9 YEARS ROCKING WITH BNZSA

June is a special month here at BNZSA. Why? It's our birthday!

Because 9 years ago in a small garage in the South of France, BNZSA was born. With an ambition to change the lead generation industry, our founder and CEO, Brahim, started on the path to make BNZSA what it is today – a leading B2B sales and marketing agency in delivering campaigns for some of the best-known IT brands in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NY_9u37Sv8

The Team

From humble beginnings in 2013 when our founder Brahim Samhoud was working as a one-man band, to now in 2022 rocking as an ensemble of more than 400 employees across Spain, UK, France and Morocco, we wouldn't be here today without all the hard work and dedication of every single person who contributed to BNZSA's success along the way.

From our business development representatives, coaches, data scientists, digital marketers, software developers and more, we are grateful to have such a huge pool of talent that will drive our growth to the next level.

It’s incredible to have such ambitious and skilled individuals choosing to spend part of their career with us. We also have a growing alumni network and we're excited to see how they're spreading the BNZSA spirit into our industry and beyond!

Our clients and partners

Over the last 9 years we've had the pleasure of building and developing strong relationships with key players in the IT industry. To the clients that trusted us in the beginning, and took a chance on a small player, thank you for being part of our exciting journey.

Our clients and partners have not only helped to develop our network, but by working together, building strong connections, and looking for creative ways to address new problems, our clients have been pivotal to our continued innovation and growth.

Their trust and commitment to us have allowed us to build new departments, launch new products and services and invest in new technologies that help us get our clients to where they want to be. These include our trademarked Warm Handover^TM process, our B2B programmatic offering and the new Decision Science practice.

What's next for BNZSA?

In BNZSA we strive to deliver the highest quality leads and go the extra mile and our plans for the future are no different.

Having recently launched our Decision Science practice to provide our clients cutting edge actionable insights, here at BNZSA we have no plans on slowing our innovation and growth.

With some exciting projects in the pipeline, be sure to watch this space as we continue to change the industry!

How to build a BNZSA Rocker

By Paul Briggs, Director Global Corporate Development

If you know anything about BNZSA, you’ll know that rock music has been a huge inspiration for us. We recently launched our first ever song, Together We Rock, which is an ode to our company slogan, and we refer to every single one of our employees as a BNZSA Rocker.

Like all the best bands, we got started in a garage. Our CEO, founder and frontman Brahim Samhoud explains why rock music is so important to him: “I love the image of the rock band. A group of people who might not have a lot in common apart from their single goal to work together and produce an incredible result that inspires and delights the crowd. I hope that’s what we do here every day – our multinational, multilingual teams come together to get great results for our clients”.

“I also firmly believe that anyone has the potential to be a great BNZSA Rocker. I challenged our onboarding team to come up with a programme that any person from any professional background can jump into. With the right attitude and the right support, anyone has the potential to excel here at BNZSA”.

This has been even more important as we prepared to scale fast! From March 2020 to now, we have grown our headcount by almost 400%. We want to fill people with the BNZSA spirit as quickly as possible and give them the tools they need to succeed from Day 1.

What makes a BNZSA Rocker?

There is no magic formula to create a BNZSA Rocker. Some people come with years of experience in B2B Sales, others can apply their skills from customer service, hospitality or other industries. Some people have many master's degrees and others are fresh from school. We look for people who have the drive and ambition to grow with us.

The people who succeed with us are those who live by the four Core BNZSA Values:

People – we would be nowhere without our People! Respect and support for each other as professionals and as human beings is something we always look for.

Extra Mile – this is not about working extra hours; in fact, we encourage everyone to close the laptop at 17.00 sharp. Extra Mile to us is about giving that bit more – trying just one more phone call after your 10^th “no” of the morning, raising your hand in the team brainstorm or encouraging a colleague who is having a tough day.

Highest Quality – we ask everyone to give the best they can at any given moment. What you can do in your first week is not where you’ll be a year later. Keep pushing for YOUR highest quality and you’ll be great!

Changing the industry – doing things differently is in our DNA. People with new ideas will always thrive at BNZSA.

How do we build a BNZSA Rocker?

We hired the amazing Álvaro Aldana three years ago to help us grow our onboarding process. Álvaro brings his experience as a learning and development manager from Starbucks to industrialise our onboarding and get our Rockers performing fast.

This training mostly focuses on those who will take on roles as BDRs, but we are quickly adding programmes for the digital, development and data teams, as well as a stream for new management positions.

We currently onboard up to 40 Rockers a month and have just two weeks to get them ready for the intense world of B2B lead generation.

Week 1: The tools for success

Week 1 focuses on instilling the BNZSA Values and culture – we spend a lot of time talking about our history, showcasing role models in the company and sharing our vision for the future. Being coachable and ready to grow is also an essential element of this week, so we include an immensely popular module called “Learning How to Learn.” There´s a strong focus on the basics of the IT products required by businesses so that any Rocker can prepared for whatever our clients throw at them.

During this first week we ensure that the new Rockers acquire all the basics that they will need to start getting the job done while also giving them space to absorb and reflect.

We finally also make sure that we find some opportunities to decompress with colleagues at our weekly Friday barbecue.

Week 2: Learning by doing

Week 2 is when things get serious. The best way to learn is to get on the phone and out in the market talking to potential IT buyers. Our newbies will first do some shadowing and role playing before they jump straight in and receive live coaching on their conversations. We support them with additional workshops on building connections over the phone, handling objections and tackling difficult situations – all using real examples from the group’s experience. Pretty much all of our newbies will make their first leads during this week – a huge confidence builder that prepares them for what comes next!

By their second Friday with us, we have a whole new batch of BNZSA Rockers ready and waiting to join the band!

Week 3 and beyond: the learning never stops

From Week 3, our new Rockers join the rest of the team and enter our ongoing coaching and training programme. We offer product trainings and team learning sessions as needed, as well as one-to-one coaching. Everyone at BNZSA also has access to a huge library of content via our Learning Management System Skillsoft Percipio – Rockers can work on their current skills gaps and take courses that help them meet their development goals for the future.

Together We Learn!

Learning from a legend: my conversation with David Cote

Call me boring, but there’s nothing I enjoy more than talking about business strategy and exploring new ways to power growth.

It’s even better when I get to pick the brain of a business legend, and a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to have a one-to-one with David Cote, former CEO of Honeywell and current Chairman of Vertiv.

David’s new book Winning Now, Winning Later is a modern business classic, and I could barely believe that I won this opportunity through the HarperCollins Leadership Book Club. Even now, it seems at times like a very strange dream since David did the whole conversation whilst enjoying a pre-workout cigar!

The interaction was completely inspiring – we got on so well that we continued way beyond the scheduled 30 minutes. We talked about the challenges of growing a company, the direct marketing business model and how to make time for big ideas, like his famous Honeywell (and now Vertiv) Operating System.

Here are some of the topics we touched on, and the things I’ll be taking away:

Running a growing small company is just as hard as running a big one

I breathed a sigh of relief when David brought this up – I’d been feeling our growing pains a little this year as we expanded beyond 200 employees and wondered if it was just me.

The thing with this size is that you have to learn that you can’t control everything, and your people have to be empowered and motivated to push for increasing profitability through lower costs and higher quality.

We’ve been lucky enough to grow without too much hierarchy, but we need to keep a constant eye on our processes to make sure they’re fit for purpose as we grow.

Building a change culture requires cross-functional teams

Change is constant; there is no endpoint. We have to bake this into our culture and make sure everyone is comfortable with that. Lately we’ve been running and running in the hope that things “settle down”, but we need to make sure that we keep that agility and flexibility without burning out.

I loved talking to David about how to prepare a team to live like this. His advice was to pick just one process to begin with, then build a cross-functional team of stakeholders to work on it. It’s important to bring in different viewpoints, since as David says, “the obvious is not always obvious to the person who has to solve the problem.”

By focusing on just one process to begin with, we’re more likely to have a success that will empower the team to move forward with the intent for future change.

Think of new strategies and models as part of your R&D

A tough challenge for most entrepreneurs is innovation – not just in terms of your product or service, but also with regard to pricing. This can be super sensitive as you’re really putting your profitability at risk; I certainly didn’t get into this business to lose money!

David made a suggestion for a new pricing model that might work in the direct marketing industry, and at first, I’m embarrassed to say that I went straight on the defensive with all the reasons it wouldn’t work.

As we discussed it further, however, I really saw his point that pricing can and should be something that we experiment with. Any risks that we take could be considered an investment in R&D – if we crack the code and find a more profitable pricing model, that could be totally transformational!

There’s so much more I could say about our conversation but I’ll leave it there for now. I’ll share a few clips from the recording over the next few days – let me know if you have any questions and let’s have a debate about some of these big ideas!

Finally, thank you so much to Rainer Stiller for advising me to pick up David’s book in the first place!