Twenty-six years of asking which enquiries became customers

The first sales lead I ever tracked arrived by fax at a copier dealer in Newcastle. In 2000 I was the marketing coordinator at Tuckwell Office Systems, a family-owned business that sold, leased and serviced office printers across the Hunter, and the sales team told me every enquiry I passed them was rubbish. I began writing each enquiry into a spreadsheet and checking a month later whether it had become a lease. Most had not. A few had become the dealership's largest service contracts. Both of us were partly right, and I have been measuring that difference ever since.

I grew up in Newcastle, the daughter of a nurse and a boilermaker at the steelworks, and studied commerce, majoring in marketing, at Hunterdale University, graduating in 1999. At Tuckwell I wrote direct mail, staffed stands at regional business expos and learnt that a sale to a business depends on a service relationship that lasts long after the signature.

In 2003 I moved to Sydney to join Pellow & Strang, an independent agency that made advertising for companies selling to other companies. Over five years I became an account director for technology and professional-services clients. Agency life taught me to write a brief and to defend a creative idea in front of a sceptical client. It also showed me that an agency rarely saw what happened after a campaign. Clients told us response rates; they seldom told us which responses became customers. I wanted to work where that answer was visible.

Halbridge Business Systems, a Brisbane firm that resold and implemented mid-market finance and payroll software, gave me that view in 2008. I joined as partner marketing manager, responsible for spending the market development funds our vendors provided and for the seminars where we met finance managers. It was the first time I understood a channel from the inside. A reseller earns most of its margin from consultants' time, so it promotes whatever keeps its consultants busy, and vendors who forget this pay for seminars that never become projects. During those years I completed a graduate certificate in marketing analytics part-time, because I wanted to build the analysis myself rather than commission it.

In 2013 I joined Brennock Networks in Melbourne, a managed IT and security services provider selling three-to-five-year contracts to mid-sized organisations. It had grown on its founders' relationships and needed a demand engine. I built one, and within two years the board was looking at a marketing-sourced pipeline of A$90 million. When I reconciled it with the contracts actually signed, A$28 million had converted, and much of the remainder had never been a real opportunity. I took that reconciliation to the chief executive before anyone asked for it. It was an uncomfortable meeting and the most useful one of my early career. After a private-equity investment in 2015 I became marketing director, and spent two years rebuilding our reporting around contract value won.

In 2017 I took a role in London as head of marketing for the UK and Ireland at Fenmore Software, a private-equity-owned cloud accounting company, because I wanted to learn how software is sold when a professional adviser's reputation stands behind the recommendation. Most of Fenmore's growth came through accounting practices. The largest test was Making Tax Digital for VAT, which from April 2019 obliged VAT-registered businesses above the registration threshold to keep digital records and file through compatible software. We helped practices move tens of thousands of reluctant clients at once, and I learnt that the most valuable thing a software company can give an accountant is a client who never rings her with problems.

We came back to Sydney in early 2021 to be nearer my parents, and I joined Yarrowby as CMO that March. The company had a respected payroll product and almost no reputation outside payroll offices, and its marketing was measured on lead volume. My first year went on changing what marketing counted and my second on rebuilding the partner programme. The third was shaped by the credential-stuffing attack of May 2023, and the fourth by a change to our pricing that took effect in July 2025.

I lead 64 people through seven direct reports, and I ask them for evidence before enthusiasm. Every campaign brief names the customer group it is meant to change and the measure that will show whether it did, and each quarter we send the executive team a list of the things marketing has stopped doing. I work most closely with our chief revenue officer, chief product officer and chief information security officer, because in payroll software the promise marketing makes is kept by their teams.

People in Australian software marketing would probably describe me by three positions that cost money in the short run: that lead volume is not a measure of marketing, that a company should not advertise its security soon after failing at it, and that self-service has a limit where people's pay is concerned. I also sit, unpaid, on the board of Merrigal Learning Foundation, a not-for-profit that teaches digital skills to adults returning to work. It has shown me what it means to be responsible for an organisation without running it, and that is the role I now want to take further.

Open to Board appointments · Speaking invitations

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