How can Opportunity Finder optimise your ABM strategy?

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is not a new marketing discipline. On paper it sounds like a simple proposition to find and locate the various stakeholders or buying committees within an organisation, to communicate with them when a need is identified, buying intent established and to nurture the account to a point that they are ready to become a customer.

Usually considered a strategy for enterprise marketing and sales teams, if done well, ABM can offer companies the ability to engage with customers earlier, identify the buying committees within target accounts, and deliver relevant content to the right stakeholders at the right time. It combines the various marketing and sales tactics that would have traditionally been siloed by industry, product/service or channel

WHAT IS NEEDED FOR A SUCCESSFUL ABM STRATEGY?

While the dream of ABM is like performing a symphony by Mozart, using a highly trained orchestra directed by a world class conductor, the reality is often very different- using an amateur orchestra, without a conductor using a score with a lot of notes missing.
In many cases, companies think that just because they have a target account list, or they have an online platform that manages data about their accounts they are “doing” ABM.
Online tools and platforms on their own will not be sufficient to deliver a successful ABM campaign. To do it right, ABM requires an all-in approach with a joined-up sales and marketing operation with clear stakeholders and shared go to market strategy, which is not as easy as it sounds.

Data

The data you need must be analysed. Questions that need to be discussed include:

  1. Who are our ideal customer profiles?
  2. What buyer personas at these companies do we want to reach?
  3. What does our target account list look like?

Once agreed, decisions on how to build out this data set or use third party tools and services is required. In a post GDPR world, it is always wise to verify and conduct due diligence on where the data comes from, if using a third-party.

Alignment between sales and marketing

Account plans are complex and require a shared strategy to align sales and marketing. Cross functional sales and marketing teams should be harmonised around the target accounts.

When implementing an ABM strategy, it is crucial to categorize your tactics by channel and clearly define your objectives. This will help you determine the level of personalization and targeting needed for each tactic.
For example, if you want to create tailored content for a specific persona, you would need a 1:1 tactic with highly personalized and relevant content delivered to that person. On the other hand, if you are organizing a webinar or event for your target account list (TAL), it would be a 1:Many tactic and may not require the same level of personalization as a 1:1 scenario.
By segmenting your tactics, you can effectively allocate your resources and time based on the desired outcome for each account. This will help you prioritize and tailor your efforts to maximize engagement and conversion rates.
Ultimately, ABM is about building strong relationships with target accounts by providing relevant and valuable experiences that address their unique challenges and needs. By strategically categorizing your tactics and objectives, you can create a more effective and efficient ABM strategy that drives long-term growth and customer loyalty.

Content

Once the right personas have been identified, relevant and timely content needs to be either created, repurposed, or recycled to ensure your company’s value proposition is front of mind of the persona you are trying to influence.

Sending complex IT ‘speeds and feeds’ about a technical product or service to the entire buying committee is not an effective strategy. Tools like ChatGPT will not replace the human intelligence needed to personalise messaging that is personalised to the interest of each potential stakeholder.

Harmonised automation technology

Like the symphony orchestra analogy, companies must look to orchestrate and automate content to deliver via the many channels available.
Lastly, ensure technologies that are enlisted or considered to be purchased to automate some or all of the processes to support your ABM strategy are harmonised with the aligned organisational structure.
Ultimately engaging in ABM is about getting better ROI from your highly orchestrated sales and marketing organisation to amplify the sweet music of closed won business.

WHAT VALUE SHOULD YOU EXPECT FROM ABM?

Reach

Once you have your first party and third-party data segments prepared and stack ranked in Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) order look to grow your brand and product awareness with influencers and decision makers within your ICPs.

Relationship

To grow your brand and product/solution awareness it is recommended to develop a two-way communication strategy with prospect clients to build trust in brand and solutions. Just sending out non-personalised content is not going to get the results you want.
It takes time to build that trust and although there are several commentators that say that traditional salespeople will increasingly not be part of the buying process, there will still be the need for human and human intelligence to influence prospective buyers. This may be why many companies are merging their demand teams into the sales functions over the past few months.

With regular communication and a dialled-down hard sell, it is a good way to identify customer pain points and potential needs that in the future can be potentially nurtured into a future sale.

Revenue

By adopting organisational alignment and the above considerations, companies can start thinking about generating credible opportunities rather than ‘leads’ that will if done correctly will produce a higher percentage of closed won sales and measurable return on sales and marketing investment.

HOW CAN OPPORTUNITY FINDER HELP IN OPTIMISING YOUR ABM STRATEGY?

Enrich

For successful ABM it all starts with Data. Companies often struggle with siloed, inconsistent, and incomplete data. BNZSAs Decision Science and Data science teams can help find those missing notes on the score, verify existing data using our Leadverifyr service and fill in the white space in spreadsheets of missing information to enrich data sets. BNZSA can also blend and optimize its own first party with third-party data, intent data, firmographic data and technographic data to create unique audience segments and stack ranked ideal customer profiles (ICPs) without having to wait for a prospect to interact with a website1 or click on an asset.

Find

If there is a lot of data that is old and potentially inaccurate, companies can utilize BNZSA’s ContactFindr service to discover the influencers and decision makers at ICP TALs.
ContactFindr aims to reduce the time involved in trawling through platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other similar resources so our clients can target the right people at the right time with the right message on multiple platforms.

This service is supported by BNZSA data researchers who complete contact records manually using different sources & platforms and gain GDPR consent.

Ignite

By utilising social, programmatic, and digital engagement, BNZSA’s clients can ensure that every single decision maker in its ideal audience segments is aware of its brand, products and services or thought leadership on certain key topics, even if they’re not yet in-market.
BNZSA’s segmentation tools enables the ability to target programmatically by job function for the most cost-effective use of our client’s display advertising budget.

Engage

Increasingly, BNZSA’s clients do not have the time or resources to nurture-up top of the funnel opportunities and prefer to concentrate on opportunities that are more sales ready and closer to closing. By implementing BNZSA’s BDR time-based model, clients can supplement existing BDR and sales teams with highly trained BNZSA agents using a cost per time-based model.
Benefits of using this model for ABM are as follows:

BNZSA’s Warm HandoverTM is a three-way video call between a BDR, a client’s sales rep and the prospective customer. The BNZSA BDR is responsible for identifying and qualifying the lead, securing and scheduling the meeting, and ensuring that the sales rep has all the information they need to help close the deal. Conversion rates can improve by up to 300 per cent compared with traditional BANT2 content syndication.

Close

Taking the time-based model to the next level, BNZSA also offers its clients’ Sales Development Resources SDRs as-a-service that handle the entire sales cycle generating closed sales and revenue. They can use the clients’ email address, hold regular pipeline calls and be responsible for an agreed sales target.

Conclusion

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is an effective approach to engaging potential customers at the right time and with the right content. However, it requires an all-in approach that integrates marketing and sales operations with clear stakeholder alignment and a shared go-to-market strategy. Despite the challenges, ABM promises to provide companies with the ability to engage with customers earlier, identify buying committees within target accounts, and deliver relevant content.
Opportunity Finder can help companies optimise their ABM strategy by enriching first and third-party data, harmonising automation technology, and providing guidance on segmenting tactics, creating personalised content, and building strong relationships with target accounts. Ultimately, ABM is about building long-term relationships with potential customers that drive growth, customer loyalty, and measurable returns on sales and marketing investment.

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.

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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.

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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 OverTM 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

BNZSA Maintains Hypergrowth Trajectory Recording 274 Percent Year-On-Year Revenue Uptick in Q2 and 176 Percent Growth Year-to-Date

Headcount Increased by 163 in Q2 to Enable Significant New Business Delivery and Client Enrichment

Leading European B2B IT sales and marketing agency, BNZSA, confirmed that it is in a phase of hypergrowth by delivering 274 percent year-on-year revenue growth in Q2 2021, and booking 176 percent year-to-date growth. BNZSA forecasts 300 percent annual revenue growth by year-end.

Key Q2 milestones included:

BNZSA is one of Europe’s largest B2B marketing agencies and specialises in tele-based demand generation. It is expert in delivering qualified, sales-ready leads to many of the world’s leading technology brands, deploying campaigns globally in 16 native languages. BNZSA has more than 100 clients, which include Acer, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Juniper Networks, Oracle, Samsung and SAP.

“Coming off the back of a record-breaking 2020, we planned for 2021 to be a year of hypergrowth,” said Brahim Samhoud, BNZSA’s CEO and Founder. “By January a lot of meticulous planning had been done – in business development, client services, data, IT and HR – to ensure that we are able to effortlessly scale-up throughout the year and meet unprecedented client demand.

“The phenomenal performance in the first half of the year demonstrates the unique value BNZSA brings to the B2B IT lead generation marketplace. It also indicates that demand for enterprise hardware and software solutions is very strong globally. We are seeing businesses aggressively investing in their infrastructures to enable their teams to operate effectively from wherever, and to ramp-up their agility in responding to customer needs.”

BNZSA’s teams are able to physically qualify and route a lead within hours of it being generated to provide client-side sales reps with pipelines that have a 70 percent led-to-conversion rate.

“BNZSA is built on four core values – people, highest quality, extra mile and changing the industry,” Brahim added. “Firstly, our business is all about people and the relationships we build with clients and their prospects. We’re obsessed with the quality of the information we hold, how we use it and the insights it brings to client programmes – as well as the quality service we deliver daily. Going the extra mile is not a nice to have, it’s how we operate. Bring all of this together and we’re changing the industry by default.”

Arnaud Burel, Channel & Distribution Manager France/North Africa at leading wireless edge solutions provider, Cradlepoint, concluded, “What’s really different about BNZSA is that they don’t just deliver leads, they deliver meetings – and meetings that convert. That is truly unique. It means that my team is able to focus on nurturing the great relationship that BNZSA’s agents have already developed. It shortens the sales cycle and enriches opportunities.”

BNZSA in Numbers

About BNZSA

BNZSA is a leading EMEA marketing agency specialising in tele-based demand generation with a team of more than 300 who are experts in delivering qualified, sales-ready leads. It was established in 2013 and has grown rapidly over eight years. The company is based in Madrid, Spain, and has offices in the UK, France and Morocco. It invests heavily in its agents who are all native language speakers and deliver client campaigns in 16 languages globally. In addition to the uniquely human and personal dimension of the company, BNZSA is a leader in the application of technology to underpin its value proposition. It built its own bespoke CRM platform, and is a pioneer in the use of AI, NLP and ML technologies.