Launching an Asian commerce platform into the ANZ market from a standing start

Business context

An established Asian commerce platform — strong presence across Greater China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, a healthy recurring revenue base, and a product suite spanning commerce, POS, social commerce and chat commerce — had decided that ANZ was the next priority region. They had a beachhead (one existing customer inherited through a global agency relationship, one local hire, one shared co-working desk in Sydney) and a board who wanted a real business stood up inside 24 months.

What they didn’t have was market presence, partner coverage, local reference customers, or — honestly — a GTM playbook tuned for the region. Asian sales cycles are not ANZ sales cycles, and the implementation partner ecosystem that had made the vendor successful in its home markets did not yet exist here.

The challenge

This was a commercial leadership role with a heavy technology-credibility requirement. ANZ retailers and D2C brands evaluating a new commerce platform want to talk to someone who can hold their own in an architecture conversation — not a salesperson who will escalate every technical question back to head office in another timezone. That was the whole point of the hire: someone who could run the regional P&L, carry the sales number, and be credible across the table from a prospect’s CTO at the same time.

The structural challenges were all the usual ones. No local brand recognition. No reference customers for prospects to call. Competitors who had been in-market for a decade. A product roadmap set in another hemisphere that occasionally forgot the region existed. And a corporate centre whose natural instinct was to measure the region on Asian pipeline velocity — a benchmark that was never going to hold.

My role

General Manager, ANZ with full regional P&L accountability. Reported to the global CRO, with a dotted line to the CEO on regional strategy. The brief was unambiguous — build the business, hit the number, make it real.

What I did

Anchor customer strategy (months 1–6). Did not chase long-tail merchant volume to pad the customer count. Spent the first six months in direct pursuit of two anchor reference customers — both multi-brand D2C retailers with strong local brand recognition — because the single biggest accelerant in a commerce platform sale is being able to name a peer using the platform in their own market. Got both signed by month nine. Everything downstream ran faster after that.

Partner ecosystem build. Identified 20 implementation agencies that mattered in the region, ranked them by capability and fit, and signed 14 of them into a formal partner programme over the first twelve months. Created a region-specific certification curriculum because the global one assumed a prerequisite base that wasn’t present. Crucially, gave partners genuine sales credit — not “influenced pipeline” air — which made them actually sell the platform rather than politely reference it.

Customer success from day one. Hired a regional customer success lead in month two, before there was enough customer base to obviously justify it. This was a deliberate bet: in a market building on word-of-mouth, the cost of a churned logo is vastly higher than the cost of a slightly overbuilt CS team. The first two anchor customers had named CS support on their first day of implementation.

Roadmap advocacy. Carried regional feature requirements into the global product process on a weekly cadence. Some wins (local tax treatment, GST compliance, payment rails, localisation); some losses (ongoing). The point was making sure the region’s voice was audible in the product conversation, not just the sales one. The Asian origin of the product was a genuine strength for one segment — ANZ merchants with existing sales channels into Asia, who valued native WeChat, LINE and regional social commerce support — and a neutral-to-negative for others. The regional narrative had to handle both honestly.

Operational rhythm. Ran regional business reviews that reported region-specific leading indicators — qualified pipeline, partner-originated pipeline, time to first implementation go-live — rather than inheriting the Asian dashboard wholesale. This took three quarters of gentle insistence with the corporate centre before it stuck, but once it did, forecast accuracy improved materially.

Outcomes

The ANZ customer base grew from one to over 40 paying merchants across 18 months. Regional ARR ran at roughly 4x the board’s year-two target, enough to justify a significant increase in headcount and regional investment in the following fiscal. Two anchor multi-brand D2C retailers signed inside the first nine months and became the reference calls that unlocked the subsequent pipeline. The partner ecosystem of 14 certified agencies covered the region end-to-end, with a sustainable mix of partner-led and direct engagements.

The transition out was to a permanent regional GM hired inside the last three months of the engagement, by which point the business existed, had customers, had partners, and had an operating rhythm that would survive the handover.