A payroll customer hands us every employee's pay and bank details, so I judge marketing by the customers who stay, not the leads we count.
I am the chief marketing officer of Yarrowby Software Limited, a fictional ASX-listed company whose cloud software pays 1.05 million people across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Our customers are about 7,400 mid-market employers, from aged-care operators and regional manufacturers to hospitality groups and engineering firms, most with between 50 and 2,000 staff. Revenue for the year to June 2026 was A$198 million, three-quarters of it earned in Australia. I lead 64 people across demand generation, product marketing, partner marketing, brand and customer communications.
Payroll is an unusual thing to market. Nobody wants to change it, everyone notices when it fails, and the person who signs the contract is rarely the person who runs the pay each fortnight. I learnt to sell into that kind of reluctance slowly: writing direct mail for a copier dealer in Newcastle, running accounts at a Sydney business-to-business agency, spending vendor funds at a Brisbane software reseller, building the first honest pipeline report at a Melbourne managed-services provider, and working with thousands of accounting practices for a cloud accounting company in London. I came home to join Yarrowby in March 2021.
The defining weeks of my time here came in May 2023, when attackers used passwords stolen from other websites to get into our employee app and redirect nine people's pay. We repaid those employees within two days, wrote to every customer rather than only the 58 affected, and stopped all advertising for eight weeks. I apply the lesson to every marketing decision I make. A payroll company's promise is kept by its systems and its people; marketing's task is to describe that promise precisely and never to run ahead of the evidence for it.
A pipeline report that sales and finance both accept
We retired lead quotas in 2021 and agreed one written definition of a qualified opportunity with sales. Reported pipeline fell from A$61 million to A$37 million on paper. Win rates on qualified opportunities then rose from 19 to 27 per cent, and the months needed to recover acquisition cost fell from 31 to 22.
Retention rebuilt after a security incident
Gross revenue retention dropped from 95.1 per cent to 92.6 per cent in the year after the May 2023 incident. By June 2026 it stood at 95.4 per cent, with multi-factor sign-in compulsory on every employee account and no security advertising at all for the first twelve months.
Partners paid for customers who stay
Replacing one-off referral fees with a three-year revenue share cost us 190 referring partners in its first year. Partner-referred customers still with us after eighteen months rose from 62 to 89 per cent, and partners now introduce 34 per cent of our new recurring revenue.
A price change explained bill by bill
Our 2025 move to per-employee bundles raised the average bill by 8.5 per cent. With 120 days' notice, a 15 per cent first-year cap and a letter showing each customer their own old and new bill, price-related cancellations came to 1.4 per cent of recurring revenue against the 3.5 per cent we had modelled.
Current focus
I am working with our product and finance leaders on the next stage of our self-service journey: deciding which setup steps customers can safely complete alone and where an implementation specialist must stay involved before a first live pay run. I am also preparing the board's annual review of marketing spend, which this year asks whether our brand investment in the United Kingdom has earned the shortlist gains it earned at home.
Conversations I welcome
I intend to stay at Yarrowby while our UK plan and the redesign of our self-service journey are under way. I would consider one non-executive directorship at an ASX-listed or member-owned organisation outside software, where customer trust and digital channels are board questions, taken with my own board's consent. I can give about 25 days a year. I also accept a small number of invitations to speak to marketing, product and governance audiences.