The marketing judgements a payroll software company cannot hand to an agency

I measure marketing on outcomes that someone outside marketing can verify. At Yarrowby a qualified opportunity has one written definition, agreed with our chief revenue officer and audited by finance: a discovery call has been held with someone who owns or shares the payroll decision, headcount and current system are confirmed, and a demonstration is booked. Sales accepts or rejects each one. Every quarter's qualified opportunities form a cohort that we follow through to won revenue, cost per new customer, months to recover acquisition cost and eighteen-month retention by source. Lead scoring survives, but it steers our own programmes rather than triggering sales calls. I learnt why this matters at Brennock Networks, where A$90 million of reported pipeline produced A$28 million of contracts, and I have not shown a board a sourced-pipeline figure since 2021.

An employer changes payroll system perhaps once a decade, usually after something has gone wrong with the old one. Performance marketing captures the few employers searching this month; brand decides whether we make the shortlist when the rest start looking. In FY2021, 78 per cent of our programme budget went on paid search, paid social and software review sites. By FY2025 the split was 60 per cent performance and 40 per cent brand, spent on business-programme radio and podcast sponsorship in Sydney and Melbourne, outdoor sites near business districts and an annual survey of payroll practice that the trade press now reports. We judge the brand spend on unaided awareness among payroll and HR decision-makers, from a survey of 1,200 every six months, and on win rates when we are shortlisted from first contact. Australian awareness rose from 11 to 24 per cent. The UK has not yet moved the same way, and I say so in every budget paper.

Accounting practices and payroll bureaus influence which payroll system a mid-market employer chooses, and many help run it afterwards. I have worked with partners from both sides: as a reseller's marketer in Brisbane, turning vendor funds into consultants' work, and in London, where 2,900 accounting practices recommended our software to their clients. At Yarrowby I replaced one-off referral fees with a 12 per cent revenue share, paid quarterly for three years while the customer stays, and created a certified tier for practices trained to support implementation. Partners now introduce 34 per cent of our new recurring revenue, and 89 per cent of the employers they refer remain after eighteen months. I treat partner marketing as a service to the practice's own reputation. The most useful thing we can give an accountant is a client who never needs to call her about payroll.

I support self-service wherever a customer's mistake is cheap and visible, and I insist on a person's help where it is not. Our free rostering tier, for single sites of up to 30 staff, has brought about 11,600 workplaces to Yarrowby without a sales conversation, and our demonstration environment and payroll guides are open to anyone without a form. Payroll implementation is different. A 2024 pilot found that 31 per cent of employers who went live without assistance had a pay error in their first three pay runs, against 6 per cent of a matched assisted group. Customers now configure most of the system themselves, process a parallel pay run alongside their old system and review the differences with an implementation specialist before the first live pay. Marketing's measures follow the same logic: we count verified parallel runs and error-free early pay runs, not sign-ups.

A price change in business software is a marketing decision as much as a financial one, because customers judge the explanation as closely as the number. I worked with our chief financial officer and chief product officer on Yarrowby's 2025 move from separate per-product fees to two per-employee bundles, which reduced 1,900 negotiated price combinations to fewer than 60 and raised the average bill by 8.5 per cent. I argued for 120 days' notice, a first-year cap of 15 per cent, a two-year price lock for customers moving to annual billing and a letter showing each customer their own old and new bill. Price-related cancellations reached 1.4 per cent of recurring revenue against a modelled 3.5 per cent. I also hold a firm view on discounting: every discount a salesperson negotiates becomes a future increase that somebody else must explain, so we now publish our prices and allow discretionary discounts only in defined cases.

In payroll software, what a company says during an incident is part of the product. After the May 2023 credential-stuffing attack I led our communication with customers, employees and the market, alongside our chief information security officer, general counsel and chief executive. We wrote to all 7,400 customers within 48 hours, paused marketing for eight weeks and ran no security advertising for a year. Since August 2023 every customer administrator has received a quarterly trust report covering multi-factor enrolment, bank-detail changes held for employer approval, penetration-test findings with dates for fixing them and our certification status. I keep marketing's own handling of personal data under review too: consent records, how long we keep prospect data and which vendors process it are reported to the Audit and Risk Committee twice a year. A marketing department holds more personal information than it usually admits, and a breach of our own systems would undo years of careful communication.