Bryson Webster

If your AWS partnership isn’t producing predictable pipeline, the problem probably isn’t AWS. In this episode of Inside Partnering, I sat down with Jen Dawson, Founder and CEO of SaaSNova, to talk about why so many ISVs struggle to turn Amazon Web Services (AWS) partnerships into predictable GTM. When Jen worked for AWS, she was a 𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝟭𝟬𝟬 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽 𝗜𝗦𝗩𝘀 get their AWS GTM rolling and growing. She’s seen the pattern repeat. ✅ Strong product. ✅ Big ambition. 🚫 No clear execution path. “AWS is not the lead gen engine,” Jen explains. “It’s an amplification engine.” AWS leans in when ISVs show clarity and momentum. 🎯 Clear ICP. 💪 Clear value. 📈 Marketplace readiness. 🎉 Early wins the field can rally around. We dig into: • Why marketplace simplifies seller execution • What actually gets AWS field's attention • How channel partners accelerate scale • The metrics that signal seriousness • When SCAs make sense - and when they don’t This is not beginner content. It’s for leaders responsible for real outcomes. Which metric do you rely on most to prove your partner motion is real? Full video in first comment Matt Yanchyshyn Jeff Grimes Jessica Rudy Josh Greene Louise Strandoo Reagan Koryozo Eamonn Colman Udita Bhattacharya

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In today’s market, Solution Engineering isn’t a supporting act. It’s a strategic lever. When revenue slows, most teams look at sales motions, pricing, or pipeline generation. But often, the real inflection point sits before the opportunity even enters the forecast. That’s where Solution Engineers (Presales) come in. Done right, presales is where: 🔍 Discovery gets real 🧩 Complexity gets clarified 🎯 Value gets translated 💡 And bad-fit opportunities get filtered before they burn resources downstream But too often, presales is stuck in demo mode—overburdened, under-leveraged, and reactive. The best teams are rethinking this function as: ✅ A qualifying force, not just a technical one ✅ A voice of customer truth in GTM design ✅ A driver of win-rate, not just support for it ✅ And a key player in reducing Cost to Serve by setting up delivery for success If we want predictable revenue, we need purposeful solution design.

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SaaS has been in a crisis, and with ~$300B in market value wiped out last week, more are noticing. Customer Success will feel a disproportionate share of the pressure unless it levels up - fast. We wrote about the new standard for enterprise value in today’s market. https://lnkd.in/dAPr7zBE

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We built cyustomer success backward and now it’s coming back to bite us. We thought it was a *team* when in reality it’s a recurring revenue business *capability*. We started with coverage models: 1/ hire CSMs 2/ assign accounts 3/ schedule intros, check-ins, QBRs. Touch points Another layer of “engagement” competing with Marketing, Sales, Services, and TAMs for the same customer attention. Nobody asked if customers wanted this. We just assumed more human touches = better outcomes. Spoiler alert, It’s doesn’t. It’s expensive. It’s laborious. And half the time, it’s noise the customer has to manage. Now the market is forcing the correction we should’ve made from day one.. Digital-first engagement, human intervention when necessary. Letting data and insights drive action not arbitrary coverage models. The product and digital experience do the heavy lifting: - Onboarding without handholding - Insights without meetings - Value realization without QBRs Humans aren’t the strategy, they’re the escalation path. The future of CS isn’t more coverage. It’s better digital experiences that know when to call in the humans. — What changes are you planning for your customer success model as we head into 2026?

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Most enablement leaders never talk to customers—and it's killing their impact. Are you still treating your go-to-market teams as the end customer? On the latest SellMeThisPen Podcast, I sat down with Meganne Brezina, CCMP™ Brezina, Head of Enablement at Zylo, to talk about what modern enablement actually looks like when it’s done right. Meganne didn’t start in SaaS. She was selling tractors to racetracks. That’s where she learned real solution selling—and more importantly, how to scale sales outcomes by enabling the right people, not just selling solo. But it was running a restaurant that flipped her thinking. Instead of serving internal teams only, she worked the front lines—observing, learning, and iterating based on real customer feedback. And it changed how she approached enablement forever. Here’s her 3-part playbook for any enablement leader who wants to actually drive business impact (not just check boxes): 1️⃣ Get visible. Go where your customers are—events, LinkedIn, even sales calls. Stop hiding. You need firsthand context to enable teams properly. 2️⃣ Drive insight loops. Bring real market feedback into the org. Not filtered marketing decks—real conversations. Capture the niche use cases, not just the generic personas. 3️⃣ Shift the mindset. Enablement is not a support role. You’re a strategic lever for revenue. That means knowing what the customer needs, not just what sales asked for. In the full episode we cover: ✅ Why enablement leaders need “frontline empathy” ✅ What most teams get wrong about behavior change ✅ How to build credibility with sellers and execs ✅ The role of AI in scaling a team-of-one What's your take on this—should enablers be more customer-facing? P.S. Link to the full episode in the comments!

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Building out our Austin office has pushed me to rethink how I approach leadership development. When you're working with individual contributors like AEs or BDRs/SDRs, the process is highly prescriptive. You spend time walking them through the fundamentals of the role - how to run a discovery call, handle objections with confidence, and navigate procurement processes effectively. Every step is spelled out with the goal of precision, repetition, and execution. When you're training leaders, instead of focusing on the how, you concentrate on the what. The key is to clearly define expectations, communicate what success looks like for the organization, and then give him the space to lead in his own way. If someone is stepping into a Head of Sales role, it means they’ve already spent years proving they can deliver results and developing the judgment required to lead others. Once Duri completed his initial training, I gave him three high-level goals to accomplish before the end of the year. (1) Recruit! As a leader he’s expected to bring on 20 superstar AEs to launch the office. (2) Drive immediate value through revenue acceleration by progressing in-funnel deals. (3) Start building sales pipeline with new hires in preparation for next year These goals were clear, outcome-driven, and tied directly to company goals. To stay aligned, everything is documented in Notion so we have a clear reference point for what success in this role looks like. At the end of the year, we’ll sit down for a retrospective to review the results, reflect on key moments, and map out priorities for the next chapter. With a strong Sales Leader like Duri in place, my role is to set the direction and let him lead.

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Thank you, Patrice (Taylor) Barber, Erin Beckstein, and Colorado Companies to Watch, for inviting me to share my thoughts as a panelist. I enjoyed the conversation and being able to share my perspective with other local leaders in the Denver area who are moving the needle with AI. The conversation has officially shifted. This wasn’t about future AI potential - it was about present valuation impact. Operators are redesigning workflows, expanding capacity without payroll growth, and tying AI directly to enterprise value. AI isn’t a side tool anymore. It’s a capital allocation strategy.

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What’s your close rate? If it’s less than 20%, you’ve got a BIG problem. If I had a low close rate, this is #1 thing I’d do TODAY to fix it. At Chief, we’ve analyzed millions of data points across hundreds of sales orgs. One factor shows up again and again as the outlier with disproportionate impact on close rate. It’s not more pipeline. Not more headcount. Not another enablement program. It’s speed-to-lead. The fastest responders win. Every time. When new leads are engaged within 60 seconds of raising their hand: • Conversion jumps 391% • Wait 5 minutes → odds drop 10x • Wait an hour → game over I saw it firsthand scaling eVisit. We ran a contest to see who could get a prospect on the phone while they were still on the site. The result? Those leads were 5x more likely to close. So if you're not closing at 20%, don’t start with adding more pipeline. Start with speed. Chief isn't a “speed-to-lead tool;” this is just one of the patterns Chief is surfacing across the funnel and helping sales teams address. Every week, I share data-backed insights we're seeing about the biggest opportunities to improve sales performance. To see your actual speed-to-lead (and more numbers that actually move the needle), follow me & comment “CLOSE RATE. We’ll pull it for you--for free 99.

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Really enjoyed this perspective from Cloudinary's SVP of Marketing Wanda Cadigan on scaling visual content without scaling complexity. This Q&A digs into what actually holds teams back from operational drag, tool sprawl, to broken workflows, and why fixing the foundation matters more than chasing the next shiny tool. 👉 https://okt.to/ligICu CMO Thinks

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AirOps is live in the Claude Directory today and I am pumped. Marketing teams can now access their complete AI search performance data, competitive intelligence, and content visibility metrics directly inside Claude. Ask a question, get the data, see the charts, and take action - all in one conversation. No switching between tabs. No export, upload, copy-paste. Just ask like you normally would and the data appears with charts, analysis, everything. What really excites me, though, is the partnerships angle: we didn't need months of build time to make this happen. No integration backlog. No debates. Just immediate interoperability that lets us innovate with partners at lightning speed. This is the golden age of partnerships. We can test joint value, tell stories together, and get into real co-selling conversations in weeks instead of quarters. Every major platform is moving toward MCP support (ChatGPT and other clients coming soon) which means we're just getting started. If you're thinking about how to activate your actual business context with AI instead of just pumping out generic content, let's talk. Huge shoutout to the Anthropic team for being incredible partners on this. Let's go! Available now in the Claude Connector Directory: https://lnkd.in/eH3tnwG4

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My colleague Paz and I crashed the The Hospitality Show in Denver. We were there to sniff out all things AI, here are my thoughts... First, no surprise that AI took center stage throughout the tradeshow. I found that exhibitors generally fell into one of two categories; 1) Have an existing solution and have added some form of AI on top of older tech (reacting). 2) Newer players that have developed a narrow and specific niche AI native solution. Several of these niche approaches centered around the idea of an automated AI concierge. The ability for hotel guests to interact with an intelligent chatbot to learn about what services are available, schedule and confirm automatically. One company had an interesting approach, developing an agent for front desk reception to get an in depth profile overview of each guest to reference during check in. The use case they sited was a K-Pop influencer with 80m followers that no one recognized at check in, and should have provided VIP service. One positive post equals millions in free marketing! Both interesting use cases. The larger existing companies that are reacting to new AI tech, particularly in Agentic AI, did appear to be somewhat generic, some struggling with accuracy and relevance. I witnessed these challenges first hand at a large company I worked at prior to my current role where we were forced to quickly respond to the onslaught that ChatGPT introduced to the market back in 2022. It felt like a nuclear bomb had hit in the technical data / search space! We ended up getting it working "okay", but quickly realized that if you don't have an AI native tech stack, it is very difficult to produce accurate results. What I did NOT see at the show, was anybody offering an agency approach to AI projects. When you take an AI agency approach, you work closely with customers to first learn specifically what AI projects they are struggling with, or don't have the bandwidth to execute on. Additionally a good AI Agency will seek to understand customers specific business objectives and use cases to develop very accurate, purpose-built bespoke AI agents specific to each business. Now, I'm not saying there aren't companies developing good AI applications out there, but it feels a bit generic to me. "One size fits all" sort of thing. If any of this sounds interesting, or if you just want to learn more about some of the projects fifthelement.ai has been involved in, comment here or DM me. I truly believe our AI agency approach is a differentiator in an otherwise very crowded space. Focus on solving real problems first matters! #TheHospitalityShow, #agenticAI, #ai, #fifthelement, #customai

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Scaling a team used to mean scaling headcount. What we shipped this month challenges that. A new dialer that keeps reps in live conversations longer, real-time dashboards that surface coaching gaps as they happen, and CRM syncing that stops data from falling through the cracks. Good month for the team.

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Phase 1 of building a SWE experimentation platform moves on to planning local and remote storage. The next installment from 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑬𝒙𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒕, arriving in subscriber email inboxes now.

Glenn Sanford invited the XPRIZE team to present to our leadership group at eXp a few years ago and since that day, I've thought about innovation through a completely different lens. To really innovate at scale, it can't be a single threaded process. It can't be the job of a single person or team to think of and build big ideas. Well it could be, but the pace would be limited and that's a major missed opportunity. The real way to make progress at scale is to crowdsource innovation by enabling and empowering subject matter experts in their own respective fields and teams to solve their own pain points. Hundreds or even thousands of people working in parallel, leveraging their unmatchable niche familiarity with problems, frictions and opportunities in their day to day. Deploying tools like Lovable and Supabase to non-technical subject-matter-experts across our org and developing enterprise-ready methodology to ensure scalability and safety has made the pace of progress truly exponential. We focus on forging the best practices and truly upskilling and enabling the entire team at eXp to maximize the opportunity. I'm thankful for our strong partnership with companies like Lovable.

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99.4% telemetry distillation. That's the latest benchmark for OtterMon AI's MVP build. But you might be surprised to hear data optimization isn't our primary focus... Our platform is designed to help customers *prevent* security incidents and business outages instead of them constantly reacting to problems. We accomplish that by sitting on top of their existing DevOps tools and analyzing their holistic digital footprint. What are they monitoring? What vendors are they using? What critical context is hiding in documentation, code, and runbooks? Today, trying to process all that data just doesn't scale. But by solving the data volume problem first, we also solved the data silo problem. And now our customers can see auto-detected issues, risks, and optimization opportunities instead of drowning in disparate dashboards and endless alerts. That's the power of Unified DevOps Intelligence 🚀

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For AI to work at scale, admins need transparency. Will Olson walks through two new features from Sigma that help teams govern Ask Sigma usage and align AI analysis with existing warehouse models.

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In SaaS, churn is everything. And if you're not targeting the right businesses, you're setting yourself up for failure. John Kosturos, Founder & CEO at SpringDB, helps companies fix this by combining data, systems, and processes to create highly impactful GTM outcomes. The problem? Most companies have terrible data quality. Poor enrichment. Duplicates that create compliance nightmares. And no reliable ideal customer profile to guide their targeting. In this customer story, John shares how SpringDB uses nearly the entire ZoomInfo product suite: ZoomInfo Copilot, Operations, Sales, Marketing, and Chorus to clean data, enrich profiles, and operationalize GTM strategies. SpringDB is also already deploying ZoomInfo’s newest innovations: GTM Studio and GTM Workspace. The results: → 2-3x increases in campaign conversions → 30-50% uplift in average deal size → 20-40% reductions in customer churn → 300% increase in database usability Watch the full story👇

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Really excited about this one: Confluent is teaming up with the Visa Cash App Racing Bulls F1 Team! As someone who gets to see firsthand how powerful real-time data can be, it’ll be amazing to see it fuel faster race-day calls, engineering breakthroughs, and even fan experiences. Read more here: https://cnfl.io/46LDD8Z

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Bridge Investment Group has quietly proven that #verticalintegration isn't just a buzzword, it's a strategic engine. Since 2009, this Salt Lake City powerhouse has fused data-driven rigor with hands-on asset management across #realestate, #credit, #renewables, and #secondaries. The result isn’t just differentiated returns, it’s a differentiated mindset. Robert Morse brings three decades of high-stakes finance, from Citigroup's Asia desk to private-equity, to sharpen Bridge's strategic edge. Alongside him, Jonathan Slager, CEO and Co‑CIO for Multifamily, has helped steer $8B+ in assets. Dean Allara and Adam O'Farrell fuse operations with capital markets. Katherine Elsnab, CFO, anchors the backbone. Together, they manage $49.2B in assets across 25 vehicles and a 2,270-person team. Bridge’s six-lane playbook, #multifamily, workforce housing, net lease, credit, #logistics, #renewableenergy, secondaries, is vertically dialed. In workforce housing, they organically lift income through upgrades and community programming. In logistics, it’s Class A infill facilities. Renewable energy amplifies real estate cash flow. Secondaries diversify capital via private equity and VC LP stakes. Proof? A record‑breaking $2.26B equity raise for their flagship multifamily fund in a constrained market; a $83.5 million industrial acquisition in Fontana, California, that expands their logistics footprint to 16.3 million square feet; and $650 million in secondary capital deployed following the Newbury Partners acquisition. Their public debut on the NYSE in July 2021 (BRDG) and an agreed‐upon $1.5 billion sale to Apollo Global Management, Inc. in February 2025 underscore market confidence. Bridge Investment Group's edge isn't only financial. Their proprietary modeling identifies dislocations in credit and real estate, especially during rate turbulence, where vertical integration fuels alpha. This isn't passive portfolio management; it's operational conviction at scale. The firm cultivates founders and operators through more than capital, they offer onsite execution teams, institutional network access, and thought leadership on opportunity zones, workforce trends, and debt strategy. That vertical support is living strategy, not marketing copy. Bridge Investment Group backs purpose as well as profit. More than $2B has flowed into Opportunity Zone investments. They partner with local workforce development programs, elevate underrepresented founders, and stage forums on CRE credit and multifamily innovation, real impact, real community. Their doors are open, roles are available in #assetmanagement, #operations, #analytics, and #development. Follow this firm. Study their founders. Track their plays. #VentureCapital #VCSpotlight #VCFirm #Startups #Founders #FounderJourney #StartupJourney #StartupFunding #InvestmentCapital #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #Hiring #TechHiring If engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.

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