Engage your prospects 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.

Tip for engage your prospects

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

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.

Tips for Ignite the lead gen eco-system

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.  

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:

  1. Who are our ideal customer profiles?
  2. What buyer personas at these companies do we want to reach?
  3. 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:

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.

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.

BNZSA Expands into Asia-Pacific to Deliver Truly Global Demand Generation

BNZSA has built upon its European and Americas operations with expansion into the Asia-Pacific region to provide clients with global demand generation services. At present, all global client lead generation campaigns are being run remotely from Europe but uniquely, delivered by native language speakers.

“As a consequence of the outstanding campaigns we continue to deliver for clients in EMEA and in North and South America, we are responding to overwhelming demand for us to extend our offering into the diverse and complex Asia-Pacific markets,” said Brahim Samhoud, BNZSA’s CEO.

“Clients find that the unique combination of our deep first- and third-party data and insight, digital capabilities and native language contact centre agents is simply not available to them in Asia-Pacific and have insisted that we extend our services to support their sales and marketing programmes in the region.”

BNZSA, which posted 344 percent growth in Q3 2021 vs the same period a year ago, eyes expansion into Asia-Pacific as a catapult for even more impressive performance in 2022.

According to The McKinsey Global Institute, Asia’s technological capabilities have expanded rapidly over the past decade. Between 2006–08 and 2016–18, Asia accounted for 52 percent of global growth in the revenue of technology companies. The region’s global share of start-up investment increased from only 16 percent in 2006–08 to 40 percent in 2017–19, accounting for 43 percent of global growth. And McKinsey asserts that the four areas where Asia has a high share of both start-up investment and strong patents are mobile services, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and manufacturing equipment.

“The growth opportunities in hardware and software are evident, and as clients are increasingly centralising sales and marketing budgets and focusing on global enterprise accounts, they expect the same levels of service in all regionals globally,” added Paul Briggs, BNZSA’s Director of Global Corporate Development. “Regardless of geography, our teams are able to physically qualify and route leads within hours of the lead being generated. This is practically unique in the marketplace – particularly as we bring our industry standard GDPR compliance to Asia.”

About BNZSA

BNZSA is a leading marketing agency specialising in tele-based demand generation with a team of 350 than who are experts in delivering qualified, sales-ready leads. It was established in 2013 and has grown rapidly over eight years. BNZSA is privately-owned, has never relied on third-party funding, and has been profitable since day one. The company is based in Madrid, Spain, and has offices in the UK, France and Morocco. It invests heavily in its agents who are all native language speakers and deliver client campaigns in 25 languages globally. In addition to the uniquely human and personal dimension of the company, BNZSA is a leader in the application of technology to underpin its value proposition. It built its own bespoke CRM platform, and is a pioneer in the use of AI, NLP and ML technologies. 

BNZSA Records 344 Percent Year-On-Year Revenue Growth in Q3 and is On-Track to Exceed 300 Percent Earnings Enrichment in 2021

Headcount Increased by 17 Percent with 67 New Hires in Q3 To Meet Increasing Client Demand and to Fuel Expansion into Asia Pacific to Deliver a Truly Global Service

BNZSA saw a 344 percent year-on-year revenue growth in Q3 2021, and added 67 new members to its multinational team – now totalling 350, comprised of 45 nationalities speaking 22 native languages. The company is confident that it will exceed its forecasted 300 percent annual growth in 2021.

Key Q3 milestones included:

“For many companies, Q3 is typically a slower quarter because of holidays, but not for us,” said Brahim Samhoud, BNZSA’s CEO. “Our campaign delivery continued to outstrip expectations, and client demand only ramped-up as a consequence.

“This means that we are hiring, on-boarding and training team members at an astonishing rate to meet demand and provide a truly global lead generation solution. Our business growth is organic, driven by reputation and recommendation. We develop a deep intimacy with our clients and are passionate about exceeding expectations with each and every campaign. So, when we overdeliver in Europe, we are asked to do the same in the Americas, and now across Asia.”

Underpinned by industry standard first- and third-party data management and digital excellence are BNZSA’s call centre agents who engage in native language personally with prospects to nurture qualify and deliver sales ready leads to clients’ sales teams. Following numerous physical and digital engagements, BNZSA agents host a three-way ‘warm handover’ with prospects and clients only when they have a clear picture of the sales opportunity – which delivers a 70 percent lead-to-conversion rate.

“We continue to grow and innovate with one objective in mind – to ensure that our clients can sell more, better and faster,” Brahim added. “While we work with partners, clients are increasingly demanding that we are their single, full-service lead generation agency to ensure that they can maintain and grow in established markets and scale-up fast to capitalise on new market opportunities – especially now in Asia. This is driving our globalisation and we are changing the industry as our people go the extra mile to deliver the highest possible quality.”

About BNZSA BNZSA is a leading marketing agency specialising in tele-based demand generation with a team of 350 than who are experts in delivering qualified, sales-ready leads. It was established in 2013 and has grown rapidly over eight years. BNZSA is privately-owned, has never relied on third-party funding, and has been profitable since day one. The company is based in Madrid, Spain, and has offices in the UK, France and Morocco. It invests heavily in its agents who are all native language speakers and deliver client campaigns in languages globally. In addition to the uniquely human and personal dimension of the company, BNZSA is a leader in the application of technology to underpin its value proposition. It built its own bespoke CRM platform, and is a pioneer in the use of AI, NLP and ML technologies.

The future of account based marketing

Account based marketing – A difficult, but rewarding ‘new normal’ for B2B sales

With greater uncertainty about technology investments, the current pandemic has ushered a necessary change in traditional B2B sales and marketing strategies and accelerated a greater need for effective account based marketing (ABM).

Without in-person channels like face-to-face meetings and networking events, it's clear that marketing and sales have really had to adapt. The pandemic has forced a new alignment between marketing and sales, which can only be a good thing!

The challenge remains how to build the close personal relationships that we know are the basis of productive and long-lasting B2B sales partnerships.

Where to start with ABM

Paul Stacey, Head of BNZSA UK, has written a series of blogs about the future of ABM:

  1. How it works, who it’s for and its benefits - recognising the challenges of delivering on a multichannel strategy, Paul explains how you can make ABM work for your objectives. ABM's main benefits are better focus on relevant accounts, earlier and better engagement with deals and ultimately better value for money from marketing.
  2. The software available to help implement an ABM strategy - if you're managing multiple channels, you may want to consider an investment in technology to help stay on top of everything. It's also worth considering working with an agency like BNZSA who can leverage multiple tools and specialisms to get the best results, especially in areas like database strategy and buyer intent.
  3. Why the human element of ABM should not be underestimated - Good agents beat bad digital; good agents complement good digital. In short, every ABM campaign should involve humans. Paul explains how to bring the human engagement into your strategy.

You can also learn more about how our integrated ABM approach can deliver a 70% lead-to-revenue conversion.

Drop us a line via our contact form or reach out to Paul directly if you'd like to chat about this further.

Demand generation powered by people: the future of effective account based marketing (Part 3)

In the third and final instalment of his assessment of Account Based Marketing (ABM), Paul Stacey, Head of BNZSA UK, considers the necessity for quality data and appropriate human intervention in successful ABM.

Let’s not kid ourselves, ABM is difficult

A truism is that not all ABM campaigns are created – or executed – equally. Indeed, some are definitely more equal than others. Don’t be confused by having a TAL. That’s not really Account Based Marketing. ABM is personalising tactics to the account and targeting only those accounts that matter. 

Very often organisations do the targeting but not the personalisation. Relying on flooding the internet and social platforms with ads or hiding behind unsolicited email is a sure way to fail.

You can have all the delivery tools in the world, but ABM is utterly dependent on data – and the quality of that data.

You need quality data to select the right account, and quality data to personalise to that account. You can’t personalise if you don’t know who you’re communicating with. Online and offline, ABM requires data to be able to personalise.

Your data needs to be both demographic and behavioural. Who are your prospects and what are they doing? Can you understand what they care about and what problems they are trying to solve? Get this right and deliver valuable insights and solutions, and you’re getting there.

The smartest companies are able to combine every piece of first-party data gleaned from multiple channels – online, social, webinar, events, media etc. When combined with strong third-party data, an organisation can establish a single view of what every account and every known individual within that account is doing.

In my opinion, very few organisations can do this. Some claim to. Others want to. But only few can.

Smart companies also use data to re-target within and across multiple channels. They also use smart scoring models to track engagement and convert leads from MAL to MQL at just the right time. But be wary of self-fulfilling prophecies. If you re-target a small audience, they will over index on engagement and you’ll get false positive leads.

Demand generation powered by people

So, you’re a smart company. You have your well-oiled multi-channel market plan in place.  You’ve nailed your scoring. Congratulations! How are you converting leads? 

Ultimately, unless you’re selling a solution with very low consideration and a short sales cycle someone actually has to speak to the client or prospect at varying points during the cycle. I wholeheartedly believe in the principle of Demand Generation Powered by People.

As mentioned in the first article in this series, traditional ways of meeting prospects and nurturing relationships is out the window. But that doesn’t mean conversations can’t be had. They just need to be by phone or video conference. Indeed, the very nature of how we work today may offer greater opportunities for the personal touch. People are more captive at their desk at home today than ever before. And with a greater sense of physical isolation, staying connected with the outside world is particularly appealing to many of us – your clients included.

But this requires intelligence and a relational approach. It also raises a number of questions:

There’s no hard and fast rule here. It truly depends on the campaign you’re running and your relationship with the client – but the personal touch is essential for successful Account Based Marketing.

The simple fact is that personalisation through digital alone is hard. Even with the best DCO solution it’s hard and expensive.

Good agents beat bad digital; good agents complement good digital. In short, every ABM campaign should involve humans.

So, can an organisation scale and engage at the right point in the customer journey? Yes, but to do so you need the right data to determine when to engage at the right time, coupled with the human capital to support the outbound calls. Humans can identify bad data, rescue poor leads and convert good leads in a way that machines can’t.

Lead qualification is a good example of using people early in an ABM journey, while BDRs are good example of using them at the end.

I’ll say it again, my mantra is Demand Generation Powered by People because I believe that the best demand generation campaigns are personal.  

ABM is no longer an alternative B2B strategy. It feels like it’s the only one that matters.

To summarise

Demand generation powered by people: the future of account based marketing (Part 2)

In a series of three articles, Paul Stacey, head of BNZSA UK, examines the current state of Account Based Marketing (ABM). In this second instalment, he provides an appraisal of the ABM vendor landscape and where to invest.

Can software alone solve ABM today?

There are multiple activities involved in creating and executing a successful Account Based Marketing programme. These span lead management and marketing automation, sales intelligence and intent data collection, content marketing, email marketing, CRM and customer data management, predictive analytics, and ad serving and re-targeting.

For some companies, investing in one or more of these types of tools is a great way to start an ABM programme.

Many ABM products specialise in one or a few of these areas. While these tools are often complementary to larger account-based engagement platforms, they do not provide a comprehensive ABM solution.

Businesses looking to invest in a platform to support Account Based Marketing should look for solutions that allow them to:

Fully featured ABM, or account-based engagement, platforms usually include the following set of capabilities:

Other ABM related software include:

The challenge is to make the vendor selection that’s right for you, and embed them into your existing sales, marketing and communication programmes.

With careful selection and deployment these solutions can radically improve an organisation’s ability to find, engage and convert target accounts and buying groups. 

But these buying groups are all people. So again, I return to my key point – that demand generation in B2B should be powered by people not just machines.

What ABM tools are you using, how are your teams responding, and how are they helping you succeed?

Demand generation powered by people: the future of effective account based marketing (Part 1)

In this series of three articles, Paul Stacey examines the current state of Account Based Marketing (ABM). He looks at the necessary alignment with sales and marketing strategies; an appraisal of the ABM vendor landscape and where to invest; and considers the essential linkage between high quality data and timely human intervention. 

Account Based Marketing – A difficult, but rewarding ‘new normal’ for B2B sales

With greater uncertainty about technology investments, the current pandemic has ushered a necessary change in traditional B2B sales and marketing strategies and accelerated a greater need for effective account based marketing (ABM).

ABM has been with us for some time. So, it’s not a new and recent readjustment of B2B sales and marketing augured by Covid-19 per se. But the changes in how sales and marketing teams have had to rethink their alignment – perhaps rationalising their account or industry focus – in the current climate means that companies have this year had to respond quickly to new priorities and audiences.

ABM is an obvious plan of attack in our new world. But effective ABM is particularly challenged today as previous direct and personal – in-person channels like face-to-face meetings and networking events – have evaporated. In-person client activities of yore like hospitality at sporting occasions or the arts were arguably on the wane anyway, but intimacy with clients and prospects has never been so challenged. And yet have never before been so important.

Relationships in our increasingly virtual world are less direct and personal, and decision making far more dispersed – both geographically and organisationally.

Effective ABM is expensive, it’s difficult, but executed well, has the potential to deliver exceptional returns.

As most of you know, ABM, also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to B2B marketing based on account awareness in which an organisation considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one.

Despite its name, ABM is really less about marketing to an ‘account’, and more of an understanding that B2B investment decisions are made by buying committees from varied internal silos. So, their collective actions constitute an indicator of interest, intent and engagement. But reaching the decision-making group is hard and is inevitably increasingly complex. Getting your ABM strategy right has never been more important or tougher. 

A significant part of the promise of ABM is the ability to personalise messages, content and programmes to differentiate by addressing prospect’s specific needs.

How it works, who it’s for and its benefits

ABM is typically employed in enterprise-level sales organisations. If you do it well, you can realise these benefits:

While business marketing has been typically organised by industry, product/solution or channel (direct/social/PR etc.), ABM brings all of these together to focus on individual accounts. Done well, you will reap the rewards of your tailored solutions. Done badly, you will waste a lot of time, effort and money.

So, sellers today need to rely on integrated marketing and communications in a way they have never done before. Marketing needs to be personalised, and it needs to be intelligently deployed across multiple channels. It needs to be joined-up, complementary and highly relevant.

But going the multi-channel way brings risk. A multi-channel approach inevitably waters down spend levels within each channel. The temptation is to increase media spend at the expense of creative personalisation. When this happens the uniqueness of a message is lost, and marketing activities become commoditised and potential customers see little or no difference between suppliers and their competitors. When that happens, price becomes the only obvious differentiator. Personalisation is paramount.

Organisations which are currently seeing the greatest benefit from ABM are IT, Services and Consulting companies. With complex propositions, long sales cycles and large customers, these organisations are ideal candidates for the approach. This is because ABM is ultimately dependant on data, and these sectors major on the value of data. They have complex solutions, and they have complex buying groups.

ABM is, though, spreading into other sectors and a benefit can be seen to be an increased return on investment. Consequently, there is something of a ‘gold rush’ in the ABM automation space.

If you read the ABM technology vendor’s marketing claims, you would be led to think that automation can overcome marketing and sales teams’ current challenge for intimacy with clients and do it all instead – identify, reach and engage with your highest-value prospects – at the touch of a button. But can these off-the-shelf solutions truly automate at scale while retaining key customer insights and preserving intimacy? I think not.

There is a place for automation of course, but it’s worthless without high quality data, and essentially, the intervention of people.

I would argue that the human touch is necessary in at least one, if not multiple touchpoints in any company’s ABM campaigns. Demand generation must ultimately be powered by people.

But how to achieve the perfect marriage of automation, data and people?

Tune in for the next instalment. But in the meantime, what do you think? I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Case study: ABM demand generation - collaboration software and hardware solution

The campaign has been running for six quarters and has delivered more than 200 leads and more than 12 times return on investment. 

The brief

The client asked BNZSA to help support ambitious sales goals for a collaboration software and hardware solution. Due to the relatively low market awareness of the product, the client tasked us with building a demand pipeline within a target list of 120 accounts, and amongst mid- to large enterprises with a large number of collaboration spaces.

The client had field sales representatives ready to receive high value leads and several resellers available to receive lower value / volume leads. 

BNZSA’s job was to provide qualified leads that met the client’s audience parameters and setting appointments to hand-over the leads to the client’s sales team and resellers. 

Our response

We developed a comprehensive database of target customers and decision-makers that matched the client’s requirements and built a repeatable sales engagement model.

BNZSA agents used client-provided assets such as video content, whitepapers, and solution briefs to engage, educate and sell to more than 2,000 accounts.

Critical to our success was making sure that our team fully understood the solution. To this end we installed a demo area in our office and ensured that our team to make sure that had hands on experience using the technology.