Episode 9: The Real Reason Your Best Salesperson Might Be Killing Your Team (Low Ego Beats High Talent)

Most tech companies expanding into New Zealand skip the local team entirely. Lowry thinks that's exactly why so many of them fail to earn trust in market.

After eight years trying to escape a career in corporate law, Lowry talked his way into a partnerships role at Vend, one of New Zealand's most formative (and wildest) SaaS success stories, then helped Xero build what may be the most effective channel partnership motion in SaaS history: 60 to 70% of its growth driven by accountants and bookkeepers. Now he's Airwallex's first employee on the ground in New Zealand, building the local sales team from scratch inside one of the most ambitious fintechs in the world.

In this episode, Lowry joins Paul Perrett to unpack why product partnerships fail without customer overlap, why "we'll just sell in remotely" doesn't cut it in categories built on trust, like payments, and what he actually screens for when hiring a sales team from zero in a market with a brain drain problem. Lowry has seen sales and partnerships from nearly every angle: corporate lawyer, product partnerships lead at Vend, channel strategist at Xero, and now country lead at Airwallex.

Together, they get into why customer overlap is the only early signal worth trusting in a partnership, why New Zealand's 25 to 35 year old talent gap is reshaping how companies hire, why curiosity and hunger matter more than sales pedigree when your product is genuinely complex, and why low ego, not raw talent, is the trait he won't compromise on when someone's revenue numbers say keep them and the team dynamic says otherwise.

Why you should listen:

If you're building or scaling a go-to-market team into a new market, or wrestling with the tension between hiring for skill versus hiring for fit, this episode is a grounded look at what actually works. Lowry doesn't romanticize the journey; he's candid about the partnerships that wasted his time, the risk of hiring someone your team can't function with, and why "hire the best" is easier said than done in a small market.

This is a conversation about earning trust through local presence, why AI is quietly reshaping how finance teams evaluate vendors, and why the difference between a partnership that compounds and one that goes nowhere often comes down to a single, boring question: do we actually share customers?