Head of Marketing
Hi I’m Nick Allen I play the long game building: brand, sustainable demand, leads and expansion revenue for B2B/B2G SaaS 🚀. As employee 3 at FileInvite, I built $2 million ARR in Australia, Canada and the US through: inbound, SEO, PLG, paid social, outbound sales, events and content partnerships. I've worked in big corporate (19,000 employees and 9 figure ACV), consumer apps, education, fintech, real estate and travel. I started my career in South America, then Eastern Europe and the UK, but now take New Zealand to the world. Living in the bottom corner of the map, I've gotten used to growing digital brand and inside/remote sales. Grab some time with me if you’re keen to talk about things like: - Looking to enter new international markets, setting your ICP and creating customer canvases - Want to generate demand for you product, build a niche, get your content engine humming. - Want to work on your Account Based Marketing. - Need help with Product Led Growth or maybe that leads to rev ops conversations and we could explore inside sales, how to get a team up and running with cold calling, or maybe some automated calling instead. - We could write playbooks, battle cards or even just getting to an agreement of what a qualified lead is with your sale steam. - Or maybe we go right up and look at your buyer personas, user journeys and key conversion point.
Working in both startup and large organisations I've both formed and inherited teams of up to 21, and 13 direct reports. I've had the pleasure of coaching and mentoring design, performance marketing, email, content and events teams. Using Asana, Trello or Jira I've run agile marketing and sales at scale with both in person and remote employees across 6 time zones
Writing and recording content for brands, I used to blog and brief in some pretty elaborate ebook and research projects to writers. The key? Knowing your persona, and the action you want them to take. What do you want them to feel, do or share with a colleague? My best trick yet, has been building a content engine that not only creates subscription worthy newsletters, feeds and channels, but also brings in qualified leads SQLs FOR SALES, RIGHT AT THE START, AS PART OF THE CREATION PROCESS.
Figuring out what's holding back your funnel can be challenging. I'll help you isolate elements and test rapidly across a framework to give you quick results. We'll look at things from a channel, object, copy and element level across ads, your website and the destination URL. From there we could go a little less traditional and we can look at the sales side and what's working in cold calling, cold emails, discovery, POC and Pilot - what's leading your PLG funnel and potential upsell options.
Having built out marketing automation for four brands we can have a chat about the pitfalls, setting up for split testing, prioritisation of sequences and how automation can play into lead scoring. We can also explore enabling onboarding and the handover of leads to sales. Tools wise, I've used many but am most familiar with Hubspot, MailChimp, Active Campaign and Customer.io.
Living in NZ, I'm used to working remote. Since 2007, working in London, I've coached teams in Philadelphia, Toronto, Singapore and Manila, while reporting to New York. Working remote and asynchronously places emphasis on effective communications and solid project management procedures. It also means your "urgent question" can't interrupt someones flow state. It also gives you access to some of the best talent, working at their prime in environments and hours of their design and choice.
From pillar pages to on-page to link building to technical I've been working on generating what everyone calls "free organic leads" for the last 15 years. Let's see what you can create to get some snippet winning and page one content live.
Let's chat about cold calling ( and automated calling), cold emails, discovery, POC and Pilot - what's leading your PLG funnel and potential upsell options. How your sales playbooks are looking your pitch decks, supporting materials and battle cards look like. Plus, how marketing can really enable sales with product launches, events and BUYER INSIGHTS!
Intermediate level. I've set up a few automations from touchpoint mapping to newsletter creation, sequence planning and execution and integrations with CRMs like Firebase, Pipedrive and Hubspot. I'm familiar with their list based subscriptions model and how to transfer over to ongoing newsletters.
Used to split and view our Churn, activation and sales metrics across channels ChartMogul is powerful. Connect it to your Slack and you can get pings for every new sign up and also see when deals close $$$. It's brilliant for country and channel breakdowns to see where a global SaaS is getting cut-through or needs to focus. Dig in, and you can see if freemail vs business mail is a lead killer (one hot tip I'd give of sales is "busy" with tyre kickers)
Expert level: Even before 2014, I'd been consuming Hubspot content and using their free tools - But at Harcourts I took on a multi brand, multi website build in the COS and create automation sequences for 7 countries. Migrated 5 blogs and trained users on them globally. In 2019 I used it in force as a Marketing Automation tool, did two rebrands and powered our mid market sales engine with leads from our Hubspot powered site.
Intermediate: We used PipeDrive to power our outbound sales to enterprise level brands and to manage the onboarding setup of our SMB clients. connected to Hubspot and Zapping everywhere, it was a good tool for Kanban style deal movement and seeing our projected pipeline. Wasn't as good for structured data and ultimately I managed the migration to Hubspot where we could get a full client view of things.
I'm only a freemium user, but boy does this tool pack a punch. It covers off all your basics in SEO and Paid Search, Social mentions and basic site metrics. Great for getting you sites health humming from the get go in terms of broken links or finding terms your competitors are beating you on.
Employee number three. As Head of Marketing helped take FileInvite from 200k to 2.5 Million in ARR and am now transitioning Foster Moore to a SaaS marketing model.
Throughout my career I have sold and marketed to the B2B market. I have worked in the software, education, travel, telco, research and investment spaces to name a few.
Working at FileInvite our software spanned from sole trader mortgage brokers, to franchises, to multi state and international banks. At Willis Towers Watson our tech supported multi billion pound transactions and was used in every continent.
When marketing feels like throwing expensive spaghetti at the wall and you're spinning far too many plates, we bring clarity and direction. From startup chaos to enterprise growth, our marketing engines deliver predictable pipeline and revenue impact through data driven strategy and clear roadmaps.
Governance Board Member. Advisor for international and domestic sales, partnerships and marketing.
Fractional HoM at Amico. The app for New Zealand's 5th largest lender: The Bank of Mum Dad. Taking the guesswork out of friends and family loans. Clear terms, no awkward moments.
Working with Founder and COO to set strategic growth direction. Driving account based marketing and transition upmarket to enterprise sales in Europe resulting in: 4X growth in leads for FY '24, reduced sales cycle by two months and has us at 8% of our target accounts with open deals.
Part of the New Business Acquisition Team at Foster Moore. Leading GTM for our SaaS product offerings to government and jurisdictional clients globally. Where there's regulation, there's a register. We simplify the user experience for even the most complex regulatory environments.
Led Cupla to market. Getting 'Date Night' sorted for busy couples to have better time together.
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I led marketing at FileInvite - a B2B SaaS Fintech - that collects loan documents and data for CRMs. I took revenue from $200k - to $2Million ARR, leveraging every channel possible to drive user acquisition.
Reporting to the CEO and board. Responsible for developing and leading the company’s international sales and marketing strategy. Implementing omnichannel Agile sales and marketing management to recruit international students from around the world. - Managing: sales, marketing, counsellors and business development team of 13 across 8 countries remotely. 🇮🇳 🇧🇷 🇨🇳 🇯🇵 🇳🇿 🇹🇭 🇻🇳 🇵🇭 - Remit: sales, business development, marketing strategy, partnerships, pricing, new product development, market research, and brand development. PROJECTS • Brand reconciliation and website revamp - consolidated sub-brands and clarified positioning. • Ongoing AdWords optimisation lifting click through rates from under 1% in 2016 to 4.97% CTR and $20 CPA in 2018 (industry averages: CTR 3.78% and CPA $72). • Restructured the sales and marketing team to Agile Marketing and Agile Sales mode. • Maintaining sales volumes and numbers in a volatile regressing market though aggressive co-marketing with agency partners - increasing market share. • Entire revamp of marketing collateral, digital marketing and multimedia.
Responsible for developing, delivering, and executing the company’s international digital marketing strategy across all digital marketing channels: online, mobile, social, email, digital, display and SEO. PROJECTS • Set digital marketing budgets and strategy. Optimised for country and state CEOs. • Implemented Agile marketing automation strategy. Migrated 10 countries and 5 brands to Hubspot. • Trained the international team on Hubspot, Content Marketing and Lead Generation. • Led rebrand implementation on Hubspot and social media channels. • Presented at Australasian conferences on Social Media and Online Lead Generation.
Responsible for Social Media Marketing Strategy and day to day management of Social Media engagement, content, apps and a team of three producers. PROJECTS • Implemented Agile project management for the social media team. Streamlined the production of social media campaigns and enhanced visibility of team’s workflow. • Formed a company wide social media content calendar and formalised post initiative reviews with standardised KPIs. • Executed - First LinkedIn paid campaigns in New Zealand, first Snapchat treasure hunt campaign building to 3k followers in two weeks, first Facebook video campaign to 750K views, first New Zealand Twitter paid social lead generation card. • Partnered with Facebook to create custom audiences and new segmentation around holiday visitors to New Zealand, Roaming Kiwi's and site-specific targeting.
Responsible for Social Media Marketing Strategy and management of SEO and PPC. Managed day to day website, content and mass email marketing. Progressed from the manager of outsourced email marketing to the leader or regional and global responsibility with a team of 6. Trained as Certified Scrum Product Owner for pivotal CMS project. Implemented Agile Marketing. PROJECTS • CMS – Agile project. Managed from development to content creation, and CRM integration with internal stakeholders and agency. 92 service lines and over 20 countries. • Project Management – numerous new website builds including SEO and PPC campaign • Display advertising - raised traffic 100% in ‘09 • Email subscriptions up 10% in '09 and ’10.
Promotion in recognition of managerial position supporting team in EMEA and Asia Pacific content producers, AdWords manager, developer, email marketers and front end designer.
Managing a local and remote team producing web content and email newsletters for the EMEA region. Moved the outsourced function in house and managed the production of all EMEA digital marketing, microsites and adwords.
Contact role responsible for digital content creation, extended contract twice. PROJECTS • CD-ROMs – managing artwork, copy, video selection and production. • Video – quarterly filming – production of 300 clips and foreign language voiceovers. • Email – established libraries and templates for adoption of Seibel email application. • Micro websites – design briefing and construction of two conference websites.
Responsible for marketing, PR and business development/sales of our research and data. PROJECTS • Marketing – development and implementation of marketing plan. • Financials – setting, achieving and reporting revenue to board for – sales, marketing and event management. • PR – produced monthly investment media releases, with strong ongoing uptake in local press. • Website Content Management – enhanced copy, content, structure and graphics. • Website Strategy – total sales strategy redevelopment, adding B2C; new online distribution channel for PDF based research; and moving newsletters to an online payment based model.
Responsible for digital marketing, PR and business development. Set and delivered full marketing and sales strategy for Europe and Latin America. Managed new website build involving: proposal to board; architecture; design brief and managing agency; managing translations; budgets; SEO; web statistics; direct email and online advertising; and implementation of online enrolment/payment platform.
Conference marketing lead responsible for all collateral and generating sponsorship. Negotiated significant sponsorship from Hungarian multinationals both in kind and currency. Project management – production of slogans, logos, and all marketing materials; both on and offline. Full website build, from brief to launch.
Responsible for marketing collateral through copy, design and production. Led Business development by training and supporting subsidiaries on sales to the Oceania region.
6 Years in sales, merchandising and stock keeping progressing from sales to relief store manager.
First job in sales and stocktaking. Awarded multiple High Performer badges for the Saturday morning sales numbers I knocked out after stocking the shelves.
