in the tech space. This episode is packed with practical advice and innovative strategies for MSPs looking to enhance their VCIO capabilities. Key Takeaways: VCIOs need to focus on the client's business objectives rather than just showcasing technical achievements. Effective QBRs should integrate a strategic narrative that aligns with the client's long-term goals and business outcomes. AI presents a significant opportunity for MSPs to innovate and lead conversations with clients about technology governance and security. By engaging in deeper strategic dialogues, MSPs can transition from being seen as vendors to becoming integral business partners. Fractional VCIO services can bridge knowledge gaps and prepare MSPs for more effective client interactions, ultimately driving business growth. Guest Name: George Mellor LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-mellor-kloudreadiness/ Company: vCIO Growth Website: https://vciogrowth.com/ Show Website: https://mspbusinessschool.com/ Host Brian Doyle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandoylevciotoolbox/ Sponsor vCIOToolbox: https://vciotoolbox.com

Join the College Show powered by Dynasty Nerds with hosts Garret, Jared, Andrew, and Jagger as we break down winners and losers from the first half of the 2025 college football season. For dynasty fantasy football, risers include Alabama QB Ty Simpson, climbing boards as a potential top QB. Oklahoma QB John Mateer brings Baker Mayfield moxie and controlled chaos, with a big arm and rushing upside. On the downside, Texas QB Arch Manning struggles against elite defenses, tanking QBR, and draft hype amid nepotism buzz. Penn State QB Drew Allar lacks confidence with wild inaccuracy, dropping from first-round talk to day-two hopes. Fantasy Roster Rescue: Get your Roster Rescued! FastDraft: Download and deposit $10 using code NERDS on the FastDraft app and join your first draft to be eligible for a free one-year full bundle membership at Dynasty Nerds (new members only). FastDraft will match your deposit up to $50. Draft best ball teams in under 5 minutes! Keywords: dynasty fantasy football, 2026 NFL Draft, college football winners losers, devy league prospects, Ty Simpson Alabama QB, John Mateer Oklahoma QB, Justice Haynes Michigan RB, Michael Trigg Baylor TE, Makhi Hughes Oregon RB, Arch Manning Texas QB, Drew Allar Penn State QB, Darius Taylor Minnesota RB, NIL deals, transfer portal, quarterback class 2026 00:00 Start 02:09 Winner: Ty Simpson 09:05 Winner: John Mateer 13:45 Winner: Justice Haynes 18:30 Winner: Michael Trigg 24:49 Loser: Makhi Hughes 28:45 Roster Rescue 29:20 Loser: Arch Manning 33:34 Loser: Drew Allar 37:15 Loser: Darius Taylor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

RJ Bell, Steve Fezzik and Mackenzie Rivers talk NFL recap for Week 5. [RJ Bell (0:06–0:20)] opened in disbelief over Arizona's collapse. [Steve Fezzik (0:20–1:05)] vented, “I had Arizona and Indy… easiest winner ever. And yet somehow it lost,” showing frustration with improbable losses. [Bell (1:15–1:52)] called it “two or three things that were a hundred to one each,” defining its absurdity. [Fezzik (2:24–3:08)] blamed player arrogance—“Hand the ball to the referee”—as Arizona, up 21–6, fumbled twice, turning a 99% win chance into defeat. [Rivers (3:08–3:24)] confirmed a 98% win probability even post-turnover. [Bell (5:08–6:04)] said Arizona's average win rate was 89%, second-most unlikely loss in a decade. [Fezzik (6:29–7:48)] slammed coaching “incompetence” for running three times and punting, gifting Tennessee a comeback. [Bell (7:49–9:37)] added metrics: –24 kickoff yards, –7 in turnovers plus sacks, yet 45% success rate vs Tennessee's 37%, proving superior play undone by mistakes. [Fezzik (9:53–10:15)] said Arizona repeats errors; [Bell (10:33–11:04)] tied that to Kyler Murray's weak leadership. [Fezzik (11:05–11:59)] contrasted him with Mahomes: “Mahomes dives on the ball… Kyler stands there,” showing passion vs passivity. [Bell (11:59–12:19)] moved to Baltimore's meltdown vs Houston. [Fezzik (12:19–14:25)] admitted his once–No.1 Ravens were “five points worse than average.” [Rivers (15:18–15:27)] cited Stroud's 99.5 QBR; [Bell (15:27–16:09)] added Houston's 61.5% success vs Baltimore's 37%. [Fezzik (16:19–16:24)] cut Baltimore three points, raised Houston 1.5. [Bell (16:54–17:49)] noted Houston's average snap 16 yards closer to scoring—total domination. [Fezzik (17:49–18:14)] confirmed 400–200 yard edge. [Bell (18:26–18:44)] said elite defense plus average offense makes Houston “well above average.” [Fezzik (19:13–19:31)] shifted to Giants-Saints: “five straight turnovers.” [Bell (19:31–20:05)] said that gave New Orleans a 34-point edge. [Fezzik (20:12–20:17)] noted Saints' red-zone flaws but solid play. [Rivers (21:18–21:36)] said they've covered nearly every game. [Bell (22:14–22:56)] saw Giants QB Dart as “slightly below average passer, above-average runner.” [Fezzik (23:13–23:28)] predicted more rushing. [Fezzik (25:17–26:06)] said Seattle “should have won 38–35,” averaging nine yards per play but losing from turnovers. [Bell (26:37–26:57)] added success rates: Seattle 62%, Tampa 51%, both elite. [Fezzik (29:24–30:35)] noted Rams outgained San Francisco by 2.3 yards per play but failed twice inside the five. [Rivers (32:17–32:35)] described 49ers' “dink-and-dunk” control style. [Bell (32:59–33:11)] compared Purdy to Mac Jones—efficient but limited. [Fezzik (36:04–38:22)] highlighted Minnesota's trick-play win over Cleveland, 49% vs 39% success rate and seven explosive plays to three. [Fezzik (42:08–42:58)] analyzed Washington's easy win over Chargers, calling them “a sneaky contender.” [Bell (45:02–47:46)] praised Detroit's 37–24 rout of Cincinnati as a “wipeout,” citing +13 turnover points and +252 hidden yards. [Bell (49:59–50:43)] warned power ratings ignore style—Detroit dominates early, KC thrives late. [Fezzik (51:59–52:19)] said Philly-Denver was even statistically, but Sean Payton's bold two-point try flipped momentum. [Bell (55:56–56:38)] said it forced Philly from clock-control comfort. [Fezzik (57:29–57:47)] lamented fading stars Barkley and Henry losing burst. [Bell (59:42–59:56)] ended on Indianapolis's rise; [Fezzik (1:00:10–1:00:24)] said they “might be the best team.” [Bell & Fezzik (1:05:03–1:07:22)] agreed old coaches like Belichick and Carroll can't adapt to the fast-changing league. [Fezzik (1:11:19–1:11:54)] closed with betting advice: “Target 7.5-win teams with young coaches for Coach of the Year.” [Fezzik (1:13:36–1:16:49)] finished humorously, describing a month at a luxury gym as a short burst of energy—an apt metaphor for fleeting success and needed renewal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

RJ Bell, Steve Fezzik and Mackenzie Rivers talk NFL recap for Week 5. [RJ Bell (0:06–0:20)] opened in disbelief over Arizona's collapse. [Steve Fezzik (0:20–1:05)] vented, “I had Arizona and Indy… easiest winner ever. And yet somehow it lost,” showing frustration with improbable losses. [Bell (1:15–1:52)] called it “two or three things that were a hundred to one each,” defining its absurdity. [Fezzik (2:24–3:08)] blamed player arrogance—“Hand the ball to the referee”—as Arizona, up 21–6, fumbled twice, turning a 99% win chance into defeat. [Rivers (3:08–3:24)] confirmed a 98% win probability even post-turnover. [Bell (5:08–6:04)] said Arizona's average win rate was 89%, second-most unlikely loss in a decade. [Fezzik (6:29–7:48)] slammed coaching “incompetence” for running three times and punting, gifting Tennessee a comeback. [Bell (7:49–9:37)] added metrics: –24 kickoff yards, –7 in turnovers plus sacks, yet 45% success rate vs Tennessee's 37%, proving superior play undone by mistakes. [Fezzik (9:53–10:15)] said Arizona repeats errors; [Bell (10:33–11:04)] tied that to Kyler Murray's weak leadership. [Fezzik (11:05–11:59)] contrasted him with Mahomes: “Mahomes dives on the ball… Kyler stands there,” showing passion vs passivity. [Bell (11:59–12:19)] moved to Baltimore's meltdown vs Houston. [Fezzik (12:19–14:25)] admitted his once–No.1 Ravens were “five points worse than average.” [Rivers (15:18–15:27)] cited Stroud's 99.5 QBR; [Bell (15:27–16:09)] added Houston's 61.5% success vs Baltimore's 37%. [Fezzik (16:19–16:24)] cut Baltimore three points, raised Houston 1.5. [Bell (16:54–17:49)] noted Houston's average snap 16 yards closer to scoring—total domination. [Fezzik (17:49–18:14)] confirmed 400–200 yard edge. [Bell (18:26–18:44)] said elite defense plus average offense makes Houston “well above average.” [Fezzik (19:13–19:31)] shifted to Giants-Saints: “five straight turnovers.” [Bell (19:31–20:05)] said that gave New Orleans a 34-point edge. [Fezzik (20:12–20:17)] noted Saints' red-zone flaws but solid play. [Rivers (21:18–21:36)] said they've covered nearly every game. [Bell (22:14–22:56)] saw Giants QB Dart as “slightly below average passer, above-average runner.” [Fezzik (23:13–23:28)] predicted more rushing. [Fezzik (25:17–26:06)] said Seattle “should have won 38–35,” averaging nine yards per play but losing from turnovers. [Bell (26:37–26:57)] added success rates: Seattle 62%, Tampa 51%, both elite. [Fezzik (29:24–30:35)] noted Rams outgained San Francisco by 2.3 yards per play but failed twice inside the five. [Rivers (32:17–32:35)] described 49ers' “dink-and-dunk” control style. [Bell (32:59–33:11)] compared Purdy to Mac Jones—efficient but limited. [Fezzik (36:04–38:22)] highlighted Minnesota's trick-play win over Cleveland, 49% vs 39% success rate and seven explosive plays to three. [Fezzik (42:08–42:58)] analyzed Washington's easy win over Chargers, calling them “a sneaky contender.” [Bell (45:02–47:46)] praised Detroit's 37–24 rout of Cincinnati as a “wipeout,” citing +13 turnover points and +252 hidden yards. [Bell (49:59–50:43)] warned power ratings ignore style—Detroit dominates early, KC thrives late. [Fezzik (51:59–52:19)] said Philly-Denver was even statistically, but Sean Payton's bold two-point try flipped momentum. [Bell (55:56–56:38)] said it forced Philly from clock-control comfort. [Fezzik (57:29–57:47)] lamented fading stars Barkley and Henry losing burst. [Bell (59:42–59:56)] ended on Indianapolis's rise; [Fezzik (1:00:10–1:00:24)] said they “might be the best team.” [Bell & Fezzik (1:05:03–1:07:22)] agreed old coaches like Belichick and Carroll can't adapt to the fast-changing league. [Fezzik (1:11:19–1:11:54)] closed with betting advice: “Target 7.5-win teams with young coaches for Coach of the Year.” [Fezzik (1:13:36–1:16:49)] finished humorously, describing a month at a luxury gym as a short burst of energy—an apt metaphor for fleeting success and needed renewal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hear "The Buck Belue Show" every weeknight from 6-8pm on 680 The Fan ad 93.7 FM, the 680 The Fan App available on Apple and Android, with your Smart Speaker by saying Alexa or wherever you get and listen to your favorite podcast! Get the latest on Georgia sports, newsmakers, and more! Buck’s Big Take – Top candidates for Braves coach What’s Poppin – Picks week Bulldog Beat – UK Breakdown CF Bounce – This weekend’s slate QB Club – QBR rankings Chop It Up – Chipper won’t be a manager See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hear "The Buck Belue Show" every weeknight from 6-8pm on 680 The Fan ad 93.7 FM, the 680 The Fan App available on Apple and Android, with your Smart Speaker by saying Alexa or wherever you get and listen to your favorite podcast! Get the latest on Georgia sports, newsmakers, and more! Buck’s Big Take – Top candidates for Braves coach What’s Poppin – Picks week Bulldog Beat – UK Breakdown CF Bounce – This weekend’s slate QB Club – QBR rankings Chop It Up – Chipper won’t be a manager See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Connelly ranked the QBs through 4 games with QBR being a part of the equation as well as stats and a general eye test---and he has USC's Jayden Maiava at No. 1 (93.4 QBR), followed by Vanderbilt's Diego Pavia, Ole Miss' Trinidad Chambliss, Indiana's Fernando Mendoza, and Oregon's Dante MooreRaiola fits at 25th with a 77.2 QBR, and Connelly points out his TD/INT ratio is impressive, but is concerned about the amount of time it takes him to throw the ball (2.89 seconds on average, 108th nationally); extremely short passes (6.2 air yards per attempt, 123rd); and amount of sacks taken (28.6% sacks to pressures, 119th). Dylan can still grow as a player…will those stats improve? Show Sponsored by SANDHILLS GLOBALOur Sponsors:* Check out Avocado Green Mattress: https://avocadogreenmattress.com* Check out Hims: https://hims.com/EARLYBREAK* Check out Washington Red Raspberries: https://redrazz.orgAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Munaf Manji, Mackenzie Rivers, Dave Essler and SleepyJ talk NFL contests for week 4. Munaf Manji (0:06 – 2:21) opened by welcoming listeners, recapping Week 3, and noting that Circa Survivor lost 3,154 entries with 13,811 remaining, each valued at $1,355. He emphasized that fading the top five most-selected teams has been profitable as they went 2-12-1 ATS at Westgate and 3-12 ATS at Circa, with one entry leading Circa Millions at 14-1. Sleepy J (5:45 – 8:53) chose the Titans +7 vs the Texans, saying “I think the Titans are slowly building. Cam Ward is looking a little bit better each and every game.” He highlighted Houston's lowest points per game, Tank Dell's absence, Mixon's struggles, and a weak offensive line. He argued Tennessee is hungrier and capable of an outright win. Munaf (8:53 – 10:08) agreed, calling the Texans' line inflated, citing receiver losses, Nick Chubb's decline, and predicting a fairer line closer to six. Dave Essler (10:09 – 10:43) also agreed, calling +7 too many points, though doubting Tennessee's ability to win outright. Mackenzie Rivers (10:52 – 12:06) picked Buccaneers +3.5 over the Eagles, arguing “The Eagles have underperformed all season. If you look at advanced stats, they could easily be one and two or oh and three.” He dismissed Philadelphia's late-game magic, noted Wirfs' return, Mayfield's strong play, and called the line exaggerated. Dave (13:27 – 16:29) agreed on Tampa, then picked the Broncos -7.5 over the Bengals, pointing to Denver's defense being top 10 in yards per play, number two in the red zone, and number one in TDs not allowed per game, while Cincinnati averaged only 49 rushing yards per game with Browning already turnover-prone. Munaf (16:30 – 17:12) backed this, citing Chase Brown's meager 93 yards on 2.0 YPC and Browning's five interceptions. Sleepy (17:14 – 19:17) hesitated on Denver due to the spread, saying “I would much rather pick a dead number game” but admitted Cincinnati's WRs could still threaten Denver's defense. Munaf (19:17 – 21:45) chose Steelers +2.5 vs Vikings in Dublin, pointing out Wentz faces new pressure, Pittsburgh's defense improved with T.J. Watt, and Jalen Warren emerged as a passing-game weapon. He predicted mistakes from Wentz would cost Minnesota. Sleepy (21:59 – 23:58) liked the Steelers too, stressing the importance of the 2.5 line in a low-total game, warning Wentz has struggled under pressure and “when you get a level-headed Aaron Rodgers, you don't get five turnovers.” Mackenzie (24:37 – 26:52) disagreed, backing Vikings, criticizing Rodgers' rankings (31st in PFF, 22nd in QBR), pointing to Pittsburgh's poor metrics, and saying “Favorites do well internationally.” Dave (27:07 – 27:50) sided with Mack, calling Pittsburgh's run game the second worst in the league and Rodgers incapable of carrying them. Survivor picks followed: Dave (30:12 – 32:01) took Patriots over Panthers, dismissing Carolina's win as turnover-driven, while Sleepy (32:06 – 35:42) also chose New England, adding, “How many chances are you going to get to really play New England? I think the chances to play them is this week.” Munaf (35:42 – 37:33) added Denver and possibly Texans as options but leaned Broncos. Mackenzie (37:34 – 38:50) favored Detroit, citing a profitable trend where underdogs who win as big dogs typically fail the next week, saying, “The Browns traveling to Detroit get smoked. And I think Carolina also is going to be a little bit overmatched in New England.” The show closed with humor, coupon codes, and Dave joking about being offered Fritos for Chase Brown, ending with optimism about continuing to deliver valuable picks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Griffin Warner and Lonte Smith talk CFB betting for Week 5. [00:00 | Speaker 3] The discussion begins with intensity: “Offense, play fast. Defense, swarm. Swarm and tackle.” The repeated demand to “out-block, out-tackle, out-hit, out-hustle” and “Leave no doubt tonight!” frames a theme of urgency and dominance. [00:45 | Griffin Warner] Griffin introduces the Week 5 show, joking about Vanderbilt's surprising success and admitting their bets went 0-2 after a 2-0 streak, showing how volatile the season can be. [02:10 | Lonte Smith] Lonte reflects on UConn: “The UConn play was the wrong side,” noting they had chances but “couldn't capitalize and couldn't stop Kelly on the run.” He highlights Vanderbilt scoring 72, their most since 1918, underscoring how explosive games can get. [05:30 | Griffin Warner] Alabama vs Georgia comes up with Alabama +3 and total 52. [06:15 | Lonte Smith] Lonte stresses “My number is exactly three,” pointing to both teams' weak pass rush. Georgia ranks outside the top 100 in EPA per pass and has just three sacks, while Alabama has only 31 pressures. He predicts “an explosion of big plays” and loves the over 52.5, leaning slightly to Georgia at home. [12:40 | Griffin Warner] Griffin asks about shifts in program power. [13:20 | Lonte Smith] Lonte explains, “Bama is second tier to what Georgia is doing,” crediting Kirby Smart's continuity and NFL pipeline, while contrasting Saban's defensive style with DeBoer's offensive focus. [15:00 | Griffin Warner] Next is LSU at Ole Miss, with Ole Miss -1.5 and total 54.5. [15:45 | Lonte Smith] Lonte breaks down the quarterback dilemma: Trinidad Chambliss has been “nothing short of sensational,” while Austin Simmons is turnover-prone. LSU can exploit Ole Miss's weakness, “outside the top 115 in rush success rate.” He says, “The over is good regardless of quarterback.” [21:20 | Griffin Warner] Moving to Ohio State at Washington, Griffin notes the line moved from -12.5 to -8.5. [22:00 | Lonte Smith] Lonte cites, “Five and nine straight up for Power Four quarterbacks making their first road start.” Washington has a 21-game home win streak, one of the best in the nation. He suggests betting Washington early before Ohio State's depth shows, expecting an eventual Buckeye win by eight or nine points. [28:15 | Griffin Warner] Griffin asks why bettors move against “the number one program.” [28:40 | Lonte Smith] Lonte answers that sharps love home dogs, adding Washington's momentum, dual-threat QB De'Mon Williams, and cross-country travel factors make this a prime spot. [31:00 | Griffin Warner] Griffin introduces Oregon at Penn State, Oregon +3.5. [31:30 | Lonte Smith] Lonte says, “I love Penn State in this spot.” He criticizes Drew Aller, “outside the top 100 in QBR,” and weak receivers, but expects Penn State's elite defense in a whiteout to overwhelm Oregon despite Dante Moore's strong play. He predicts a 9-10 point Penn State win. [37:00 | Griffin Warner] Griffin highlights the impact of a night game at Happy Valley and travel challenges. [38:10 | Lonte Smith] Lonte agrees, noting Penn State's balance and defensive edge. [39:45 | Griffin Warner] Griffin offers promo code “Blitz20.” [41:00 | Lonte Smith] Lonte's best bet is Illinois +7 vs USC, citing USC's struggles traveling east and poor defense: “124th in rush success rate allowed.” With RB Aiden Lowry returning and QB Luke Altmyer's legs, Illinois can bounce back. [44:00 | Griffin Warner] Griffin agrees on the full touchdown value. His best bet is over 54.5 in LSU vs Ole Miss, banking on scoring regardless of quarterback uncertainty. [46:00 | Closing] Both hosts thank listeners, preview October matchups, and hope to rebound with winners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Griffin Warner and Lonte Smith talk CFB betting for Week 5. [00:00 | Speaker 3] The discussion begins with intensity: “Offense, play fast. Defense, swarm. Swarm and tackle.” The repeated demand to “out-block, out-tackle, out-hit, out-hustle” and “Leave no doubt tonight!” frames a theme of urgency and dominance. [00:45 | Griffin Warner] Griffin introduces the Week 5 show, joking about Vanderbilt's surprising success and admitting their bets went 0-2 after a 2-0 streak, showing how volatile the season can be. [02:10 | Lonte Smith] Lonte reflects on UConn: “The UConn play was the wrong side,” noting they had chances but “couldn't capitalize and couldn't stop Kelly on the run.” He highlights Vanderbilt scoring 72, their most since 1918, underscoring how explosive games can get. [05:30 | Griffin Warner] Alabama vs Georgia comes up with Alabama +3 and total 52. [06:15 | Lonte Smith] Lonte stresses “My number is exactly three,” pointing to both teams' weak pass rush. Georgia ranks outside the top 100 in EPA per pass and has just three sacks, while Alabama has only 31 pressures. He predicts “an explosion of big plays” and loves the over 52.5, leaning slightly to Georgia at home. [12:40 | Griffin Warner] Griffin asks about shifts in program power. [13:20 | Lonte Smith] Lonte explains, “Bama is second tier to what Georgia is doing,” crediting Kirby Smart's continuity and NFL pipeline, while contrasting Saban's defensive style with DeBoer's offensive focus. [15:00 | Griffin Warner] Next is LSU at Ole Miss, with Ole Miss -1.5 and total 54.5. [15:45 | Lonte Smith] Lonte breaks down the quarterback dilemma: Trinidad Chambliss has been “nothing short of sensational,” while Austin Simmons is turnover-prone. LSU can exploit Ole Miss's weakness, “outside the top 115 in rush success rate.” He says, “The over is good regardless of quarterback.” [21:20 | Griffin Warner] Moving to Ohio State at Washington, Griffin notes the line moved from -12.5 to -8.5. [22:00 | Lonte Smith] Lonte cites, “Five and nine straight up for Power Four quarterbacks making their first road start.” Washington has a 21-game home win streak, one of the best in the nation. He suggests betting Washington early before Ohio State's depth shows, expecting an eventual Buckeye win by eight or nine points. [28:15 | Griffin Warner] Griffin asks why bettors move against “the number one program.” [28:40 | Lonte Smith] Lonte answers that sharps love home dogs, adding Washington's momentum, dual-threat QB De'Mon Williams, and cross-country travel factors make this a prime spot. [31:00 | Griffin Warner] Griffin introduces Oregon at Penn State, Oregon +3.5. [31:30 | Lonte Smith] Lonte says, “I love Penn State in this spot.” He criticizes Drew Aller, “outside the top 100 in QBR,” and weak receivers, but expects Penn State's elite defense in a whiteout to overwhelm Oregon despite Dante Moore's strong play. He predicts a 9-10 point Penn State win. [37:00 | Griffin Warner] Griffin highlights the impact of a night game at Happy Valley and travel challenges. [38:10 | Lonte Smith] Lonte agrees, noting Penn State's balance and defensive edge. [39:45 | Griffin Warner] Griffin offers promo code “Blitz20.” [41:00 | Lonte Smith] Lonte's best bet is Illinois +7 vs USC, citing USC's struggles traveling east and poor defense: “124th in rush success rate allowed.” With RB Aiden Lowry returning and QB Luke Altmyer's legs, Illinois can bounce back. [44:00 | Griffin Warner] Griffin agrees on the full touchdown value. His best bet is over 54.5 in LSU vs Ole Miss, banking on scoring regardless of quarterback uncertainty. [46:00 | Closing] Both hosts thank listeners, preview October matchups, and hope to rebound with winners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What a weekend in Seattle sports. The M’s are poised to win the AL West after sweeping the Astros, the Seahawks have ascended to the top of the DVOA leaderboard and Demond Williams Jr. is second nationally in QBR after … Continue reading →

Rod Villagomez and Munaf Manji talk NFL waiver wire moves. NFL Week 2 Waiver Wire Highlights Rod Villagomez (0:06 – 0:49) opened with Week 1's excitement, calling Josh Allen “a dangerous man” after a monster fantasy outing. Munaf Manji (0:50 – 2:26) noted sluggish early games but praised Sunday night football. He reminded that survivor pools had low Week 1 eliminations compared to prior years. Rod (2:26 – 3:47) stressed the need to hit waivers early, sharing Allen gave him 50 fantasy points yet he still lost. Munaf (3:48 – 5:03) highlighted injuries: George Kittle, Drake London, Evan Engram, Brock Bowers. He spotlighted Dylan Sampson (CLE): weak rushing (12 for 29) but stellar receiving (8 catches, 64 yards, 43% snaps). Rod (5:04 – 6:23) added Bijan Robinson picked up London's slack as a pass-catcher, while Jake Tonja could fill in for Kittle. Munaf (6:24 – 8:13) praised CLE's defense holding Burrow to 113 yds and Chase to 26, while Sampson looked like a waiver gem. Rod (8:14 – 10:52) hyped Daniel Jones (IND): 22/29, 272 yds, 1 TD, just 5% rostered. Munaf (10:53 – 13:16) added Jones' 2 rushing TDs, 87.6 QBR, noting he scored on every drive. Rod & Munaf (13:17 – 19:38) warned on Tua (7.3 pts), Darnold (5.4), Dak (7.8) and blasted Russell Wilson's 25.6 QBR, saying Jackson Dart could replace him soon. Chargers (19:39 – 24:06): Quentin Johnston exploded with 5 catches, 79 yds, 2 TDs; still only 9% rostered Yahoo. Keenan Allen also strong (7 for 68, 1 TD). Chiefs (26:10 – 28:36): With Xavier Worthy hurt, Hollywood Brown drew 16 targets, 10 for 99; JuJu added 5 for 55. Patriots (30:18 – 34:44): Kayshon Boutte shined (6 for 103) and is 1% rostered. Tight Ends (34:45 – 41:52): Juwan Johnson (NO) led TEs with 8 for 76 on 11 targets, rostered in just 2%. Steelers (41:47 – 47:40): Aaron Rodgers torched his old Jets with 244 yds, 4 TDs; 7th-best QB of Week 1. Available in most leagues. Justin Fields added 218 pass yds + 2 rushing TDs. Rod (47:41 – 48:34) closed urging proactive waiver moves and flagged Pregame's Kickoff25 promo. ✅ Top Adds: Dylan Sampson, Daniel Jones, Quentin Johnston, Hollywood Brown, Kayshon Boutte, Juwan Johnson, Aaron Rodgers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Unlock the secrets to revolutionizing your sales strategy with the power of AI! Join us as we sit down with Drew Regan, Global Leader, CRM Modernization & AI Solutions at Microsoft, who brings fresh insights from his recent move from Salesforce. Discover how AI is not just a buzzword but the backbone of a seamless, efficient work environment, helping businesses consolidate data and obliterate silos. With Microsoft's cutting-edge applications like Azure, Outlook, and Dynamics, you'll learn how to harness AI for dynamic, streamlined processes that transform mundane tasks into strategic opportunities. Say goodbye to the drudgery of manual data entry and hello to a new era of CRM efficiency. We tackle the common frustrations of sales professionals burdened by traditional CRM systems and unveil how AI and automation, through platforms like Microsoft's Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, are game changers. Imagine freeing up valuable time to focus on building customer relationships instead of logging information. Our conversation underscores the value of a unified platform that eliminates complexity and boosts productivity, all while keeping the focus on what truly matters—driving business success through meaningful customer interactions. As we explore the future of AI in sales, witness firsthand the immense potential of AI-driven tools like Microsoft's Copilot and Dynamics. These technologies drastically cut down the time and effort needed for tasks like preparing QBR presentations, empowering sales teams to prioritize strategic deals. From enhancing decision-making with precise data analytics to automating routine tasks, AI is reshaping modern business practices. You'll hear real-world examples of how AI optimizes field service operations and meeting preparations, paving the way for a more productive and successful future. Don't miss out on learning how AI is not just a tool but a strategic partner in revolutionizing your sales processes. Drew Regan is a Global Leader and Principal Business Program Manager based in Charleston, South Carolina, guiding organizations of all sizes to modernize CRM with an AI-first approach across all stakeholders. With a strategic mindset and passion for innovation, Drew helps businesses transform with speed to stay ahead of the competition and drive measurable impact by deploying productivity and automation across their entire operation. As a strategic and trusted partner, Drew leads customers through the AI-driven shift from legacy CRM systems to modern, intelligent enterprise platforms, enabling smarter engagement and scalable growth. His programmatic approach, collaborative leadership, and results-oriented mindset empower teams and customers to thrive in today's dynamic digital landscape.   Quotes: "AI isn't just a buzzword—it's becoming the backbone of a seamless and efficient work environment, helping businesses obliterate silos and consolidate data."  "With Microsoft's cutting-edge applications like Azure, Outlook, and Dynamics, AI is transforming mundane tasks into strategic opportunities, paving the way for modern sales success."  "Say goodbye to the drudgery of manual data entry and hello to a new era of CRM efficiency where AI and automation become game changers."  "The true power of AI lies in its ability to automate routine tasks, allowing sales teams to focus on what truly matters—building meaningful customer relationships and driving business success."    Links:  Drew's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-regan-01272b7/ Microsoft - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ Find this episode and all other Sales Lead Dog episodes at https://empellorcrm.com/salesleaddog/ 

Are your customers ghosting your QBR invites? Let's be real… every CSM has faced the dreaded silence or worse, the wrong people showing up. But here's the ugly truth leadership never told you. It's not your QBR's timing, your agenda, or your follow-ups. It's that your meetings are about you, not your customer.In this episode, I break down the single biggest mistake 99% of CSMs make with their QBRs and hand you my simple 3-step framework to flip the script—from ignored invites to strategic sessions your customers actually want to attend. We'll dig into exactly what to research, how to reframe your outreach, and the one pro move that gets even busy execs leaning in. Craving the kind of executive buy-in that accelerates renewals, expansions, and your own career? Hit play, because everything you've learned about QBRs is about to change, starting now!

Tired of being treated like the company's junk drawer? Frustrated that executives don't see the strategic value of your CS team? Struggling to get buy-in for the resources and respect you deserve? Rob Zambito, founder of Success Scaled Consulting and three-time VP of Customer Success, joins us to reveal how behavioral psychology transforms CS teams from reactive everything departments into proactive revenue-generating engines. With his unique background in consumer psychology and behavioral economics, Rob shares the secrets to what separates successful CS leaders from those stuck on every QBR.BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER: Why customer decisions are driven by cognitive biases (not logic) and how to leverage this for better outcomesThe difference between being "strategic" and having a clear team charter that executives actually understandHow to translate CS work into executive language that gets you a seat at the leadership tableThe forecasting approach that proves CS is a revenue function, not just a "happiness department.Why CS teams need different personas and the 5 key types every CS leader should recognizeThe research methodology mindset that helps you test assumptions and avoid infinite loopsHow to stop being the company junk drawer by establishing clear boundaries and focusWhy asking customers directly often beats complex health score algorithmsStop letting your team be everyone's dumping ground and start getting the executive respect you've been fighting for.