International marketing expert joins Xero Advisory Board

We announced today that internet marketing expert Andy Lark has joined our Advisory Board.

Andy is Global Vice-President of Enterprise marketing at Dell where he has held a variety of responsibilities – including dell.com, one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites. Dell is the number one PC provider in the U.S. and number two worldwide.

“Xero is the most exciting software company I’ve seen come out of New Zealand, so far. Not only is Xero a fantastic product, they have a great team, have executed on their plan, and are making enormous progress in a short amount of time. I’m looking forward to helping them capture the massive global opportunity that is theirs for the taking.”

We’ve known Andy for a while and he’s already helped us out a lot, as he has for many other software companies. Formalizing the relationship allows him to speak with authority on our behalf.

Up until now, we’ve been focused primarily on product, ramping up our local market and working through initial market entry activities for the UK and Australia, continually validating the product. Over the next few months we’ll be doing a lot of work, planning our global and US scale marketing strategy. We want to remain a low cost operator and we haven’t seen any other SaaS companies that make us think ‘that’s the model for us’. But we definitely have some ideas forming of what we want to do.

Having Andy to sound ideas off and having access to his extensive networks is a great first step. We’ll talk a lot more about marketing in the months ahead. For us, it’s the next big challenge and we think it will be interesting, and fun, to share the experience.