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 HandoverTM 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!

The Benefits of Outsourcing Business Development: Free-Up Your Sales Teams so They Can do What They Do Best… Sell

Business development is essential to keeping sales pipelines populated with qualified and nurtured leads – especially in B2B IT sales. But business development representatives (BDRs), or sales development representatives (SDRs) as they are also known, are not made in a consistent mould, and how they are categorised and deployed may differ from one company to the next.

Maintaining a healthy sales pipeline is critical to near-term monthly and quarterly forecasting and performance, but it can often be a huge challenge. And what about mid- to longer-term planning and sustained momentum? It’s not effective to start every month, quarter or year with a cold start – or an empty pipeline.

There are many functions BDRs can perform to maintain a constant feed to the pipeline and free-up inside sales teams to focus on deal closure and client relationships.

Value-added activities BDRs can perform include:

Clearly, outsourced BDRs can deliver a myriad of tactical duties to enhance inside sales teams’ performance. Here are some key strategic benefits companies can realise when they work with an outsourced business development team.

Generate New Opportunities

Working with an outsourced sales team helps companies gain access to new regions and markets without sacrificing sales for long-term benefit. BDRs who work smoothly and efficiently on lead generation and qualification can be used to test new markets, introduce new products, and open new opportunities for inside sales teams.

No Recruitment or Lengthy On-Boarding

While outsourcing BDRs can be viewed as expensive, it’s a lot more cost effective that hiring and providing benefits to an inside team.

There is No Ramp-Up Time and Leads Are Delivered from Day One

An outsourced BRD team can hit the ground running and begin filling the pipeline immediately. Outsourcing means that clients do not have to wait for a team of BDRs to become experienced. Clients gain experts instantly. The BDRs that agencies have on staff are highly specialised and often have years of experience prospecting and generating leads. 

They know what’s what when it comes to business development and will apply their knowledge to your business from day one. 

Prospecting Efforts Result in Better Leads to Fill Your Pipeline

More leads aren’t always better. Outsourcing business development means higher quality leads. The BDRs works with sales teams to identify key qualifiers for leads, then applies that to their process to deliver the people who are more likely to close.

It is Cost effective Because You Only Pay for The Days That Are Worked

Clients can structure their outsourced BDR teams to suit their needs with flexible time allocated to campaign delivery.

The Team is Scalable and Development Can Be Amplified or Dialled Down Instantly

Changes to a BDR programme can be costly and time consuming when conducted in-house. Outsourcing gives flexibility to change sales needs and can help to grow new programmes quickly.

External BDRs also know how to shift resources to where they are most needed thereby keeping costs down, while maintaining productivity and results.

Improve Your Close Rate

Better prospecting with an outsourced BDR team means better leads. Better leads are more likely to close with sales reps. 

Increase Customer Satisfaction and Retention

Freeing-up internal teams from cold calling, prospecting, and other sales development tasks means they have more time to dedicate to building relationships with clients.

Essentially, inside sales get to do the things they do best which can increase their own job satisfaction and productivity. This, in turn, provides a higher quality experience to customers and clients.

Free Up Your Time

Outsourced BDRs mean that firms can focus on more important matters. There is no need to take time building processes and KPIs for an in-house team, and there is no need for on-boarding or train either. 

State-of-the-art data science means that agents are already working on high quality prospects. Also, agents receive active personalised coaching for continuous improvement in service and quality.

Quality Control Ensures Warm, Qualified Leads

To close the loop, the best agencies vet every lead generated before it is sent to the client.

In essence, outsourced BDRs provide companies with many advantages that reduce the burdens they are likely experience when trying to build their own BDR team.

Basware and BNZSA: An Outsourced BDR Programme That Delivers the Goods – Year-In, Year-Out

Background - About Basware

Basware is a global leader in providing networked purchase-to-pay solutions and e-invoicing services with operations in 14 countries. Its cloud-based technology enables organisations to fully manage their spend, mitigate financial risk and reduce the cost of operations via automation. The company markets its solutions to an international audience of enterprise level companies.  

The Brief - Establishing Outsourced Business Development

In March 2018, Basware asked BNZSA to support its German inside sales team with lead generation through outsourced business development using external Business Development Representatives (BDRs). At the time, Basware needed to generate more qualified leads for its team and needed to ramp-up capacity in a flexible way. It also wanted its sales team to focus on what they do best – convert leads from above the funnel marketing campaigns via a leading-edge Account Based Marketing approach.

The Solution - Trust, Collaboration and Intimacy

In order for the outsourced BDR programme to be successful, BNZSA agents had to become experts in Basware’s eProcurement solutions, and over time, have become intimate with the client teams – so the lines between client and agency are almost non-existent. Both companies have completely aligned their ways of working to the point where BNZSA’s BDRs are fully integrated into Basware’s field marketing efforts.

To make the handover process seamless, BNZSA integrated its CRM system with Basware’s to enable leads to flow directly between the companies. But it’s not just a data exchange; it’s a lot more personal. Each lead generated is personally introduced by the BNZSA agent to their counterpart at Basware via the ‘warm handover’ a value-add like no other in the industry. The BNZSA agents map buying committees, develop personal relationships, understanding and trust with budget holders, decision makers and influencers. They only host three-way meetings between Basware reps and their prospects when there is a complete picture of the opportunity.


Results - Delivering Incremental Value and MQLs

Now, three years later, BNZSA is providing outsourced BDR support to Basware in five regions – DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia, France, UK & Ireland – with a team of seven BDRs. The BNZSA team consistently delivers above expectations to ensure quarterly targets are not just met but routinely exceeded.

Indeed, in Q1 2021 BNZSA team members serving the Dutch, French and UK markets received Basware awards for sales excellence – awards usually reserved for inside sales team members only.

Awards for BNZSA's outsourced BDR team


"The relationship between Basware and BNZSA is very close and very intense," said Chris Blake, Vice President of Field Marketing, Basware. "We expect best-of-breed deliverables and exemplary service from our partners. The BNZSA team is strongly focused on our products and on client service. Our colleagues at BNZSA are collaborative with our teams, and the level of intimacy is such that every Basware regional team feels that they are working with a local agency. They are flexible, but most of all, they are focused on business outcomes and the bottom line."

Intent Data: Its Value to Sales, Channel, Marketing and Business Development Teams

By Saurabh Rastogi, Chief Product Officer, BNZSA

Intent data, ideally enriched with technographic, firmographic and trigger insight, has widespread applications across the broad demand generation machine. Earlier this year, BNZSA launched our Intent Activation Engine to ensure that we and our clients can fully leverage these insights.

Here I look at how Sales, Channel, Business Development and Marketing teams can improve their effectiveness and enhance business results by leveraging rich intent insights. This is based on my experience leading data and predictive intelligence programmes at Oracle across EMEA as well as with a number of BNZSA clients.

Sales                  

Many sales reps have changing or evolving territories assigned to accounts they might be initially unfamiliar with.

A rep with, say, 40 accounts typically focuses heavily on two to four accounts to make their targets. The rest can be largely unknown or ignored.

Intent insight can act as a filter on all 40 accounts on an on-going basis and proactively identify the best account opportunities at any point in time. Reps can then leverage the broader sales support machine – business development, marketing, partners etc. – to nurture and develop these accounts until they are ready to progress to the opportunity stage. This leads to responsible and effective territory management which drives improved sales productivity.

Reps can also set up programmatic intent alerts on key accounts so they are on top of the evolving requirements within these accounts.

As proof, an Oracle rep told me, “I’m more successful now because I prioritise and focus on the accounts in my territory that I know are at the right stage of need and maturity. I know what to position and who to talk to”.

Channel

The Channel problem is the sales problem amplified. ISVs/vendors and partner organisations tend to be small with a relatively unsophisticated level of demand generation. They also have relatively large market segments to cover. Demand generation is largely sales-driven and advanced segmentation is usually not on offer. Intent filtered Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) accounts, with topics to discuss – augmented by rich firmographic and technographic data – makes the channel much more effective. Reps working the channel can now be laser focussed on a limited number of accounts for the best conversion. This data can be either sourced directly or indirectly provided through the larger product organisation.

Business Development

All of the out-bound campaigns executed by business development groups need quality account lists as a starting point. Historically this has been primarily firmographic data, which has contributed to campaign inefficiencies and indifferent results. For various out-bound campaigns at Oracle, I saw an uplift of three to five times when campaign lists were selected using intent. More leads were generated, lead-to-opportunity and opportunity-to-close conversion rates were better, deal size was larger and the time to close was shorter. All campaigns can be supported programmatically so that data driven account selection becomes the business norm.

Marketing and Advertising

For advertising the use case is quite direct by deploying intent signals for specific topics to target accounts digitally or on social media. This can be done programmatically, so digital targeting always leverages dynamic intent data.

For marketing, intent-based segmentation can help to identify the best accounts for event and webinar engagements and focussing on engaging these across the business, rather than to cast a wider net with inferior results. Account Based Marketing (ABM) can leverage intent insights on focussed key accounts to develop ABM plans, prioritise accounts and allocate budget. For the first time, marketing can bring data-based insights to Key Account leaders and have an account-specific viewpoint rather than rely entirely on inputs from sales.

Intent insights can also be used to inform topics for content development which can be used for campaigns, website, SOMO and sales outreach.

In summary, intent data enables all elements of the marketing and sales process to effectively align internally, to focus effort where and when it is best applied to deliver measurably improved results.