Opportunity Finder gets a Promotion - Introducing the BNZSA Promoter Programme

The latest service offering available from BNZSA’s Opportunity Finder end-to-end revenue framework.

Against a backdrop of recession, inflation, and staffing cutbacks, if a company could approach you and offer you the chance to continue to grow your business well above the market average and in double digits, what would you say?

“Impossible?” “Very unlikely?” Or “Are you finally giving me those Glengarry[1] leads?”

Well, it’s not just closers who get the coffee under the BNZSA Promoter Programme, (BPP) it’s the entire company, because BNZSA Promoters mean business!

What is the BNZSA Promoter Programme?

The B2B equivalent of Internet ‘influencers,’ BNZSA’s Promoter Programme is a service that fits under the umbrella of its Opportunity Finder Framework and run by highly trained specialists who work with end users and channel partners to inform them and educate them about a client’s hardware, software, platform and service solutions.

These promoters are multilingual and can serve multiple markets, so are ideally placed to help companies that are looking to land and expand in new territories quickly and effectively without the need to hire full-time staff or set up offices.

They also work with our client’s channel partners. The strategy here is to drive scale of adoption and proactive selling through training and co-selling. The programme is closely aligned with BNZSA’s traditional marketing campaigns.

Reach parts of the market other programmes cannot reach!

The differentiator for the BPP is that it’s designed to reach the parts of the market not covered by the client’s direct or BNZSA’s direct sales teams and is agile like a special forces unit that can react to quickly to changing field conditions, like tactical moves by competitors.

BNZSA's diverse, international team with 26 languages spoken natively supports global coverage depending on the clients needs and priorities. We currently offer this service across EMEA, US and APAC markets, with coverage in the Middle East, Africa, and countries such as Canada, Japan, Australia, and India.

The goal of the programme is to increase unit volume sales of a product or increase adoption of client services directly and indirectly. The primary focus of the BPP is on the mid-market and public sector, areas which are not covered by the enterprise sales teams.

The target audience for BPPs are: ITDMs, Value Added Resellers (VAR), Systems Integrators (SI), Managed Service Providers (MSP), Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Local OEM’s.

Promoter Responsibilities

The key responsibilities of a BNZSA Promoter are:ç

Familiarity with a client’s product roadmap, messaging & latest internal promotions.
Advocacy to vendor partners for selling products, services, or TAM expansion where supply is feasible.
- Focus on developing and delivering against the market opportunity and educating on related technologies.
Generate and follow up on end customers leads with a view to sell. This will include product training and demos as well as long-term follow-up with each prospect.
Develop relationships by making visits / phone assessments, provide product updates, problem identification and resolutions.
- Should face-to-face contact prove impractical, virtual via MSFT Teams/Zoom/Google Hangouts will be suggested.
BNZSA Lead gen agents will work alongside the promoters to help deliver leads to assist with co-selling. However, promoters are also expected to generate their own end customer leads through their own business development initiatives.
Regular customer visits onsite ensuring regular face to face (FTF) contact, with ongoing support via phone/email as required.
Liaising with BPP counterparts to ensure all leads are successfully loaded and tracked into the client’s CRM system.
Internal Service Level Agreement to respond in a timely manner to requests from the central BNZSA team.
Maximize support and advocacy by organising and delivering training for partners.
Attend and participate in partner activities, including, but not limited to, product launches, events, and roadshows.
Supporting the existing account management team in meeting agreed KPIs and individual account objectives outlined in business plans.
Working in tandem with EMEA technical and sales personnel, raising awareness of opportunities and jointly handling leads provided by the client for partner usage.
Assembling market data/customer sentiment and reporting back to client
Development (in partnership with BNZSA digital and creative team) of case studies that reflect the unique benefits of the client’s product, service, or platform.

Reporting Metrics and Cadence

BNZSA Promoters are expected to fulfil the following reporting responsibilities:

Attend a weekly teleconference meeting to share activities, plans and help needed.
Accurate completion of the deal win / pipeline excel tracker at least 2 hours before the weekly teleconference.
Deliver feedback on Market/customer/competitor sentiment.
Report opportunities won & lost.
Provide details of completed sales trainings delivered by support provided (Number of staff trained)
Planned and executed event support.

Additional expectations

Each promoter is expected to actively work with a group of 5 to 10 resellers (usually agreed by BNZSA)

Support 1-2 partner events (OEM, Distributors, resellers) per qtr.

Support 3-5 end customers leads per week by

Joining Warm Handover^TM calls with agency and end customer, 1 hour.
Following up with customers for training and education on BPP, 2 hours
Either matchmaking customers with BNZSA preferred reseller/OEM or connect directly to the customers preferred reseller and offer BPP Platform training, program advocacy etc.

Generate 1 end customer lead per week. Advocate, train and matchmake with reseller.

Discuss BPP proof of concept, pilot and then full deployment with 2 prospects per month.

Develop 2 case studies per year in partnership with BNZSA’s Digital and Creative team.

[1] Glengarry Glen Ross: Glengarry Glen Ross is a 1992 American drama film written for the screen by David Mamet from his 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning eponymous play.

Get the right audience to your Event with Opportunity Finder

Join us for this six-part blog series where we’ll spotlight each of the key pillars of Opportunity Finder – the end-to-end revenue generator that can help you identify, engage, and close key accounts.

Before Covid, many companies used to run or attend many successful Face to Face (F2F) events, where they could attract potential customers to stands, evangelize products and solutions via keynote speaking and workshops or by hosting lunches and dinners to better understand the needs and requirements of their potential and existing customer base.

Anyone who has attended an event as a sponsor or paying for some event real estate will tell you, F2F events are hard and difficult to get the right people to attend. Delegate list data is very perishable and even when you generate what you may consider a decent number of registrations, factors like location and weather can have a negative impact on footfall.

Events in a hybrid world

With the shift to hybrid and remote working, fewer workers are commuting to traditional places of work or have digital means and telemarketing ways of attracting prospects and adopted video conferencing to identify needs and present potential solutions. These factors have also had an impact on the attendance of events as well as the health concerns of attending events with hundreds or thousands of people.

But, as fears over Covid have gradually lessened as cities all over the world return to normal, so have events started coming back as an important part of marketing spend and pipeline generation.

Using Opportunity Finder to find and engage the right audience

Opportunity Finder is powered by people and backed by data and digital solutions making it the ideal service for event outreach strategies to truly maximise your ROI.

The five pillars of Opportunity Finder can be used to:

1.- Verify Target Account Lists

By using our first and third-party data you can verify old delegate lists or Target Account lists to ensure data is up to date and accurate, as well as enriching your database with key insights and intent data about your target accounts.

2.- Identify buying committees

Our Contact Findr service finds the right contacts and the buying committees at your Ideal customer profiles in order to start nurturing them with highly relevant and personal content to encourage them to come to your event.

3.- Secure prospects' consent

Our Consent Buildr and Programmatic advertising offerings can simultaneously build brand awareness, awareness of the event and allow you to gain attendees consent to be contacted pre-event. This is crucial to nurture attendees before the event, particularly if it is a time away.

4.- Engage pre-event

Enlist support from our teams of BDRs to help validate prospects from other sources, e.g., social media or LinkedIn. They can have conversations with prospects on your behalf about the benefits of the event and at the right time look to set up face-to-face meetings at the event.

5.- Post-event follow-up

Follow-up after an event is imperative to generate true ROI. Our teams of BDRs and SDR can contact attendees post-event to verify their needs. Using our WHO^TM method, attendees who are Sales-Ready can be invited to a three-way call with our BDR and a sales representative from our client, to convert a visit to your booth, to a closed-won deal.

Close the deal with Opportunity Finder

Opportunity Finder helps you secure valuable sales opportunities to add to your pipeline, but how can it help close and guarantee revenue?

Our teams of BDRs and SDRs not only give support for pipeline generation, but our SDR-Sales-as-a-Service offering allows you to avail of SDRs who act as a full-time sales resource who handle the deal throughout the entire sales cycle.

How to close the deal with Opportunity Finder:

BDR-as-a-Service:

BNZSA’s BDR-as-a-Service is designed to both enhance the functions of your in-house BDR team, while also giving instant resources and multilingual support to generate credible and compliant opportunities that are more mature in the sales cycle. Our BDRs can profile accounts, follow up on digital activity, qualify leads and identify decision makers and buying committees gaining additional contextual insights through their conversations.

Those identified as a sales ready opportunity are then invited to a Warm Handover^TM call, a three-way call brokered by the BDR between the prospect and client. BDRs are leased on a time-based model, can have a client email, and call on behalf of the client. Training in the product or service by the client is recommended before deployment.

SDR-as-A-Service:

Like the BDR-as-a-service model, the SDR- As-A-Service” model provides an SDR who is effectively a full-time sales resource for the client. Essentially it is a “sales-as-a-service” offering, with a fixed fee and commission pricing structure.

The key difference between the BDR and SDR models is that the SDR handles the entire sales cycle, generating closed sales and revenue with an agreed commission structure to create a strategic partnership.

BNZSA’s team of BDRs and SDRs can support 26 languages with native speakers that allows clients to instantly ramp up in new territories, achieve a lower cost of sale and see quick, sustainable, and measurable ROI to investment.

In short, Opportunity Finder is designed to offer our clients a strategic partnership that works because our client’s success is BNZSA’s success.

With face-to-face events back in full flow for the first time since pre-Covid, our final installment of our Opportunity Finder series will detail how using BNZSA’s services can help you to identify, and engage the right people at upcoming events.

Engage your prospects with Opportunity Finder

So, we’ve done the research to find who is in market, who are the decision makers we need to speak to and most importantly, we have gained their consent to contact them. How can you now engage your prospects with Opportunity Finder?

Once a prospect shows interest and you have gained their consent, quick and proactive follow-up via digital and human outreach is vital to maximise the momentum of the opportunity.

How to engage contacts with Opportunity Finder:

Using Opportunity Finder, you can connect and engage with decision makers by deploying the right strategies across the digital and telemarketing toolbelt.

Ultra Nurture:

Companies often find that prospects can get stuck in the middle of the funnel without ever converting. Ultra Nurture ensures prospects stayed engaged through retargeted programmatic advertising and email nurturing to drive contacts to specially curated content hubs to further educate them about your products and services.

Lead Verifyr:

In many cases, volumes of leads that have been generated cannot be magically or instantly nurtured to be sales ready. This doesn’t mean the prospect is not interested in the product or service, they might not have budget, working on another project or simply might need a bit more information to make a decision. In this case, Lead Verifyr can set aside any leads that may be sales ready and then look to set up three-way ‘Warm Handover’ call between BNZSA, the prospect and the client or put them into nurturing tracks where we can send more information and revisit them at a later stage, reducing the wastage many companies go through when purchasing the same lead potentially from another supplier further down the line.

Our Ultra Nurture and Lead Verifyr services are powered by highly trained BDRs and SDRs, with 26 languages spoken natively by our employees, so you can land and expand in new territories or support in-house sales resources.

In the penultimate blog in this series, we will break down how to Opportunity Finder can help you finalise sales, generating actual closed revenue as well as a strong pipeline.

Ignite the lead gen eco-system with Opportunity Finder

In the first two segments of this blog series, we establish the importance of building a robust database complete with company information, intent insights, and prospect contact details. But how do you ensure that your messaging lands with this database?

Now you need to ignite the lead generation eco-system to increase brand awareness among your target audience, but more importantly it is vital to gain clear user consent to engage and regularly communicate with customers and prospects.

How to gain consent from your prospects:

Opportunity Finder allows you to gain consent with different methods:

Consent Buildr:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are a non-negotiable when it comes to generating a database of consented contacts. Consent Buildr takes the uncertainty out of compliance as we gain the prospect’s consent on your behalf, meaning that once opportunities are found, they can be legitimately followed up.

With Consent Buildr our team of business development representatives (BDRs) will call and confirm that there is genuine interest from the prospect and that they are happy to receive relevant information.

Programmatic advertising:

When integrated correctly, focused digital campaigns can be integral towards achieving specific goals throughout the sales cycle. We offer Programmatic advertising services which can drive targeted contacts to landing pages where they digitally consent to opt-in.

Once consent is gained either through digital or telemarketing, you can ignite the lead generation universe and increase brand awareness and customer education with targeted content and messaging for contacts who are ready to be engaged.

Part 4 of this series will discuss how BNZSA, powered by Anteriad’s services such as Content Creatr, Lead Verifyr and Ultra Nurture can help you take the next steps to fully engage your prospects.

Find the right people with Opportunity Finder

Join us for this six-part blog series where we’ll spotlight each of the key pillars of Opportunity Finder – the end-to-end revenue generator that can help you identify, engage, and close key accounts.

As we discussed in part one, data is the core foundation to a successful marketing campaign. But enriching your database with all the company data and intent insights in the world is a futile exercise if you don’t know who the right people are to speak to in your target accounts.

From influencers to decision makers and budget holders, there are many touch points and contacts along the pipeline that make a sale possible, and finding the right people is crucial to influence a company that fits your ideal customer profile (ICP).

BNZSA, powered by Anteriad’s Contact Findr service aims to reduce the time involved trawling through platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other similar resources so you can target the right people at the right time with the right message and discover the buying committee.

Finding the right ICP:

When we enrich a database, this often populates company information, but lacks insights into the actual people and profiles you want to reach. Contact Findr is powered by our Data Researchers who complete contact records manually using public domain resources such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoom Info, Hoovers etc. saving you time trawling through multiple platforms.

By combining the intent insights gathered in the “Enrich” stage, and contact information in the “Find” stage, you have a complete, tailor-made database with accurate information of the people you want to target.

Now you have a complete database that’s ready for the next step of Opportunity Finder – “Ignite”.

Come back for part three where we will discuss how you can use Opportunity Finder to ignite the lead generation eco-system and generate the first touch points with your prospects.

Enrich your customer data with Opportunity Finder

Businesses are always trying to crack the code of getting better return on investment (ROI) from marketing spend, and with growing uncertainty over the current economic climate, finding ways to optimise budget for best results is key.

Pipeline generation and activation requires applying various strategies along the full sales funnel to fully engage and convert prospects to opportunities effectively.

This first instalment of a six-part blog series will delve into the first element of Opportunity Finder’s key pillars – Enrich – defining the importance of data to set your campaign up for success. Each blog will show how each step was designed with revenue generation in mind to identify real opportunities, not just leads that sit stagnantly in the pipeline or are discarded.

Data Science in B2B marketing:

When it comes to developing a valuable B2B marketing strategy, it goes without saying that accurate data is key to building a sturdy foundation. Companies can often fall at this first hurdle – they struggle with siloed, inconsistent, and incomplete data. In the data science world, garbage in i.e., poor quality data, is garbage out that lacks actionable insight.

Better decisions start with better data, so Opportunity Finder starts with data to derive the information needed to select the right contacts to accurately target our client’s messaging. We use our first party and intent data enhanced with technographic and firmographic data to optimise outreach from the offset.

In a fast-paced marketing and sales environment, it’s crucial to strategically direct your resources to where they will have the biggest impact.

Usually, a wide range of data is analysed to reach informed decisions, help define Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and identify high potential opportunities more accurately.

Insights are gathered from first and third-party data sources to enrich your database with key information and intent data about your target companies, so you are fully equipped to understand what influences your prospects buying behaviours so you can adapt your outreach strategy from the outset.

Part Two will spotlight the second pillar of Opportunity Finder – “Find” – and will showcase our Contact Findr service which can help you pinpoint the right people and buying committees to speak to.

Save up to 44% in costs by switching to BNZSA, powered by Anteriad’s new SDR-Sales-as-a-Service model.

First, we had the pandemic. Second, we had the great resignation and quietly quitting and more recently we have seen swathes of layoffs in the Tech Industry that started in Q4 last year and has added another 170K to the disturbing tally in Q1 this year, according to Layoffs.fyi

Unfortunately, this trend looks likely to continue in 2023 as the economy worsens through inflation, the fall in dominance of the petro-dollar^[2]and other geopolitical factors that are putting unprecedented strains on energy bills, supply chains and the overall cost of living.

These above factors have contributed greatly to the number of vacancies for SDRs and BDRs in company sales forces or removal of roles for companies that need to downsize. This in turn is putting a lot of pressure on incumbent teams that are picking up the extra work left by vacating colleagues. Burn out across the board, is rife.

In fact, many industry watchers have noted in the last couple of years, sales staff are facing higher levels of burnout than ever before. In part due to high pressure to reach targets in an unpredictable market, this has led to voluntary sales departures reaching 67% in recent years. This causes an additional level of uncertainty when it comes to staff retention and return on the investment when sourcing talent.

And prospective employees and employers know this, with strong candidates currently having up to five offers from rival companies in their back pocket to strike the best deal.

But paying over the odds for a candidate that doesn’t work out after their three-month probation can be even more costly for companies and the process of recruiting a replacement could take a further few months leaving the company without revenue or resource for a potential six months or more.

According to career planning site Zappia, the average cost of a bad hire is $14,900, or 30% of the hire’s yearly salary.

Even when a candidate looks likely to fit the bill, the overall package offered to a) beat the competition b) incentive the candidate such as points in the business, health membership, gym membership and the other hygiene factors like hybrid work- all add to the overall oncosts of that FTE. And we haven’t even mentioned the costs of software licences, IT equipment for that person to do their work.

BDR and SDR Sales-as-a-Service

For all of the above reasons, BNZSA has introduced its Revenue or SDR-Sales-as-Service Model (SDR-SaaS) to help companies to maintain healthy resourcing levels to facilitate pipeline acceleration, backfill vacancies with temporary or longer term non-full-time employees, and to manage the entire sales process and contribute to a sales number and target.

Soft launched in late 2022, SDR-SaaS model builds on BNZSA’s successful time based BDR model, where customers are billed on the time of the agent rather than a traditional cost-per-lead (CPL) basis.

Based on customer feedback, the BDR model was introduced to help our clients back fill existing teams due to unfilled vacancies or more cost-effective way to maintain staffing levels or to land and expand in new territories, thanks to BNZSA’s 26 native language speaking capabilities.

With a BDR approach, BNZSA reps either calling from BNZSA on behalf of the client or as a white label service, can tailor each conversation to the account or individual and engage prospects in a conversation about their business, growth plans, challenges, and opportunities.

Each prospect is nurtured and ‘account managed’ so that even if they are not ready for a sales conversation at the time of call, we have an open door with them with consent and can re-engage at the right time.

When sales ready prospects are identified from nurtured tracks, they are invited to a three-way meeting called a Warm Handover^TM (WHO) with our client’s sales rep.

Based on BNZSA’s internal research, conversion rates are up to 300% higher using the WHO approach compared with a traditional BANT / appointment booking.

As well as identifying potentially sales ready opportunities, BDR agents also make an average of 80-100 calls a day; send out 15-25 daily emails and 20-30 LinkedIN interactions and can perform other tasks such as verify leads that might have been generated via social media, for example. In all 20 days a month are dedicated to the client team.

Originally, many of our clients felt that supplementing existing teams with BNZSA BDRs would be a temporary measure until the economy picked up after Covid, but due to other geopolitical factors such as the energy crisis and resulting inflation, many of our clients were not only retaining and expanding levels of BDRs they were also asking if these BDRs could play an even greater role as a fully fledged SDR resource that can not only find sales ready leads, but also close them too! We said yes and the SDR-as-a-Service model was born with all the same benefits of a BDR but also revenue to agreed targets.

Total cost of ownership of sales resources

Using recruitment site Glassdoor data as a benchmark, we compared not just the basic salaries and OTE earnings with using our BDR and SDR agents as a service, but also calculated the total cost of ownership of overall compensation with all the oncosts associated with hiring a FTE BDR and SDR. The savings we calculated were significant.

First, we looked at a number of agency level jobs for account managers, that might be deployed in generating sales pipelines, we found an average salary from a number of posts for an entry level account manager role. Using the same methodology, we did the same for an enterprise sales resource at large IT software and hardware company and also for a large cloud supplier. We logged the average salary between a few companies. We also logged either the bonus or OTE commission level to the basic salary to arrive at a total for compensation compared with engaging with a BNZSA BDR or SDR.

In terms of oncost assumptions:

We assumed especially in the current economic climate that recruitment agencies would be used to discover the best candidates
Local taxation and other taxes such as National insurance in the UK, were included.
Mandatory Pension schemes were applied in the calculations.
Holiday and Bank holiday pay were factored in.
Sick pay as above.
Life Assurance.
Disability (income protection).
Travel insurance.
Maternity and paternity leave.

For other hygiene considerations, we assumed that in order to attract the best candidates they would need to offer:

Medical and dental schemes
Discounted Gym memberships
Share schemes (after successful probation)
Bicycle and travel loans
Childcare vouchers

On top of these oncosts there are the actual equipment costs and software licences needed for the FTE to be able to perform their assigned duties such as physical IT hardware, laptops and phones and the various per seat licenses that come with accessing CRM systems and sales and data tools such as LinkedIn.

In addition to the cost savings, the SDR-SaaS representative is also tasked with a revenue number that doesn’t kick in until after three months, so not only are there significant cost savings versus hiring an FTE, the SDR that can also receive specific training by the client can also contribute to the overall number and hopefully allow the client to ride the current storm and come out stronger on the other side.

BNZSA Spotlight:

The tech industry is facing many challenges right now, from cutbacks, the looming threat of a downturn and recession, and mass lay-offs across the industry, naturally, leadership teams are looking for ways to optimise costs wherever they can.
Sales teams are crucial for businesses at a time of uncertainty to deliver a consistent revenue stream, but hiring and retaining the best talent is a costly investment.
“As-a-service models have become common place for IT and business solutions, human resources will also shift to this model to help companies overcome the challenges of recruiting during a recession.

True cost of ownership of an FTE:

Compensation: Between €70-200K
Equipment: circa €30K depending on equipment and licenses
Benefits: from €30K including mandatory pension scheme, paid holiday and sick leave

BDR-as-a-Service:

BNZSA BDRs work on a time-based model, where the client typically pays for 20 days a month depending on their needs. The use of BNZSA’s data services is included in the BDRs time-based fee at no extra cost. As the BDR works in a waterfall model, this allows for a deeper engagement with prospects.

The BDR can be trained by the client in the unique selling points of the product or service, understand who an ideal customer is and can work with the client on a script to ensure brand protection and management.

SDR Sales-as-a-Service:

The key difference between the BDR and SDR models is that the SDR handles the entire sales cycle, generating closed sales and revenue with an agreed commission structure to create a strategic partnership.

Total cost of ownership of BNZSA BDR or SDR:

Unlike the case of an FTE, by using BDR or SDR “Sales-as-a-Service”, companies can eliminate the costs associated with equipment and benefits for sales staff and minimise the risk of a “bad hire”, generating up 44% more ROI.

Additional reporting by Sinéad Conboy.

[1] Costs compared to a Full Time, Employee (FTE)

[2] Until recently oil was priced and bought exclusively in US dollars having a positive effect to that currency and subsequent economy.

How can Opportunity Finder optimise your ABM strategy?

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is not a new marketing discipline. On paper it sounds like a simple proposition to find and locate the various stakeholders or buying committees within an organisation, to communicate with them when a need is identified, buying intent established and to nurture the account to a point that they are ready to become a customer.

Usually considered a strategy for enterprise marketing and sales teams, if done well, ABM can offer companies the ability to engage with customers earlier, identify the buying committees within target accounts, and deliver relevant content to the right stakeholders at the right time. It combines the various marketing and sales tactics that would have traditionally been siloed by industry, product/service or channel

WHAT IS NEEDED FOR A SUCCESSFUL ABM STRATEGY?

While the dream of ABM is like performing a symphony by Mozart, using a highly trained orchestra directed by a world class conductor, the reality is often very different- using an amateur orchestra, without a conductor using a score with a lot of notes missing.
In many cases, companies think that just because they have a target account list, or they have an online platform that manages data about their accounts they are “doing” ABM.
Online tools and platforms on their own will not be sufficient to deliver a successful ABM campaign. To do it right, ABM requires an all-in approach with a joined-up sales and marketing operation with clear stakeholders and shared go to market strategy, which is not as easy as it sounds.

Data

The data you need must be analysed. Questions that need to be discussed include:

Who are our ideal customer profiles?
What buyer personas at these companies do we want to reach?
What does our target account list look like?

Once agreed, decisions on how to build out this data set or use third party tools and services is required. In a post GDPR world, it is always wise to verify and conduct due diligence on where the data comes from, if using a third-party.

Alignment between sales and marketing

Account plans are complex and require a shared strategy to align sales and marketing. Cross functional sales and marketing teams should be harmonised around the target accounts.

When implementing an ABM strategy, it is crucial to categorize your tactics by channel and clearly define your objectives. This will help you determine the level of personalization and targeting needed for each tactic.
For example, if you want to create tailored content for a specific persona, you would need a 1:1 tactic with highly personalized and relevant content delivered to that person. On the other hand, if you are organizing a webinar or event for your target account list (TAL), it would be a 1:Many tactic and may not require the same level of personalization as a 1:1 scenario.
By segmenting your tactics, you can effectively allocate your resources and time based on the desired outcome for each account. This will help you prioritize and tailor your efforts to maximize engagement and conversion rates.
Ultimately, ABM is about building strong relationships with target accounts by providing relevant and valuable experiences that address their unique challenges and needs. By strategically categorizing your tactics and objectives, you can create a more effective and efficient ABM strategy that drives long-term growth and customer loyalty.

Content

Once the right personas have been identified, relevant and timely content needs to be either created, repurposed, or recycled to ensure your company’s value proposition is front of mind of the persona you are trying to influence.

Sending complex IT ‘speeds and feeds’ about a technical product or service to the entire buying committee is not an effective strategy. Tools like ChatGPT will not replace the human intelligence needed to personalise messaging that is personalised to the interest of each potential stakeholder.

Harmonised automation technology

Like the symphony orchestra analogy, companies must look to orchestrate and automate content to deliver via the many channels available.
Lastly, ensure technologies that are enlisted or considered to be purchased to automate some or all of the processes to support your ABM strategy are harmonised with the aligned organisational structure.
Ultimately engaging in ABM is about getting better ROI from your highly orchestrated sales and marketing organisation to amplify the sweet music of closed won business.

WHAT VALUE SHOULD YOU EXPECT FROM ABM?

Reach

Once you have your first party and third-party data segments prepared and stack ranked in Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) order look to grow your brand and product awareness with influencers and decision makers within your ICPs.

Relationship

To grow your brand and product/solution awareness it is recommended to develop a two-way communication strategy with prospect clients to build trust in brand and solutions. Just sending out non-personalised content is not going to get the results you want.
It takes time to build that trust and although there are several commentators that say that traditional salespeople will increasingly not be part of the buying process, there will still be the need for human and human intelligence to influence prospective buyers. This may be why many companies are merging their demand teams into the sales functions over the past few months.

With regular communication and a dialled-down hard sell, it is a good way to identify customer pain points and potential needs that in the future can be potentially nurtured into a future sale.

Revenue

By adopting organisational alignment and the above considerations, companies can start thinking about generating credible opportunities rather than ‘leads’ that will if done correctly will produce a higher percentage of closed won sales and measurable return on sales and marketing investment.

HOW CAN OPPORTUNITY FINDER HELP IN OPTIMISING YOUR ABM STRATEGY?

Enrich

For successful ABM it all starts with Data. Companies often struggle with siloed, inconsistent, and incomplete data. BNZSAs Decision Science and Data science teams can help find those missing notes on the score, verify existing data using our Leadverifyr service and fill in the white space in spreadsheets of missing information to enrich data sets. BNZSA can also blend and optimize its own first party with third-party data, intent data, firmographic data and technographic data to create unique audience segments and stack ranked ideal customer profiles (ICPs) without having to wait for a prospect to interact with a website1 or click on an asset.

Find

If there is a lot of data that is old and potentially inaccurate, companies can utilize BNZSA’s ContactFindr service to discover the influencers and decision makers at ICP TALs.
ContactFindr aims to reduce the time involved in trawling through platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other similar resources so our clients can target the right people at the right time with the right message on multiple platforms.

This service is supported by BNZSA data researchers who complete contact records manually using different sources & platforms and gain GDPR consent.

Ignite

By utilising social, programmatic, and digital engagement, BNZSA’s clients can ensure that every single decision maker in its ideal audience segments is aware of its brand, products and services or thought leadership on certain key topics, even if they’re not yet in-market.
BNZSA’s segmentation tools enables the ability to target programmatically by job function for the most cost-effective use of our client’s display advertising budget.

Engage

Increasingly, BNZSA’s clients do not have the time or resources to nurture-up top of the funnel opportunities and prefer to concentrate on opportunities that are more sales ready and closer to closing. By implementing BNZSA’s BDR time-based model, clients can supplement existing BDR and sales teams with highly trained BNZSA agents using a cost per time-based model.
Benefits of using this model for ABM are as follows:

More in-depth campaigns
Native language support up to 26 languages
Deeper conversations with DMs on the Target Account list
Identify key DMs and organization structure
Understand challenges faced, build trust
Align prospect’s needs with client’s capabilities
Call to action – Warm HandoverTM set up with client Sales Rep when timing is right

BNZSA’s Warm HandoverTM is a three-way video call between a BDR, a client’s sales rep and the prospective customer. The BNZSA BDR is responsible for identifying and qualifying the lead, securing and scheduling the meeting, and ensuring that the sales rep has all the information they need to help close the deal. Conversion rates can improve by up to 300 per cent compared with traditional BANT2 content syndication.

Close

Taking the time-based model to the next level, BNZSA also offers its clients’ Sales Development Resources SDRs as-a-service that handle the entire sales cycle generating closed sales and revenue. They can use the clients’ email address, hold regular pipeline calls and be responsible for an agreed sales target.

More cost effective than hiring full time employees.
Complete sales cycle.
Has additional AM and PM support at no extra charge.
SDR handles PO, payments and all details required for contract.
SDR incentivized for bigger value, higher volume sales.
Deeper nurture through the whole funnel.
Fixed fee includes additional sales support and resources – Sales Managers, Project Managers.
Commission structure creates strategic partnership – Client’s success is also BNZSA’s success.

Conclusion

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is an effective approach to engaging potential customers at the right time and with the right content. However, it requires an all-in approach that integrates marketing and sales operations with clear stakeholder alignment and a shared go-to-market strategy. Despite the challenges, ABM promises to provide companies with the ability to engage with customers earlier, identify buying committees within target accounts, and deliver relevant content.
Opportunity Finder can help companies optimise their ABM strategy by enriching first and third-party data, harmonising automation technology, and providing guidance on segmenting tactics, creating personalised content, and building strong relationships with target accounts. Ultimately, ABM is about building long-term relationships with potential customers that drive growth, customer loyalty, and measurable returns on sales and marketing investment.

Identify, engage and close key accounts with BNZSA's Opportunity Finder

It’s a no brainer that sales teams are always going to look for ways to maximise their MQL and SQLs to closed won conversion rates. And as we face further economic uncertainty, it is even more vital for sales and marketing teams to ensure today’s budgets that are heavily scrutinised are invested wisely to secure a solid ROI.

Despite being a key component for sales pipelines for many years, lead generation is often not as efficient as it could be, leading to a lot of waste. Companies handle leads from multiple agencies which are not accurately qualified. This results in up to 98.5% of pipeline being rejected by sales because it’s not a tangible opportunity.

Optimising your pipeline generation and activation requires applying various strategies along the sales funnel in order to fully engage and convert prospects to opportunities effectively.

This can be hard to get right at every step. It requires sales and marketing teams to firstly be aligned, to have access to quality data, relevant contacts, effective content, and actionable insights. It also often means combining data from various sources.

Sales and marketing teams are often inundated with all the latest technologies, platforms, and services to facilitate and automate lead generation. Technographic and firmographic segmentation provides top of the funnel insights, but this data is often disjointed or lacks clear insights to aid conversion into actual opportunities. While this data can be valuable, it lacks context and opportunity defining detail.

One key issue is that “lead” is an all-encompassing term that can include everything from a simple opt-in to a Sales Qualified Lead, but using the term lead itself does not necessarily tell you whether it is likely to close or not.

There is a clear gap in the market for a solution that provides insights for an efficient whole funnel solution which maximises pipeline generation, transforming leads to opportunities. To make this a reality, it is necessary to combine data, digital and human interaction to identify credible and qualified opportunities.

BNZSA’s Opportunity Finder

Opportunity Finder by BNZSA is a fully integrated solution, combining some of the most advanced lead generation tools. It is designed to increase sales and marketing effectiveness as we noticed a gap in the market for an end-to-end lead generation engine that converts to closed revenue delivering quantifiable ROI.

Combining data and digital engagement with human outreach, Opportunity Finder is the most effective toolbox to identify real revenue-generation opportunities that have the best possible chance to close.

It provides insights which maximises the impact of campaigns and furthers our understanding of the market and the signals BNZSA is receiving from prospects. This allows companies to supercharge go-to-market strategies and accelerate pipeline faster.

Opportunity Finder is comprised of five key pillars to make sure each lead will move through the sales funnel. Rigorous processes are put into place to efficiently engage, qualify, and most importantly convert leads to closed won opportunities.

Enrich

Build your universe by enhancing your database with as much key information as possible about your target accounts.

Find

Find the right decision makers, identifying buying committees, and strategize how to best land your messaging.

Ignite

Combining intent data with first touch - digital and telemarketing engagement - to filter and segment the audience.

Engage

Deploying the right engagement strategies across the digital and telemarketing toolbelt to connect with decision makers.

Close

Using highly skilled BDRs/SDRs and advanced digital nurture to close the deal or deliver SQLs using our Warm Handover^TM and Sales-as-a-service processes.

Opportunity Finder - A Case Study

BNZSA recently launched an Opportunity Finder for a client – an industry leading recruitment software provider. The objective of the campaign was to generate 100 qualified opportunities and 150 MQLs for the client.

Enrich:

BNZSA’s Data and Decision Science teams combined first and third-party data to enrich the database with information intent data about 4,500 companies. We added firmographics, technographics, key market insights and anything additional that might inform their buying behaviours.

Find:

BNZSA’s team of Data Researchers identified 6,000 contacts that comprised of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) from the 4,500 companies. This included various buying influencers as well as the key decision makers.

Ignite:

BNZSA then launched a telemarketing campaign as a first touch to gather consented MQLs and Opt-ins.

Engage:

The consented contacts were passed to the digital marketing team for digital follow-up with email nurturing.

BNZSA implemented two separate email marketing strategies:
1. To nurture MQLs/Opt-ins to try convert to a scheduled meeting
2. To keep converted prospects interested by sending a meeting reminder and additional relevant content before the meeting.

As well as email nurturing, we created a microsite in the local language which acted as a key content hub to educate the prospects and push them through the funnel for conversion. BNZSA was able to drive traffic to this landing page and track the prospects’ behaviour and understand their areas of interest.

The nurtured contacts were then followed up via telephone outreach by BNZSA BDRs with the aim of booking meetings with additional prospects. Once the meeting was booked, the contact was sent custom content and meeting reminders, which lead to a higher meeting attendance rate.

Our BDRs were also able to gain additional contextual insights into purchasing cycles and buying committees through their conversations with decision makers.

Close:

The meetings that were scheduled were executed using BNZSA’s Warm Handover^TM process – a three-way call between BNZSA’s BDR, the prospect and a sales rep from the client.

Results:

Delivered over five times the original MQL & Opt-in target.
652 of these MQLs/Opt-ins were added to digital nurturing tracks.
148 sales opportunities were identified – almost 50% higher than target of 100.
65% of the executed meetings were high potential opportunities and were sent an offer by the client.