Close the deal 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 close the deal

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 HandoverTM 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.

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 HandoverTM (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.

Differents graphics about true cost of ownership of SDR

In terms of oncost assumptions:

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

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:

True cost of ownership of an FTE: 

  1. Compensation: Between €70-200K
  2. Equipment: circa €30K depending on equipment and licenses
  3. 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:  

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.  

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.

Anteriad acquires BNZSA: A message from BNZSA's CEO, Brahim Samhoud

It has been ten years since BNZSA was founded. Our goal from Day 1 was always to be a disruptive force capable of changing the B2B marketing industry for the better. And we have achieved that.  

Over the last decade, BNZSA has brought multiple ground-breaking innovations to the market such as The Warm HandoverTM, Opportunity Finder, and most recently Knowledge Exchange, which is still in its pilot phase. Our service offering has evolved over time based on our first-hand experience in the market, allowing us to provide services backed by both first- and third-party data, as well as the crucial element, human intelligence, to revolutionise pipeline generation strategies for leading IT companies. 

We invested heavily in our global culture. We have been able grow our global presence with offices based in Spain, UK, France, and Morocco, with teams covering EMEA, Middle Eastern, US, Australian and Japanese markets.  

BNZSA has big ambitions for the future; this presented us with two options, either we continued this journey alone and took the risk that it will take another ten years to develop better integrated global offerings, or we looked to partner with a company whose ambitions and values align with ours.  

This is where Anteriad comes into the picture, and on Friday, 31 March, 2023 the deal was finalised for Anteriad to acquire BNZSA.  

So, what does this mean for BNZSA? We will now operate as BNZSA, powered by Anteriad, as a separate division of Anteriad and I will remain as CEO of BNZSA.  

I am thoroughly impressed by what Anteriad has managed to achieve in the B2B marketing space, especially their tech and data stack, such as the Anteriad Marketing Cloud. Our services are entirely complementary. While Anteriad focused on developing their technology and data driven solutions, we focused on the human offering. Anteriad has a strong presence in the US and India, while BNZSA is driven by a multi-cultural team of more than 300 people, speaking 26 languages natively, giving us a truly international presence with the power of understanding cultural nuances in different markets. Our European base gives Anteriad more direct access to the EMEA markets, expanding its sales reach and accelerating its growth in EMEA.  

This acquisition is great news for the industry. By combining our forces, we are integrating the best of both worlds to create the most comprehensive sales and marketing stack that the market has seen. I am thrilled to have found the right partner who can bring BNZSA to the next level, and it’s been great to see how Anteriad’s client obsession mirrors ours. I look forward to supporting our incredibly talented teams to innovate and grow.  

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been a part of BNZSA’s journey, both past and present. We would not be in this position today without the dedication and hard work from our Rockers, support teams, management, and incredible leadership team. Your support has been second to none to drive BNZSA’s success this far, and I am excited to see where this next chapter takes us.  

Together, I have no doubt that Anteriad and BNZSA will take B2B marketing to a whole new level, driven by data and powered by people. Anteriad and BNZSA – Together We Rock! 

For more information about the acquisition please see anteriad.com. 

BNZSA predicts the top 3 B2B marketing trends for 2023

With the new year well underway, BNZSA is looking ahead at the top three trends that will influence B2B marketeers in 2023.  

The IT industry has been hit hard in the past year with mass layoffs and uncertainty due to the looming threat of a recession. This trend has sadly continued in January 2023 with more companies announcing redundancies. In times like these, it's crucial for businesses to be smart about their marketing spend and make sure their messaging is reaching the right people at the right time and is relevant to that audience in order to generate real sales opportunities and revenue.  

To this end, BNZSA is looking at three key strategies that can help you make the most of your marketing budget.  

1. Curated Content Hubs  

B2B buyers are increasingly expecting a B2C-like experience when interacting with B2B companies. This means that they want easy access to relevant and valuable content and information, as well as seamless and efficient communication and collaboration throughout the buying process.  

To meet these expectations, B2B marketers need to focus on creating an omnichannel presence that allows buyers to engage with their brand and access content and information on their own terms. This can include creating a robust website or landing page with educational resources that acts as a content hub. Creating this space creates a point of reference for the prospect where they can be directed to further “bingeable” content, or where they can be redirected to multiple times whether through ads, emails or through their own interest. 

Prospects’ content experiences can be enriched by using programmatic advertising on social media channels. By tracking engagement and user behaviour on the landing page, prospects can then receive advertising with tailored messaging based on their user profiles and leveraging data on customer behaviour to push them to additional content relevant to their interests, industry, or job title.   

By delivering a B2C-like experience to B2B buyers, companies can not only improve the overall customer journey, but also differentiate themselves from the competition and build strong, long-lasting relationships with their clients. 

Creating personalised user content journeys through email content, social media advertising and landing pages, allows marketing teams to gather important data on what interests their customers and helps to identify buying intent signals which is valuable data which can strengthen a follow-up telemarketing strategy.  

2. Disintermediation  

Marketing teams are often handling leads being generated from various agencies which can lead to a disjointed and inefficient workflow. 2023 is the year where marketing teams will partner with fewer agencies, instead, procuring all their marketing needs from one place.   

Gone are the days where one agency handles your social media and digital activity, another handles the generation of opted-in leads which are then passed onto another agency for further qualification, before hopefully being closed by an in-house sales representative. Working with one centralized agency that has the capacity to complete each activity along the sales funnel, maximises marketing efforts. Not only does it provide a more cohesive and centralized insight into the progress of the sales pipeline, but it also creates a seamless flow throughout nurture activity.  

When one agency handles every activity, it facilitates a faster follow up as the prospect’s engagement can be tracked and incorporated into a telemarketing campaign. When a prospect’s behaviour shows high engagement there is no lull between the different agencies’ activity, allowing you to capitalize on the momentum and increasing the chance to convert the lead into a revenue generating opportunity.  

A "one stop shop" specialist agency such as BNZSA, can provide a full range of marketing services, from content creation, content syndication, digital and telemarketing activity, and even outsourced sales teams to close the deal all under one roof, streamlining pipeline generation from start to finish.  

3. Opportunities rather than leads 

Traditionally marketing has focused on lead generation, and rightfully so. But times are changing and there is a need for campaigns to be more strategic in order to convert leads into revenue generating opportunities. Marketing teams need to look at the entire pipeline to ensure prospects are adequately qualified and nurtured until they are sales ready to not only close the “easy wins”, but to also make sure that nothing is lost from the pipeline in the meantime.  

Our research shows that up to 98.5% of leads are lost from the pipeline. This means that marketing spends potentially worth millions of euros is not being spent efficiently, simply because the sales teams don’t have the resources to follow up on everything or there is a breakdown somewhere along the sales funnel.  

This year will see a huge focus on quality over quantity and a shift from “lead generation” to “opportunity generation”. One key issue is that “lead” is a generalised term that includes 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 real sales opportunity or not.  

Simple campaigns that focus on gathering consented opt-ins no longer guarantee a high revenue return. Marketing teams need to focus on creating intricate campaigns with multiple digital and human touch points in order to optimize their pipeline generation efforts.  

Identifying and qualifying opportunities that have the highest chance of closing involves 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 but disintermediation and creating curated content experiences are huge steps in the right direction.  

Digital awareness campaigns with a purpose

The digital challenges in B2B marketing

In the B2B space, digital can be hard to get right. You have to catch the potential buyer’s attention in a very crowded marketplace, where we are already pretty desensitised and mistrustful of online advertising and email marketing in general.

It’s particularly challenging given the education journey required to purchase many B2B IT solutions, especially at the enterprise level where budgets are high, stakeholders are many and buying cycles are long. The products are often far too complex to be bought in the classic B2C e-commerce environment – somewhere along the way a conversation with experienced sales reps, product specialists and integration consultants will likely be required.

At the same time, we know that B2B customers are expecting somewhat of a B2C experience in their buying journey – they want to have a rich content experience that will enable them to self-serve the information they need, when they need it.

The challenges of digital marketing in the B2B space

High competition:

The digital space is a highly saturated environment, and customers are inundated with the content they are exposed to, whether in their email inbox or social feeds. This has created an audience which is desensited to advertising, meaning digital campaigns need to stand out and be relevant to customers’ needs in order to grab the attention of the target audience.

Lack of focus:

Digital encompasses a wide range of activities and platforms – programmatic advertising, paid social, email automation, SEM and SEO. This means that businesses run the risk of stretching their marketing resources too thin as they attempt to have a presence on every available platform. The best and most effective digital strategies are laser focused on matching the right audiences to the right platform at the right time.

Lack of actionable insight:

In digital it is hard to understand the full impact the campaign has had. Whilst you can collect a lot of metrics, it can be hard to connect some types of engagement with real action – whether because privacy laws limit tracking on digital ads or because form fills collect unreliable or insufficient information. Digital can only work when it is supported and enriched with additional insights form data and BDR teams.

Integrating digital marketing and lead generation

On the one hand, every marketer loves to do digital. It's creative and strategic, and most importantly it gives fantastic metrics that can demonstrate the value of the marketing team´s hard work.

However, sales can struggle to understand the value of this work if it doesn't necessarily translate into immediate revenue. We´ve written previously about how in some cases just 1.5% of marketing leads translate to sales.

This tension means marketing teams end up treating digital as completely separate from their lead generation programmes, or at least confine it to the awareness stage of their funnel. This means that they miss the opportunity to provide real insights that can have a real impact on sales revenue.

But it doesn't have to be this way. In our experience, digital can be an incredible tool that accelerates the customer journey – both through demonstrating value and creating opportunities for prospects to raise their hands when they are in-market.

How can digital support B2B sales?

When integrated correctly, focused digital campaigns can be integral towards achieving specific goals throughout the sales cycle. When digital campaigns are run simultaneously with a complete BDR outreach strategy, this can:

By achieving these objectives, sales and marketing teams can ignite their sales strategy and accelerate pipeline generation. Despite the challenges, digital marketing is a valuable tool for B2B sales when done well.

BNZSA offers Ultra-Nurture, a lead nurturing services which integrates data and telemarketing to create well-rounded, successful lead generation campaigns.