Former Head of Commercial Sales. Founder and CEO (exited). Six years building recruitment and enablement systems for ANZ's top SaaS companies.
Ricky co-founded Pointer Strategy to fix how go-to-market teams are built in Australia and New Zealand. The model is practitioner-led vetting, pay-on-performance pricing, and 12 months of post-placement training included with every hire.
He writes about sales compensation, hiring strategy, revenue operations, and the realities of building GTM teams in the ANZ market.
Recent articles by Ricky
Ramping for ROI: The Real Cost of a Slow Sales Ramp (and How to Cut Time to Value)
The opportunity cost of a slow ramp can be two months of full target out of your annual revenue. Ricky Pearl and Nathan Clark break down why saving $10K on a hire can cost you $120K, and how to make time to value the metric that drives every onboarding decision.
ANZ GTM Hiring Is Concentrating Into Sales While It Cuts the AI Roles - The Pointer Index Issue 10
ANZ companies posted 4,602 new GTM roles this week, the first rise in three weeks. But underneath, the active pool is concentrating into front-line sales while presales and customer success are cut two to three times faster, and the functions being thinned are exactly the ones now demanding AI fluency.
What Is Vibe Marketing? A Live Demo of 3 Marketing Jobs in 25 Minutes
Most vibe marketing you see on LinkedIn is staged. This was not. In 25 live minutes, Marshy ran three real marketing jobs in parallel with Claude Code: designing a brand mascot, mining sales calls for LinkedIn ideas, and auditing the sign-up form, which turned out to be quietly losing half its leads.
ANZ GTM Hiring Is Grinding Back to Its Floor - The Pointer Index Issue 09
ANZ companies posted 4,213 new GTM roles this week, the second straight fall and within touching distance of the quarter's low. Sales is shedding seats fastest, pay has not moved in eleven weeks, and one in five GTM ads now mention AI.
What Every ANZ GTM Role Actually Pays - The Pointer Index Issue 08, Special Edition
A special edition. The index gets five numbers, and the rest of the issue is the full role-by-role ANZ GTM salary benchmark set: 39 roles across six functions, base and OTE, from BDR to CRO. Bookmark it, forward it to whoever runs your comp review.
The Market Stopped Shrinking. It Hasn't Started Hiring. - The Pointer Index Issue 07
ANZ go-to-market hiring posted its first net gain in seven weeks. But it did not come from the side we told you to watch. Postings stayed flat at 4,602. What flipped the market positive was closures falling 40% in a single week, from 6,470 to 3,854. The market stopped shrinking, not because hiring picked up, but because roles stopped disappearing.
Lead With Insight, Not Product: Why 68% of Sellers Sound the Same (and What the Other 32% Do Differently)
68% of B2B buyers say every seller looks and sounds the same. 90% would meet earlier if they thought the seller would bring real value. Nathan Clark and Georgia Watson unpack the gap between those two numbers, the playbook that lives inside it, and the free Buyer Research Toolkit you can install in Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT, or Gemini.
Closures Hit a New High. Postings Hit a New Low. - The Pointer Index Issue 06
ANZ go-to-market hiring just had its sharpest contraction since we started measuring. Companies closed 6,470 roles this week and posted 4,093. The active pool sits at 4,856, down 19% in seven days. For four of the last five weeks the line has pointed the same way. This is no longer a drift, it is a draw down.
The Leadership Cut Bounced. The Market Kept Drifting. - The Pointer Index Issue 05
Last issue we said the leadership build was not real. This week leadership share recovered to 1.08%, back near the 13 week average. That was a noise week, not a regime shift. The durable signal in May is quieter and worth more: enterprise hiring keeps softening, mid market is holding, and salaries have not moved for eight straight weeks.