What you need to know:

• Trent Innes is six months into his role as the first chief growth officer at ASX-listed hotel management software vendor, SiteMinder, replacing the CMO position.
• Having had firsthand experience of building almost cult-like brand love through community and connected customer experiences at Xero across small and medium business users, Innes aims to replicate its “business-to-people” effect across a global hotelier industry full of similarly sized operators. A traditional B2B playbook won't get him there.
• As a chief growth officer rather than a CMO, Innes believes an extended remit enables him to realise that broader vision and ensure better integrated horizontal focus on continuous, sustainable growth anchored in customer value and winning over customers every month across the organisation.
• He's also planning a brand-led growth push – but profitably. Per Innis, too many tech companies are still chasing "fake growth," at the expense of profitability and customer retention.

SiteMinder’s recently installed chief growth officer, Trent Innes, would like to coin a new term: Business-to-people. Or reclaim it if someone hasn’t already minted such a phrase. Why? Because it’s what he believes is the imperative of many the modern B2B marketing leader.

Innes, who was the Australian managing director of SaaS accounting software darling, Xero, for more than five years until late 2021, is an experienced sales leader and veteran of the software and tech space. Having stepped into the newly created chief growth officer role at SiteMinder six months ago, he has his sights set on generating “sustainable, not fake growth” for the Australian-owned hotel business software management vendor.

To achieve this, Innes is looking at horizontal business alignment around a ‘win, love and grow’ customer strategy that harnesses brand and community building, data insight on the industry and for the industry, and a practical emphasis on product usage and value.

These are also the necessary ingredients Innes sees for seeding a business-to-people – B2P for the acronym lovers – approach. In SiteMinder’s case, this is crucial given the long tail of small to medium hoteliers the organisation can or is already servicing globally.

Vendor-supplied figures show the makeup of the hotel industry worldwide includes more than 1 million hotels. Almost two-thirds are single-property owners with less than 20 rooms, about a fifth are single-property owners with more than 20 rooms, and the remainder are multi-property owners including the industry’s top 12 brands and chains. In SiteMinder’s customer base, 13,000 customers sit in the less than 20 room cohort, 8,000 are single property operators with 20 or more rooms, 17,000 sit in the mid-market and the remaining 1,000 are within the top 12. In all, it’s selling product in 150 countries and eight languages.  

“Think about a small hotelier, which is a small business: Their behaviours are much like a consumer; they don’t behave like a business,” Innes says. “They’re not going to have a corporate account with one of the big printing companies, they’re going to go to Officeworks to buy their printing paper or buy it from the supermarket.

“Sometimes I think we’re too set on B2B or B2C. The B2P model is the way I like to think about: How do we market to the people that run these businesses and hotels around the world?”

Brand as accelerant 

One critical step for Innes is getting the balance right between brand and performance marketing. SiteMinder has certainly been working to build out its brand presence in recent years under former CMO, Mark Renshaw, who has since moved on to Access Group. Renshaw, it's worth pointing out, is also a big believer in B2B marketers needing to bring a consumer lens to their work.

In late 2021, SiteMinder embarked on a full rebrand following a raft of product releases that took their cues from the challenges hoteliers experienced during the pandemic. The rebrand was also undertaken as the organisation prepared for an IPO. SiteMinder made its public debut on the ASX just shy of two years ago and reported 30.5 per cent revenue growth to $151.4 million in FY22.  

Yet Innes sees plenty of runway to further brand focus at SiteMinder. While he probably won't be knocking Canva off its perch as Australia’s most high-profile software business, he is confident SiteMinder has a strong brand-led growth trajectory ahead.

“This is a great Australian tech company success that a lot of people don’t know a lot about. It’s a truly global company with scale in a market that still has a long way to go in terms of growth. And in an industry that needs a lot of support to help it through the journey of digitisation,” Innes says. “There are all these great things to do. But there is an aspect in being able to confidently go out and tell that story through brand. But also at scale, to use our brand for good in the industry.”

Data-powered content

Making this happen comes back to how SiteMinder supplies great content, ensures it has something thoughtful to say, and provides value to the industry it purports to care about.

“Don’t get me wrong, there is still a place for demand marketing, but you don’t want to be 100 per cent reliant on that. You need to be thinking more broadly about creating value through your brand and getting behind the industry and supporting it as best you can,” Innes says.

“We need to be telling the stories about the industry no one else can tell. If we can the aggregate insights so people can make better, more informed decisions about how they invest in this industry and support it – we have a role to play in that.” 

In this vein, SiteMinder has commenced a program of work on its data platforms which Innes says is about having the best, cleanest set of hotel data in the world. The vendor has already made strides in presenting this data through industry reports, indexes and thought leadership content.

Community growth engine

It’s also early days on community building, but Innes confirmed building a community across SiteMinder’s user base and more holistically across the industry is an initiative his team is also exploring.

“The primary reason is to allow people to be connected to each other who may be in various locations and who are reasonably lonely. It’s about getting them together so they have peers that can support them,” he says. “That is something we did very successfully at Xero – a lot of the account bookings were connected on community groups.”

Then there’s the product portfolio itself. Among newly announced product developments from SiteMinder last week are productisation of tools to help hotels effectively make more revenue.

“At the top end of the market, hotels will have sophisticated revenue managers helping them drive and maximise revenue opportunity. At the lower end they don’t have that luxury,” Innes says. “What we announced last week is around how we do that from a product perspective to help them run better hotels. That presents us with a new growth engine.”

CGO versus CMO

One tool Innes has that his CMO predecessor didn’t is a ‘growth’ title and remit. Dubbing the chief growth officer role “an evolution of the CMO position”, Innes has both marketing as a direct function reporting in his role, as well as a holistic growth imperative across all go-to-market functions.

“When you think of traditional marketing roles, they’re very much focused on marketing functions, whereas chief growth will be more holistic and across all the go-to-market functions – sales, marketing, into finance to a degree, product and onboarding,” Innes claims. “They’re all the evolution of the customer journey. Most traditional marketing roles go up and down the funnel, whereas growth is more about a continuous circle, and thinking more holistically about growth impact in a business.”

Innes’ argument for a CGO over a CMO is that business growth doesn’t just come from marketing. While marketing is one growth input, he cites leveraging product-led or sales-led growth and how to pull all these components together as key to achieving not just fast growth, but sustainable growth.

'Win, love, grow'

Innes has a mind model he typically uses when considering growth levers: “Win, love, grow”.

“Anyone you speak to inside Xero will say this comes up a lot. And it will come up a lot here at SiteMinder over time as well. It’s thinking about continuous engagement and helping to win customers every month, not just a one-off win, which is what traditional marketing and sales function does,” Innes says.

“As a software-as-a-service business primarily, which is where my skillset is, it’s not just about winning customers, it’s about how you win and then continue to win them every month. They pay you every month, so you need to think about winning them every single month. How do you actually love them and growth with them?”

Flipping 'fake' growth

The concept of winning customers every month is an increasingly prominent catch cry of the subscription-based software world. It was certainly instrumental in the marketing and customer advocacy work pursued by Xero over the last 10 years – and its martech and digital experience investments.

Yet Innes cites too many tech companies still overemphasising growth at all costs at the expense of profitability and long-term customer retention.

“We have seen a lot of that play out in the media as well – in some ways, it’s become a bit of a vanity metric. Growth is important, but sustainable growth is what it’s all about,” he says. “There is no point bringing a lot of customers in the top of the funnel then seeing them go straight out the bottom. We talk about ‘fake growth’ versus ‘sustainable growth’ to make sure we have that mindset of winning the customer every single month.”

The most important metric for understanding success in any SaaS company is product usage and its Innes’ stellar measure of success. Other metrics he is paying attention to include cost of acquisition, customer lifetime value and customer satisfaction

SiteMinder has a SaaS business as well as a transactional business, with a number of products it can position to customers online in terms of demand and pay.

“You only get the right to get people to use those [transactional products] if they love you in the first place. My background is high volume, low-touch acquisition, and again getting the balance right on that is a priority as well,” he says.  

Vertical to horizontal shift

Operationally, there’s also work underway to change the mindset internally from functional go-to-market areas to holistically working together to better help customers.

“We have a more integrated model, which is a bit of a change, but so far it seems to be going pretty well,” Innes says. “Historically, a lot of companies have set themselves up where they build a product, throw it over the fence to marketing, marketing does some wizardry on it then throws it over the fence to sales, sales then throws it over to onboarding and they throw it to support. You’re getting jammed down a funnel. It’s not the customer journey, it’s the company’s journey. Customers are buying a product and service from you, full stop. Those things should be integrated.”

Getting there means fighting hard not just to do the things that are vertical, but also those that are horizontal.  Innes says that's the key to being successful as a chief growth officer.

“If I think about what a chief growth officer has to do, it’s how we think horizontally across the entire organisation to make sure we’re doing everything we can for our customers to have an amazing experience,” he adds.