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.

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.

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.

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.

Switch to a Hybrid BDR and SDR "Sales As-A Service” model for more sustainable sales pipeline and faster returns on marketing investment in 2023

By Paul Briggs, Director of Global Corporate Development

To hire and retain the best talent in the future it will not just be about overall compensation, it will also have to address growing themes of work /life balance, remote and flexible working, and other hygiene factors.

Ultimately, these trends may force hiring managers and chief strategy officers (CSOs) to completely rethink how they hire, manage and workplaces and employees, especially when more and more companies are looking to adopt a 4-day week for staff without reducing current pay.

Naturally, the main concern is how to adopt to these new working trends without affecting pipeline and ultimately revenue targets, especially when analyst Forrester notes that traditional “leads-based “contributions have declined in terms of contribution to overall revenue results performance.

But instead of hoping that short-term re-orgs, layoffs and downsizing fixed assets will solve the current and future challenges companies are facing, many industry commentators are suggesting that the companies that will ride the wave of recession and post pandemic pain points will be those that are planning to move to a distributed enterprise where not only will IT and business solutions be provided “As-A-Service,” human resources, will be too!

Time-based models for supporting IT vendors and channel partners are increasingly being sought after as new hybrid business models evolve. By engaging with well trained and highly specialised individuals, companies can either back-fill existing vacancies, generate new high-quality opportunities or provide validation or nurturing support for existing opportunities.

BNZSA is one such company that has evolved its business model to provide its clients time-based full-time BDRs and SDRs “ Sales as-a-service”. These resources work with clients in a number of ways for opportunity and closed won sales generation, in addition to its traditional CPL-based content syndication offering.

BDR-as-a-service: Time based Model

By engaging with a BNZSA BDR in a time-based model, clients only pay for the time of that BDR which is usually 20 days a month. The BDR can either use client data such as Target Account Lists to prospect from. These lists can be validated and enriched by BNZSA’s Decision Science and Data science teams or BNZSA’s own mixture of 1^st party, 3^rd party and intent data to create custom databases and audience segments.

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. As well as producing 12-15 Warm Handovers^TM per month, a BDRs also has approximately 5-15 interactions with decision makers on a daily basis generating:

Customer insights – conversations with ITDMs allow the BDR to gather valuable insights on purchasing cycles and buying committees.
Opt-ins - prospects that have been given consent to be sent more information via email.
MQLs - qualified opportunities that are expecting a follow up by a salesperson, but not necessarily ready to purchase.

A total of around 500 ITDMs contacts within a quarter.

Without recruitment fees to hire, or ongoing costs such as holiday and sick pay, 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.

In some cases, the BDR can also use a client’s email address and call on behalf of the client. With regular reporting and calls, the progress and pipeline of the BDR can be managed by the client and can complement existing internal teams rather than compete with them.

As well as backfilling resources and generating opportunities, BDRs can also be utilised to validate and recycle opportunities that have been generated by social media or digital content syndication activity. These opportunities may have either stalled or have been discarded because there is either too much volume or not enough time/resources to nurture the prospects into a more sales ready status.

As BNZSA’s BDRs have native speaking support for 26 languages, companies that are looking to land and expand in new territories can also avail of instant support in these regions, which is also attractive for companies that are looking to IPO.

As BDRs can be throttled up or throttled back, clients can add additional resources or scale back depending on clients’ requirements, leaving internal and channel teams to concentrate on existing customer needs as well as finding new ones.

SDR-”Sales-As-A-Service" model

Similar to the BDR-as-a-service model, BNZSA has recently introduced a hybrid SDR- As-A-Service" model, where the SDR 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.

Like the BDR model, the client only pays for the days the SDR works, has a client email, and calls on behalf of the client. However, the key difference between the two is that the SDR handles the entire sales cycle and is responsible for generating closed sales and revenue where the client agrees a commission structure to create a strategic partnership.

Like an FTE sales resource, the SDR handles PO, payments and all details required to enter a contract. Between the client and BNZSA, the SDR is incentivised for bigger value, high volume sales and facilitates a deeper nurture of the opportunity through the whole funnel. As well as access to BNZSA’s data and decision science team, the SDR fixed fee also includes additional sales support and resources such as sales managers and project managers.

Like an FTE sales resource, BNZSA’s SDR will, in concert with the client’s own model, earn commission on closed won sales, but unlike many internal FTEs not in the first three months of engagement if there are no closed won sales. And due to BNZSA’s industrialised internal training programmes, there is a shorter ramp up time to get SDRs up to speed and closing sales, but like the above BDR model, there are not the extra costs in recruitment fees, training, holiday pay, sick pay, pensions, technology, software licence fees or tax.

And like the BDR model, BNZSA’s 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, BNZSA wants to offer its clients a strategic partnership that works because its client’s success is BNZSA’s success.

Together we save: sustainable marketing

Introducing sustainable marketing with BNZSA Opportunity Finder. Reduce your carbon footprint and stay on the right side of the law.

While most marketeers regard the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as legal compliance and administrative requirement, it has reduced the number of marketing emails by an estimated 1.2 billion per day, according to a recent report. In terms of CO₂ emissions, this is the equivalent of 360 tonnes per day or 650,000 trees. This can be considered a major win for sustainable marketing.

However, despite the growing awareness by companies to introduce more environmentally sustainable policies, in 2022, the number of emails that are expected to be sent worldwide is set to rise 4% from 2021 to 333bn and by 8.4% by 2023. This figure may rise further with the increased numbers of employees that are remotely working.

Sustainable marketing is about more than just climate impact

As well as the environmental impact of emails, an aspect of sustainable marketing to consider is the noise factor of inbox saturation and also the impact to personal productivity involved in processing and replying to emails. When the average daily total of emails sent and received tops 140, people simply do not have the time to respond or even delete them. Many are simply ignored.

It is small wonder then, that a digital-only approach to email marketing and lead generation not only has a negative impact on overall ESG goals it can be very wasteful when trying to attract your ideal customer with your solution.

In addition, it is sometimes hard to tell that an email open was the ‘right’ person at a company or if the ‘open’ was content inspection from a spam checker or firewall. A personal assistant may also be covering the inbox of a busy IT director or C-level director.

But when marketeers are under pressure to help generate pipeline, remain in budget and see measurable return on investment, the lure of algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning is sometimes too hard to ignore. And many companies wittingly or unwittingly are sailing very close to the wind when it comes to GDPR and other privacy regulations.

Mass mailing your database is not legitimate business interest! Scanning user inboxes for intent signals without consent is not a sensible approach and making it hard for users to opt out of cookies is also being more tightly regulated as Facebook found out this year by getting fined in January for €60m (£50.5m).

But this fine seems like a slap on the wrist compared with the fine Amazon received last year. Although little is known of the exact details of the case, privacy regulators in Luxemburg last year issued a £636m GDPR fine to Amazon purportedly around “free consent”, the largest GDPR fine to date.

And it seems the main reason why we are not seeing more companies being fined since the regulation was introduced, is that there are too many infringements happening for the teams at the privacy organisations to deal with. The investigations are often too slow, presumably, as large corporates can rapidly lawyer up and throw down a legal minefield. Nevertheless, the fines in Q3 last year alone were not far from €1bn (£840m) and set to follow a similar course this year.

And with growing email volumes set to rise and the clamour to use more digital channels to acquire customer behaviour and intent, how do today’s marketeers remain not only compliant but also sustainable?

As well as introducing data processing agreement (DPA) assessments, privacy policies, cookie consent and other regulatory compliance methodology to your marketing strategy, one approach to reduce privacy concerns, email saturation and “carpet bombing” advertising is to use more outbound calling in your lead generation strategy.

When the two work effectively together, the awareness goals are hit, and the lead generation activity is more effective than it would be without the digital ‘air cover.’

But the most common challenge with this approach is that the digital activities are targeted at audience that might not be reachable. Or the digital audiences are different from those targeted by phone.

BNZSA's Opportunity Finder: reducing waste in the marketing cycle

This why BNZSA has built Opportunity Finder that combines data, digital and calling with our Warm Hand Over^TM process.

Opportunity Finder starts with building a database of on-spec companies that we know can be reached by phone and more importantly get and validate consent. We then focus all our digital, social, programmatic activity and tele activity solely on those companies.

We then do the heavy lifting internally to assess if the prospect is sales-ready and then broker a three-way call between the client, the prospect and our Sales Development Resource.

The outcome our clients are finding is that we are targeting the right audience at the right time with measurable improvements on media efficiency, reduced carbon footprints, increased conversions, up by 70%. With these metrics, don’t you think it’s time you gave us a call to talk about sustainable marketing?

Paul is the Director of Global Corporate Development at BNZSA. He is also certified GDPR Foundation compliant with ISO 17024 from the International Board for IT Governance Qualifications.

For more information please contact: paul.briggs@bnzsa.com

Opportunity Finder – the Missing Link for IT B2B Sales and Marketing

I spoke with Saurabh Rastogi, Chief Product Officer, to find out more about BNZSA's new offering, Opportunity Finder.

Opportunity Finder will be the first and only product in the industry that will provide opportunity data at scale. This delivers a far quicker route to closed business by providing actionable middle of the funnel account insights as opposed to much earlier stage conventional intent, firmographic and technographic detail. Opportunity Finder is possible through the unique combination of the best digitally sourced data available with local language phone verified focussed opportunity insight. Only BNZSA has the data heritage and the BDR capability to make this happen.

Opportunity Finder is under development and is expected to be available in 2022.

How did BNZSA think of a Product to deliver opportunities for Sales and Marketing?

There is a gap in the market for middle of the funnel opportunity insights, delivered at scale, through a product that you can easily access on the web or on mobile. While top of the funnel intent, technographic and firmographic based segmentation is readily available, a lot has to be done to this, to generate actual opportunities. All of this data is sourced digitally which is great for coverage, scale and cost but leaves out critical context and opportunity defining detail, which can only be captured by talking to the right people in each account. Until now this has not been possible to do cost effectively as it’s expensive and organisationally challenging to set up.

At BNZSA, we can uniquely combine data expertise (leveraging the best available complimentary data sources) with a special local language data team that calls into each account to collect and maintain opportunity insights by department. No one else can do this. The local language capability is the reason why so many data and digital vendors use BNZSA for person-based lead generation.

What’s new and unique about Opportunity Finder?

This is the first middle of the funnel opportunity data solution in the business, designed to increase sales and marketing effectiveness. Nothing else is available that provides accounts which are so close to become opportunities. Only BNZSA can do this as we have the most complete data combined with local language calling capability. Other data vendors have expressed strong interest in Opportunity Finder output as it adds the person-collected contextual information and opportunity validation to their digitally sourced data.

Opportunity Finder is unique as it provides the shortest route to opportunities in the business. That’s why Customers, Analysts and other Data Vendors are all very interested! We are often asked “so when can we sign up?”

What are the initial reactions of Customers, Analysts and Data Vendors?

We have consulted with Customers, Analysts and Data Vendors from the beginning as we wanted to ensure that Opportunity Finder addresses verifiable and real use cases. Customers love it as it provides them with closest to deal ready Accounts for focus, whether by Sales, Business Development teams or Marketing. Analysts appreciate the uniqueness and first time availability of middle of the funnel opportunity data at scale, for each geo and solution area, all available online. Data Vendors see the immediate complementarity of their digitally sourced data with our person collected opportunity insights.

Recruitment in the ‘New Normal’ – Why Hypercare in HR Counts for Everything

How we work has changed in the last two years – and changed forever. At my company BNZSA, we are fully remote, and the office is now a place where teams only come together to check-in with one another periodically – and then with very strict rules.

While this has forced us all to reappraise how, where and even, when we work, it has brought freedom and opportunity. BNZSA is a global sales lead generation provider for many of the world’s largest B2B IT companies. Despite being physically dispersed, we are in a period of hypergrowth, and for instance, recorded 344 percent growth in Q3 2021 compared to the same period last year.

To serve this level of growth and maintain outstanding campaign delivery, we need more and more people so we’re increasing headcount at an astonishing rate. This year alone we’ve taken on 215 new people.

So, imagine the challenge I face as head of recruitment to maintain that momentum.

I could follow the lead of many other companies to streamline recruitment. I could appoint an agency and let their head-hunters do all the work. I could also rely on the myriad AI-based HR software solutions to vet candidates digitally.

But neither of these feel right to me, and don’t fit with BNZSA’s ethos of hypercare for our people, and to be a place where anyone can flourish regardless of their background. We hire for aptitude and potential. To illustrate my point, read this below from our founder and CEO Brahim Samhoud.

“When I started BNZSA I wanted to create something with respect for our various cultures. I don’t care about your background, if you’re highly motivated and you want to be successful, then this is the place for you. I don’t care if you’ve been to Harvard or whatever you’ve done in the past – your gender, religion, ethnic background, sexuality or age. It doesn’t matter to me. I want to give our people the opportunity to be rock stars. There are so many people in the world who have ability but are never given the opportunity to shine.”

How a candidate might fit is not a tick-box exercise. If that was the case, we wouldn’t have electrical engineers from Canada, or people with degrees in Chinese, or ex-tennis pros on the team. They simply wouldn’t get past the first hurdle in the majority of hiring environments.

So, if ‘people first’ is a core value of BNZSA, our recruitment must be personal. You can only see a person’s spark, true personality and sense their potential face-to-face. Also, when we’re assembling a team comprising 45 nationalities and counting, we must be sensitive to cultural differences. And in the remote world, all this must be done via Skype.

But we’re conscious that even today, many people might be uncomfortable or unfamiliar with a face-to-face job interview from their computer. They might be quite an introverted person (or very extrovert), and they could be self-conscious about their language abilities. There are many factors that could influence a candidate’s failure or success. And we want everyone to succeed if at all possible.

That’s why we’ve put together a short check list for interviewees to help them prepare. It might seem an obvious thing to do, but I truly doubt that many companies make such efforts to put people at ease and guide them to be their best for a first interview. Here’s the set of simple preparation suggestions that we send to every candidate.

Take time to set up your space. Have a clean, uncluttered background, and check your lighting so it’s falling on you, not behind you.
Make sure to do an internet-speed test so technical lags don’t break the flow of your conversation.
Master the platform you’ll be using for your interview.
Rehearse before you go live. Monitor your pace, use hand gestures and sit with an upright and open posture.
Ask questions about the team and the culture.
Do research beforehand to see if you have any common interests or experiences with your interviewer.

We also provide links to videos that provide insights into the company, its culture, the job and some conditions.

In short, we go the extra mile – another BNZSA core value (along with highest quality and change the industry) – to help candidates be as prepared as they can be before we speak.

This means that we’re able to hire and on-board at the tremendous rate we’re doing, giving people the best possible opportunity to succeed and be part of something very special. At BNZSA the sky really is the limit for career growth – but it always begins with a high quality first touch.