BNZ, with Air New Zealand, recently launched its brand new GlobalPlus Business Visa card.

Ideal for small businesses the new card offers a great business credit card rate and if the balance is paid off in full each month, you get up to 50 days interest-free on purchases.

GlobalPlus is a BNZ offering for its business customers who want to earn Air New Zealand Airpoints Dollars TM for every purchase they make on their credit card.

It also helps small business owners to easily seperate personal from businesss spending by using this card instead of their personal one.

Xero supports the new card to deliver automated bank feeds, and we are included in the card offering. Customers who take up the new GlobalPlus Business Visa can try Xero for free for 60 days.

This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for years. There remains a rampant problem in NZ: sites that lead to a Address Not Found error if you neglect to type www before the web address, for example…

• state.co.nz
• amp.co.nz
• toyota.co.nz
• msd.govt.nz
• tranzmetro.co.nz

These sites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, maintain and promote. Adding a redirect to the www address is a basic, ten second job for any web geek (see: wildcard DNS redirect).

Please try your site now. If somebody can’t access your site by simply typing your domain and the suffix (ie .com) then go fix it now!! Getting an error is a bad experience. You’re losing business and you’re frustrating people who happen to be persistent and knowledgeable enough to re-try with www in front.

Care to out any other offenders?

There’s a hot new store in downtown Wellington called The Bay - it’s a Premium Apple Reseller shop, which is the next best thing to an official Apple Store. It’s caused quite a stir, everytime we walk by it’s packed with people.

The store looks amazing, just like you’d expect from Apple. They’ve got all the latest greatest Apple gear with experts on hand to show you what’s what .

As proof of their immaculate taste and good business sense they’ve chosen to sell and promote Xero exclusively as their accounting solution.

One of the many things I’m enjoying about Xero is learning about marketing. I’ve done technology, learned a lot about business and operations but real marketing is new for me.

For what it’s worth, here’s a few things I’ve been thinking about that may be useful to you.

Small companies soon discover building a global or even national brand is incredibly expensive. I’ve mentioned before that we find traditional advertising ineffective. Advertising may assist with some brand awareness but as this is immeasurable it’s not something we want to put significant effort into.

With enterprise software you can sell your product on the energy of the founders. Get a good founder in the room and they’ll sell a deal. If you’re burning 200k a month and your product is $50 to $100k, the founders will often be able to get out there and do the 3 or 4 deals for the business to keep moving forward.

Read the rest of this entry »

Big news for us today as we announce our marketing partnership with Telecom.

Telecom New Zealand Partners with Xero

This is the next plank in our strategy.

We’ve worked hard to build our scalable software platform and to validate our offering with sales in New Zealand, the UK and Australia with our early market entry work.  Within our own resources we’ve managed to notch up well over 2000 customers fairly quickly.

So now we have a fantastic platform and the next big challenge is to scale sales.  To build a global brand yourself is incredibly expensive.  So we’ve always believed that the way to large markets is to partner with those organisations that are already talking to your potential customers.  In the online small business world that’s banks and telecommunications carriers.

This channel strategy is fundamentally different to traditional small business software which is normally sold through a retail channel where you pay it all upfront (at your risk) with hidden ongoing maintenance and support costs - rather than pay as you go (which is at the risk of the supplier).

We are doing some great work with the banks and appreciate their support.  Working alongside those banking relationships Telecom New Zealand is the best partner we could possibly have in New Zealand.  Not many other companies can market like Telecom does, and provide a company like Xero with exposure to the vast but diverse small business market.

Over the last 6 months, Telecom has worked hard on its brand.  Part of their new strategy is to visibly support New Zealand businesses.  Earlier this week Made From New Zealand launched with Telecom’s support and this announcement today shows that they are willing to directly assist young companies such as Xero.

The announcement signals the delivery of a commitment we’ve made to our accounting and broader ecosystem partners.  Xero will deliver revenue opportunities to you.  Contact your Xero account manager to make sure you’ve got the training and resources in place.  From mid November we’ll be driving customers to our Advisor directory and they’ll be looking for partners to work with.

A big thank you to the many staff inside Telecom that helped over the last year to get us there.  Your advice, insights and guidance are very much appreciated.

http://www.telecombusinesshub.co.nz/Pages/ComingSoon.aspx

It’s great being asked to write for industry publications such as the ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales) newsletter. I love getting the message out to the masses that online accounting is quite simply the only way forward in accounting best practice.

The following is an article, entitled ‘The future of accounting is online’, that I submitted as part of the ICAEW Software Accreditation Scheme newsletter under the banner of ICAEW Commitment to Technology.  It was sent out this week to over 27 000 UK-based accountants.

As the ICAEW says, preceding the article, “The whole area of software-as-a-service (SaaS) is seen by many as the way of the future, with online accounting looking to make inroads into the accountancy market.” Too true we think. Too true.

The future of accounting is online

We get some great emails into Xero. So far I think this one is the best.

Can you please give me the contact info of your CEO’s mother?

I want to send her a forest of flowers to thank her for giving birth to her son/daughter…

Your product is truly fantastic and unique in its kind. (I only did the demo, but after 10 secs it was christal clear to me that this is a true winner)

Thanks Jef

You may have noticed we’ve just updated our web site. The main reason for the new design is to accommodate features we’ll be adding over time. We also used the opportunity to make some visual enhancements, to keep things fresh and easy on the eyes.

One of the changes you might notice is we’ve added Australia to our country selector. The Australian version of Xero is moving towards the launch pad, so we want our friends over in the “West Island of New Zealand” to sign up and try Xero for free right now. That way you’ll be notified the instant the Australian version becomes available.

We also want to make it clear that switching to Xero is a simple process. We even provide a free demo company you can use right now to get an idea of what Xero is all about, without having to enter any of your own data.

P.S. A note to the web standards watchdogs (I’m looking at you Adam), we still have some optimising to do to make the new site conform to our high design and development standards - so watch this space.

Mauricio from GeekZone noticed we had gone into PR Mode for the UK in contrast to what we’ve been doing in NZ.

XERO GOING INTO PR MODE - IN THE UK

Well spotted Mauricio.

In NZ we’ve been deliberately not doing the press release overload thing, preferring to mainly just announce milestones when we hit them or when we have a public company disclosure requirement.

So far we’ve found that traditional advertising is expensive and ineffectual.  That may be because its a stretch to get someone to an online response to a print ad.  The person has to remember to do an action sometime later.

We get a better response from online advertising, especially Flash ads with a clear call to action.  But doing online advertising with scale is expensive and right now hard to justify the ROI.

Piggyback marketing with partners like the BNZ is great for building awareness. We put a lot of effort into these partnerships.

By far word-of-mouth recommendations are the most important for people to change their accounting software.

In the UK where we’re completely unknown we have a real challenge to create the initial buzz and get people into our demo to see how much easier and fun accounting can be. So for a few months in the UK, one of the things we’re trying is a PR type strategy.  This is as much for building Google search as getting in front of actual people reading our stories.

This has caused quite a bit of internal debate.  Personally I’m not a fan of this approach, it’s not really our style, but we’ve had advice from people we do respect that we need to try it.

Anyway, we are learning and measuring and after a few months we’ll be able to report back on its effectiveness. For us it’s really important to try things and learn what works in our market.

We’re very interested to hear others perspective on what works for them.