B2B Inspired
B2B Inspired, the podcast by BlueOcean - The B2B Agency, is all about exploring the ins, outs, ups and downs of B2B Marketing here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We'll uncover emerging trends and thinking while sharing inspiring real-world stories from B2B Marketers here in New Zealand. With the goal of supporting New Zealand’s B2B Marketing community in becoming one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world, let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.
B2B Inspired
Actionable Insights from Tech Marketer of the Year, Nick Whitehead
Ever wondered what it takes to be recognized as Tech Marketer of the Year? Join us on "We Do B2B" as we chat with Nick Whitehead, the acclaimed CMO of Serko. Nick generously shares his extensive journey through the SaaS industry, his strategic insights on Serko's dual market approach, and how his team’s innovative partnership with Booking.com for Business stands out. From his initial days at small startups to leading marketing initiatives in Fortune 500 companies, Nick's career offers a blueprint for balancing influence and agility in the tech world.
We dive into the challenges and opportunities within New Zealand's SaaS industry, exploring the critical need for high-calibre product marketers and the importance of fostering a collaborative ecosystem. Nick sheds light on the stark contrasts between New Zealand's fragmented approach and the more structured systems in the US, emphasizing the need for Kiwi SaaS companies to unite. We also discuss the transition from traditional marketing to a more integrated strategy that enhances the entire customer journey. This episode is packed with actionable insights and forward-thinking strategies essential for anyone passionate about B2B marketing and the tech industry.
For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz
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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.
Kia ora and welcome back to We Do B2B, the podcast by Blue Ocean, where we unpick the ins outs, ups and downs of B2B marketing here in Aotearoa, new Zealand. I'm your host, dale Kerner, and I'm a B2B marketer like you, from emerging trends and thinking to inspiring real world stories from smart, good people here in New Zealand. We are here to help the New Zealand B2B marketing community to become one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world. If, like me, you're a B2B marketer looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place. Welcome to number three of our Southern Sass sessions of we Do B2B. I don't want to blow smoke up our next guest's whatnot, but I'm going to say that we have someone who's close to B2B marketing royalty here in New Zealand and he's laughing as I'm saying it because I sense he's a humble kind of guy. We have Nick Whitehead, who's CMO at Serko, and this is the royalty piece Tech Marketer of the Year Last year was it Nick?
Nick Whitehead:2023, so that's old news.
Dale Koerner:That doesn't sound like old news to me. So take us away. Let's, um, let's. Let's hear a little bit about Nick. What's, what's your journey been? What do you do now? Let's start with your journey in, uh, in the various different roles that have brought you to the here and now for sure.
Nick Whitehead:Well, I mean, I've actually spent my entire career in the SaaS industry. So I find it really funny when people have to kind of articulate what is SaaS and how that's different. We had one of the speakers this morning sharing her own reflections on back in the day when Microsoft used to ship software out on CDs. Fortunately I came along after that Is that where the terminology of shipping good product comes from? Yeah, literally shipping. They were literally sending boxes. That's how software got distributed. True, but yeah, no. So SaaS for me was always very native.
Nick Whitehead:Yeah, I've bounced between small startups in the SaaS space and really large sort of Fortune 500 organizations and I've found I've kind of gone through that phase of being like, oh, I really want to be in a small dynamic organization where I can have kind of gone through that phase of being like I really want to be in a small Dynamic organization where I can have a lot of influence. And then it's like, oh, that's too hard trying to find product market fit. Go to the other end. I'm like, ah, I don't want to be in a big company anymore. For me, actually, Serko, where I'm at now and have been for the last five or six years, is really a kind of a Goldilocks size Organization. That's really cool to be part of a company that is big enough that we've proven that we've got product market fit. We're mature in that respect. We're still growing really fast, but we're also small enough to be able to actually have a really big impact and to be able to make a dent in the world, and that's what's so exciting about what I'm doing.
Dale Koerner:So for the viewers at home who don't know what is Serko in a nutshell, what do you do?
Nick Whitehead:So Serko is a technology company in the travel and the business travel and expense space. We've got two kind of routes to market. In the enterprise space we provide our booking tool to travel management companies like Flight Center or American Express, who then white label and give it to their customers. So if you work for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise or the New Zealand government department and you're booking a trip between Wellington to come up to Auckland for this event, you're probably using our technology to do that booking in your corporate travel program. And then we have a different play in the SME market which is a partnership with Bookingcom and that product is called Bookingcom for Business. The same platform, different branding, different experience, but same tech at the core, serving both the enterprise and the SME market.
Dale Koerner:It sounds like a diverse day at work.
Nick Whitehead:It is. It is. I mean there's similarities in that both routes to market are built around having really successful partnerships and channel partnerships. So that's been a real learning. For us is, how do we get those firing really effectively? But the cool thing is that it does allow us to kind of scale across a really significant breadth of customer base with different approaches, different product names, different brands, different messaging, but ultimately leveraging the same tech stack.
Dale Koerner:Fantastic. So you're getting, I suppose, a better utilization out of that core asset base, because you've got those different avenues to be putting it into market. Yeah, exactly.
Nick Whitehead:So it would be remiss of me to not ask the question what made you tech marketer of the year 2023? Look, so I would absolutely clarify that. I think I was the tip of the spear and it was more what we had achieved as a team and as a company. Good for you. So I don't think it was so much me. I just happened to be at the front of the spear and it was more what we had achieved as a team and as a company so I don't think it was so much me I just happened to get the.
Nick Whitehead:Uh, I happened to be at the front of the. You're the poster child. Yeah, I was lucky to get the reflected glory of the hard work of a lot of other people.
Nick Whitehead:I think what um really drove that recognition was the work that we did with booking dot com in bringing to market bookingcomcom for business. We started the partnership with them in 2019 when Bookingcom realized they wanted to have a more significant play in the business travel space. They looked at a build by partner option. They looked at every corporate booking tool in the world, chose our platform, zeno to white label as Bookingcom for business, and we started to take that to market in 2020-21. Since then, we are now at over 600,000 registered companies on the platform. We are continuing to grow really strongly. We are acquiring thousands of new customers a month that are positive ROI, and all of that has been achieved with a really small team on their side of only 16 people within the entire Bookingcom organization and the Serko team here in New Zealand, and so what I think that represents is a very, very cool opportunity or a play for New Zealand tech companies to partner with global leaders to take their product to the world.
Dale Koerner:So that's an angle we haven't actually talked about with anyone so far today. So are there any other? Any other examples from our home base here in new zealand have done a similar thing. Are you, are you the unicorn? Are you the only ones who've done it?
Nick Whitehead:I'm not super familiar with any other good examples. What I do know is that partnerships often end in disappointment. You sign up a channel deal or you sign up a reseller deal with a large multinational and you're like we are going to be so rich, they have got a bazillion customers we just need. They've got a huge sales team, big marketing budget. They are going to just walk us to glory. And then you sort of you're like, oh my God, we're going to need a bigger bank account for the revenue that this is going to deliver. And then you're sort of waiting for this fire hose of revenue to come out. And then you actually are kind of waiting for drips coming out of a tap.
Nick Whitehead:That's been my experience in the past commonly with channel partnerships, because they're also often really outsized or disproportionate, where you as a Aussie or Kiwi tech company working with a large global, you don't have a lot of influence and trying to push channel partners to deliver you more customers or more revenue is like pushing rope. It's only that effective. You actually have to take a different approach to kind of prime the pump, build that kind of fire, build that energy within the partner. And so I don't know that we are a unicorn, for sure, but what I do know is that we have built a really successful partnership with a global giant that's mutually beneficial.
Dale Koerner:And it sounds like there's an element of marketing to them. You know you're not just selling them the technology stack, You're selling the dream, and you know you're not pushing rope, like you said.
Nick Whitehead:Yeah, I think, one observation that I would make about Bookingcom they are the largest e-commerce retailer of travel in the world and they got there by being incredibly data-centric. They take an experiment-driven approach to everything from product development to marketing, which is let's apply the smallest amount of effort to figure out whether or not this hypothesis is true like and that's that applies across everything that they do very data-driven, not a lot of opinion. So I sorry, not not a lot of opinion driven strategy, and so it's less about us selling to them and it was actually more about having an alignment of going. The global business travel market is a $1.5 trillion market. Within that there are different segments and what we call the unmanaged space or the SME space, which is probably a lot of the startups that are in the room.
Nick Whitehead:Today. They're booking their trips on Air New Zealand or Qantas or Expedia or Kayak, and actually that works totally fine when you're a single person company. But as you kind of grow, you start to look at things like well, how do we get control and visibility around what we're spending on travel? How do we know we're getting the best value for what we're doing? And so we really saw an opportunity that, aligned with booking to create an offering that was going to help small to medium businesses go further faster, and that's really what we've been able to bring to market and literally go further, faster, by the time they book flights.
Dale Koerner:Exactly beautiful synchronicity there. So we we shot through a series of questions before this and before we tear this, this interview, up and put the question out there, what would you like to talk about? And one of the things that you touched on was the sense of snobbery of selling or marketing a service outside of New Zealand but not on your own doorstep. So take us through your thinking there.
Nick Whitehead:Yeah, that is a challenge. I mean we are focused on a global market of a $1.5 trillion business travel industry and the biggest markets for that are the likes of the US and North America and Europe, where booking are really strong in, and so all of our energy investment focus is on those growth markets, not on New Zealand. It just doesn't rank as a market that we really- it's not even a percentage point.
Nick Whitehead:Yeah, exactly, and so we don't spend any effort or resources on the market here, we don't do anything to really raise the visibility and we don't really build a product for this market. So some things like flights we don't offer in New Zealand, or not at the moment. So the product experience and the brand awareness here of both booking for business, but also Serko more generally as a company is disproportionately low. It's not a market that we're focused on, and so I think that that can come across a little bit like we don't care, which is not true. We are a proudly Kiwi company. We are Auckland headquartered. The majority of our exec team, our leadership team, are all here. We are proudly taking New Zealand tech to the world, but we just haven't done anything to kind of really raise that profile or talk about it in this market.
Dale Koerner:But we just haven't done anything to kind of really raise that profile or talk about it in this market and that seems to be something that trips the whole tech sector up a little bit is signalling back to the country here that actually we're building something of enormous value. How can the sector approach that piece piece? Because what we're hearing today at Southern SaaS is we've got this amazing pipeline of growing businesses who are going through that product market fit kind of phase, getting to a point where they are and there's forecasting a huge, I suppose, deficit of good people. So somewhere along the line New Zealand needs to know that New Zealand is really bloody good at tech. How do we tackle that challenge?
Nick Whitehead:I don't know if this is answering it directly, but one observation I would have is that in the US, when it comes to SaaS companies and the SaaS ecosystem, it's like you get on a treadmill. You have an idea for a business, you start on the treadmill and there are very clear and kind of it's almost like the lights kind of come along down the runway of here's what you plug in to do, all the things that you need to get a business up and running, and here's how you acquire customers and here's how you figure out if you have product market fit and, if you do, here's how you access funding to take it to the next level. And then at some point you either continue along on that travelator or you get off it because your business has failed. And it's quite predictable and there's a very structured ecosystem around it.
Nick Whitehead:In New Zealand it feels like every single SaaS startup it's being created from scratch.
Nick Whitehead:They've got this great idea and they're going to plow their own furrow and they're going to figure it out on their own and there is not a sense of going oh well, next I do this, and here I plug in that and I do.
Nick Whitehead:That is not a sense of going. Oh well, next I do this and here I plug in that and I do that, and there's a sort of a momentum behind them because they're a part of a whole load of other companies that are all actually trying to do the same thing and the reality is not a lot of the time are we competing against each other in New Zealand, we might be competing for talent and potentially for funding and resources, but on the whole, we should be, and the opportunity is there for us to actually come together much more to go. We are all facing similar challenges within different phases of growth, obviously like how can we work together on this? And I think bringing visibility to that and building that connection is would be phenomenal. I just heard um from the kiwi sas team that actually the SaaS industry in New Zealand is larger than the SaaS industry in Singapore and yet Singapore is globally known as an international tech hub. Wow, that blows my mind.
Nick Whitehead:Exactly, I think on overall tech we're lower than Singapore, but the SaaS industry specifically, we are again like punching above our weight, but doing it in a way that nobody really knows about it, and I just think there's an opportunity to bring us together, and so the work that KiwiSaaS have been doing is phenomenal to try and create that connection, and I do genuinely think there's an opportunity, if we do come together as a community, that we can go so much better.
Dale Koerner:Yep Leveraging each other's strengths and lessons and resources and everything that goes with that kind of genuinely sharing community. So one of the other things that you touched on in the pre-briefing to this conversation was looking at the from. You know, recognizing that our audience is B2B marketers is the evolution from acquisition to activation and beyond. Now I'm really interested to understand your thoughts on that and your perspectives on how, perhaps, the sands are changing there.
Nick Whitehead:Yeah, I think so. Traditionally you'd have marketing would provide leads to some kind of sales function with an organization. We don't have any salespeople in our business. We are a product-led growth organization and so we don't just kind of bring in leads and give them to our product team and go. You need to make those customers activate and make them profitable.
Nick Whitehead:What we're seeing is a real kind of intersection of product marketing, brand marketing, product management, development, customer success, all kind of coming together to look at the entire customer journey, from acquisition like how do we get better at sign-up conversion, but also how do we get better at activating customers, how do we get better at retaining them and growing them. And there's a role for marketing to play right across that, whether it's across comms, whether it's across user experience, and I'm seeing the rise of product marketing very much within the space as well. So we have growth teams. So we have product development teams who are building features, and then we have growth teams who are building business outcomes like activation. So we've stood up a team that's just focusing on activation and that team there is a full-time product marketer working on it, there is a full-time product manager, but there's a full-time product marketer, and so we're seeing this real kind of blend of marketing and product and engineering and tech, all kind of working together to look across the whole lifecycle, and that, to me, is really exciting.
Dale Koerner:So one question that one of our community asked in advance of the event was they were looking to get some insights on how people in the SaaS space are using their marketers' skill sets and their technical people's skill sets to cross-pollinate. Have you got anything that you can share on how you guys go about that?
Nick Whitehead:Well, I think those growth teams are a good example where somebody may sit in the marketing team but on a daily basis they are actually embedded with front-end developers and UX designers and product managers. So the functional silos have been broken down and reassembled around a particular business challenge and we're seeing a huge amount of kind of transfer of knowledge and ideas and all sorts of creativity come out of that.
Dale Koerner:And looking then at the I suppose the broader marketing landscape, what do you foresee will be the gaps and opportunities within the New Zealand marketing community skill set? What are going to be the jobs to look out for in the next five to ten years that people should be gearing up for now?
Nick Whitehead:I think product marketing uh has been and will continue to be an area that we need a lot more high quality, high caliber, experienced people in um that's. That's always been a struggle, I think, in new zealand because they're just there aren't that many uh sass, uh companies who have good product marketing functions that can kind of create and generate talent to kind of spread around. So we've kind of been relying on people coming from overseas or being spun out of some of the biggest companies, like the zeros of the world. So that to me like product marketing, if I was looking to build a career in marketing, I wanted to make sure I had a really, really um solid runway solid runway, I would be focusing on product marketing.
Nick Whitehead:I think that that that's a that's a really good opportunity for the reasons I spoke about before it's it's. It is really helping drive change for product lead growth and being, you know, embedded right in the business, and that's really changed the way that marketing is perceived. It's not seen as being purely externally focused. It is about connecting the work that's being done in the organization with the customers and making sure that you're building stuff that really solves the problems that they're trying to deal with.
Dale Koerner:And what, then, is the interplay between product marketing and brand marketing? When is the interplay between product marketing and brand marketing? So you've mentioned the phrase and beyond here and I do wonder if brand fits in the end beyond camp. But how do you kind of see that trade off and that relationship playing between the product stuff and the longer tail, the brand stuff?
Nick Whitehead:Oh, good question. I'm naturally more of a brand marketer that's my happy space is to be focused on that, and I don't think that brand marketing in any way is diminished through things like product-led growth or a focus on performance marketing. We know that performance marketing is more effective when we have a really strong positioning and a very clear brand identity and we are differentiated from our competitors. I do see them dovetail really nicely, though, because the brand proposition that customers experience before they sign up has to be consistent all the way through. So actually, our product marketers have been involved in our brand development program and so that they're involved in developing it and then also implementing it that's fantastic.
Dale Koerner:I mean great to kind of close the loop on that, because I think that the brand piece, if you do disconnect it from the here and the now, and the actual conversion piece and the activation piece, yeah, and that's been a change for me, whereas in the past I would be really happy to go out and build a brand without any real connection to the product.
Nick Whitehead:So it was really more an interpretation of what I thought the product should be, not necessarily what the product was, but that only gets you so far.
Dale Koerner:Yeah, it does no, for sure, for sure. So how would you then rate or how would you comment on the outlook of the tech and of the SaaS sector here in New Zealand? I mean, we're here at Southern SaaS and we're here today, which is about gathering the community around talking about its future. What do you see its future as being?
Nick Whitehead:I think that we have great momentum already. As has been described this morning, the sector is expected to quadruple in the next 10 years. We've seen some really awesome success stories in the last few years, so I have huge optimism for the sector, but I think that we've succeeded almost in spite of ourselves to date as a community.
Dale Koerner:And.
Nick Whitehead:I think now we really have an opportunity to leverage the work of a number of different agencies and community organizations. Different agencies and community organizations whether that's New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, whether that's See Tomorrow First, whether that's Southern SaaS, NZ Tech, tech Marketing Group there are some really good organizations out there who are helping to try to build community, to try to enhance the transfer of information and knowledge and to support people who are trying to execute on really ambitious growth programs. So they're doing an awesome job and I think the opportunity is there for us to actually start getting to the point where we are working together to support each other yeah, I see that ecosystem being so critical to to the whole, to the, to the success of the whole.
Dale Koerner:I mean it comes up time and time again, this whole sense of this shared, sharing resources, sharing of learning, sharing of opportunities, successes, failures, everything else like that. That all just helps to kind of spin the flywheel.
Nick Whitehead:Totally. I think it's also about learning about failures as much as successes. Like, the Pacific Ocean between here and the US is littered with so many dead bodies of organizations who thought they could take what worked in New Zealand and just copy and paste it into the US. You could literally walk on the backs of them from here to Silicon Valley. If we could take all of the learnings of those people who have kind of been there before both the successes and the failures, not just the dead bodies, the thriving organizations as well, and kind of bottle that a little bit, I think that we could make the paths for the next wave of growth companies a lot easier.
Dale Koerner:What do you think would be in that mix? You know you talk about distilling some of those learnings. What are the you know from your observations and your experiences? What are the stumbling blocks that people just keep tripping over?
Nick Whitehead:Number one for New Zealand tech companies, I think is being underfunded.
Dale Koerner:Really Okay, absolutely yeah.
Nick Whitehead:I think that the it's just like the scale is so different in New Zealand versus Australia and versus the US where if you get, if you got $50 million of funding in New Zealand, you would be like, oh my God, we are.
Dale Koerner:So you're cashed up. Yeah, Ready to go? We're so cashed up.
Nick Whitehead:Yeah, in Australia you're probably that's probably pretty moderate or pretty medium size, and in the US it'd be seed funding basically, and so it's just. The scale is so different that organizations here who think they've got enough runway for 12 months, when you go into the US and you realize that you actually have to amplify everything, 10x you suddenly don't have a runway of 12 months of funding.
Nick Whitehead:You've got very little, and I also think that there's a disproportionate number of kiwi startups or sas companies who are bootstrapping and that is awesome to see and there's lots of good reasons why that makes sense. But there does come a point where I think you've got to. Really you can't bring a knife to a gunfight and I think that's a lot of the time what Kiwi SaaS companies are doing.
Dale Koerner:I mean you talk about just the sheer scale of the US and that spread of like. Well, you're $50 million, that's less than a million bucks a state and each state being significantly bigger than the country that we're in.
Nick Whitehead:Exactly. Even in our. We're at probably the different end of the spectrum. We're publicly listed, we're on the New Zealand Stock Exchange and the Australian Stock Exchange. We have about $18 million of cash in the bank, which sounds like a lot when you're a New Zealand tech company, but there are multiple competitors in our space who are doing raises of half a billion dollars, and so we're actually disproportionately small compared to them and we're playing in the same global market, and so I think that's the issue is kind of that reframing.
Dale Koerner:And is there from a marketer's perspective, do you leverage that New Zealand origin piece at all? Is it part of your narrative?
Nick Whitehead:It is, but we don't lead with it. So what we want to appear is as local and comfortable and reliable and relatable as we can possibly be.
Nick Whitehead:And at some point we amplify up the Kiwiness. So we're not overt with it, but we do bring it through in the brand identity, particularly for Serko and for Zeno, our enterprise product, which, like when we launched in the us, uh, we, we had a black fuselage at the biggest trade show over there. Obviously, yeah, we had a um, people would come in and sit inside this kind of very cool looking black fuselage and they had a safety video. Uh, that was kind of poking fun at the industry, um. So we do do things like that, that kind of bring through a little bit of Kiwiness right to the forefront, but it's not overtly Kiwi, it's more coming through in terms of the brand essence.
Nick Whitehead:But I do think that we are proud of who we are. We have offices in China and the US and Australia. But where possible, yeah, we do want to make it pretty clear that we are Kiwi and we're proud. Clear that we are Kiwi and we're proud. I think that we also are able to back up that New Zealand centricity with kind of a track record of success. That then gives people confidence rather than us being like I think if we were a startup, I don't know how much we would amplify the NZ foundations because I think that that could present risk in the enterprise space.
Dale Koerner:Yeah, that's interesting. I suppose it has. What are you saying? There is it has the Kiwi Origin piece. It shapes the behaviors and some of the ways that you communicate, that you do business and that you think. But it's not like saying, buy us because we're from New Zealand. Yeah, it's like get the value proposition right first, get the positioning right for that market and then this is a nice to have. That just enriches that whole experience.
Nick Whitehead:Yeah exactly.
Dale Koerner:Very cool. Is there anything else that you would want to share with the audience that we have here in New Zealand of B2B marketers? Any other tips, advice, learnings, personal stories, observations or anecdotes? Got us a list, wow, sorry, I've never gone through that many before.
Nick Whitehead:I think the main thing is you are not alone and you are not plowing a unique furrow. You do not need to try to push through on your own. You can leverage the knowledge, the experience, the skills of the people that are around you that are trying to do the same sort of thing. They are not your competitors, they are compatriots and they're on the same team, so you use every opportunity to reach out and connect. I am super happy to share any of my learnings I can with anybody as well, so feel free to reach out to me directly, linkedin email, whatever it may be, but there are thousands of people like me who are also more than willing to have a coffee, spend some time time, share some insights, even just let you know that you're doing a better job than you think you're doing.
Dale Koerner:That's one of the reasons that we started the podcast. To be totally honest, it's just making sure the B2B marketer's role can be such a lonely space, or it can feel so lonely particularly in small and medium businesses as well, when you're the only person in the company doing that job. Yeah, who do I turn to for a pat on the shoulder or, like you know, a pat on the back to say actually, yeah, bloody well, you know good job Well done?
Nick Whitehead:Or a sense check Am I doing the right thing here? What am I missing?
Dale Koerner:Yeah, I'm barking up the wrong tree. Exactly, I love your perspective on that and thank you so much for joining us on the that. Thanks for listening to. We do b2b by blue ocean. Now brace for ctas. If you want to join and grow the community, make sure to subscribe. Wherever your eyes and ears absorb information, don't forget to switch on notifications so you know when the latest episodes drop. And for more b2b, goodness, be sure to follow blue ocean, the b2b agency, on linkedin. Now look, you know how this next piece works. The more reviews we get, the faster this. So please do for us what you hope your customers would do for you Leave a review and share your thoughts. Let's stay connected and keep the B2B marketing conversation going.