Tag: BNZSA

Anteriad Acquires BNZSA

My plan yesterday was to deal with the sale of my house (open house Sunday with contract offers yesterday), but I couldn’t fully focus on that as important announcements were coming from Europe: B2B full-funnel marketing vendor Anteriad bought Demand Generation vendor BNZSA.  Separately, Sales Intelligence and B2B data vendor Echobot, which merged with Visitor Intelligence platform Leadfeeder last year, rebranded as Dealfront and launched its new platform.

Both BNZSA and Dealfront emphasize the diversity of the European market and their ability to meet market needs across national boundaries with localized support and GDPR compliance.

BNZSA, a Madrid-based demand generation firm, has been on a tear the last few years, growing several hundred percent per annum through H1 2022 (H2 growth data was not announced).  BNZSA provides Anteriad with a solid foundation for global marketing and GDPR-compliant data.  In addition, it offers B2B demand generation services to over fifty multinational clients, including Oracle, SAP, Acer, Dell, and Fujitsu.

BNZSA’s team offers local market expertise and campaign support in 26 languages.

“The combination of Anteriad and BNZSA provides an industry-leading offering of B2B demand generation products and services to clients across the globe,” stated Anteriad.  “The acquisition of BNZSA will enable Anteriad to expand its international data coverage by integrating BNZSA’s unique GDPR-compliant data.  Bringing together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services will provide differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”

MeritB2B rebranded as Anteriad in April 2021 after a series of acquisitions that expanded the company’s scope.  It previously acquired several MarTech firms, including intent-data vendor True Influence (Nov 2021), ABM MarTech and Audience vendor 180byTwo (Nov 2020), and B2B data vendor Compass Marketing (Jan 2020).

“Anteriad is a company that’s ahead of its time and ahead of the market.  Our positioning directly reflects our focus on being uniquely able to provide our customers the solutions they need to get ahead and take the lead,” said Anteriad CEO Rob Sanchez in 2021.

Anteriad had strong growth last year, with a 15% increase in US new customer wins and 30% globally through Mid-September.  The firm enjoys loyal customers with an average retention rate of eight years.  Furthermore, multi-service clients generate more than 60% of revenue, “showing the value of a full-funnel partner versus point solutions.”

The BNZSA acquisition “brings together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services,” providing multinational customers a “differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”

“BNZSA, powered by Anteriad,” will act as Anteriad’s international and EMEA headquarters.  BNZSA adds three hundred employees who specialize in ABM and multi-touch campaigns.  BNZSA supports programmatic display based on its firmographic, technographic, and intent datasets.  Its customers can build integrated multi-channel marketing programs that leverage BNZSA’s EMEA-based, multi-lingual contact center.  As leads are generated, BNZSA staff offers a “Warm Handover” process which ensures that leads are appropriately transitioned to sales teams.

Anteriad CPO Ken Lordy described the acquisition to GZ Consulting as a “highly complementary combination of data and technology assets with full-funnel campaign management.”  Consequently, the combined firms “now serve the full funnel demand generation needs of all our marketing clients at a truly global scale.”

Continued Lordy, “BNZSA’s services include native language speaking BDRs at one of the largest call centers in EMEA, ensuring an individualized approach and understanding of each market’s distinct local customs.”

BNZSA identifies potential prospects for its customers, surrounds them with “messaging and brand awareness,” and collects engagement metrics that inform content development and enhance BNZSA’s prospect engagement.  BNZSA tracks interest and intent and maintains an ongoing dialogue with prospects.   Nurturing includes the period between contacting prospects and providing a ‘Warm Handover’ of leads to account executives.

“Following this approach has a positive uplift in conversions to our Warm Handover Process, where BNZSA agents broker, arrange, and moderate a call between the prospect and our customer’s sales or product specialist,” said Paul Briggs, BNZSA Director of Global Corporate Development in 2021.  “This ultimately boosts closed-won opportunities for our customers up to 300%.”

BNZSA digital services include SEO strategy, performance marketing/SEM, email marketing, content marketing, content syndication, marketing automation, and UX and CX design.

“BNZSA understands the individualized approach and distinct local customs of each market it serves,” said Anteriad.  “BNZSA’s nuance in culture across regions includes BDRs that speak over 26 native languages at one of the largest call centers in EMEA.”

The combined company offers “data, technology, and a differentiated high-touch client service model” that supports “rich B2B demand generation and ABM solutions and in-market customization at global scale.”

BNZSA CEO Brahim Samhoud maintains a “significant ownership stake in the combined business.” He will report directly to Sanchez.  Samhoud emphasized that both companies have a client obsession that “will take B2B marketing to a whole new level, driven by data and technology, powered by people.”

“Anteriad means to ‘Get in Front’, and acquiring BNZSA delivers on that philosophy.  By expanding our global reach through this acquisition, Anteriad establishes itself as a true global leader in tech-enabled B2B marketing solutions.  BNZSA brings an extremely talented leadership team and a differentiated offering that is made even more valuable by their local presence in key markets around the world,” said Sanchez.  “Leadership at Anteriad and BNZSA are both invested in our people, our clients, and our growth.  With this solid foundation, we will accomplish remarkable things for our clients in the global B2B marketing community.”

Deal terms were not disclosed.

Tomorrow, I will cover the Dealfront rebrand.

BNZSA Enters “Hypergrowth Phase”

European IT Sales and Marketing Agency BNZSA announced that it is enjoying “hypergrowth” with 274% year-on-year revenue growth in Q2.  Bookings are up 176% year-to-date.  It is forecasting 300% annual growth in 2021.

During Q2, BNZSA added 25 new clients and doubled its multi-national team.  It hired 163 employees, evenly distributed between their offices in Madrid and Tangiers.  BNZSA employs more than 300 employees from 34 nations, allowing it to broadly deliver tele-based lead generation services in sixteen languages across EMEA.  BNZSA has also been expanding its lead generation services in the Americas.

Q2 net revenue retention rose to 190%.

BNZSA doubled its campaign delivery load in H1, completing 433 lead generation campaigns.

“Coming off the back of a record-breaking 2020, we planned for 2021 to be a year of hypergrowth.  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 CEO Brahim Samhoud

BNZSA’s agents place more than 1.5 million calls a year, delivering a 96% lead acceptance rate.

Earlier this year, BNZSA launched its Intent Activation Engine.  The service identifies, tracks, and activates buyer intent.  BNZSA combines technographic, firmographic, intent, NLP, and B2B telemarketing data to deliver a set of intent-activated leads.  Agents then initially join calls to foster “warm handovers” to their clients.

Along with tele-based demand generation, BNZSA supports buying committee identification; intent, firmographic and technographic insights; and prospect engagement.

“BNZSA is built on four core values – people, highest quality, extra mile, and changing the industry,” Brahim added. “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.”

Headquartered in Madrid, BNZSA is well-positioned to conform to GDPR and country-specific data privacy regulations.  It was founded seven years ago as a marketing agency focused on tele-based demand generation.  It has steadily grown at 30% per annum since launch and grew revenue by 38% last year before entering its hypergrowth phase this year.

BNZSA has over 100 clients, including Acer, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Juniper Networks, Oracle, Samsung, and SAP.  Growth is combined with a 95% client retention rate.

BNZSA Intent Activation Engine

B2B IT Marketing Agency BNZSA (pronounced BEN-zah) entered the intent data space with the BNZSA Intent Activation Engine product launch.  The new service identifies, tracks, and activates buyer intent.  BNZSA combines technographic, firmographic, intent, NLP, and B2B telemarketing data to deliver a set of intent-activated leads.

The new service “connects all the disparate tools available to deliver the most accurate buyer Intent data, with the highest possible lead qualification and industry-standard GDPR compliance.”

Madrid-based BNZSA supports buying committee identification; intent, firmographic and technographic insight; and prospect engagement.

“At the heart of the BNZSA Intent Activation Engine is a combination of data and digital capabilities with inter-personal engagement,” stated CEO Brahim Samhoud.  “No one else offers this. There are intent vendors, technographic vendors, firmographic vendors, contact vendors, digital agencies, and tele-agencies.  Some provide pieces of the puzzle, but none does everything – until now.  No other offering provides B2B sales and marketing leaders with so many different execution options.”

BNZSA describes itself as a customizable, full lifecycle intent data solution for B2B sales and marketing teams.  

“The BNZSA Intent Activation Engine realises an end-to-end value journey through information enrichment via broad-based Intent, firmographics, and technographics, to digital warming through social media, content syndication, email, display, and PR, to local language phone-based BANT qualification,” wrote the firm.

The BNZSA Intent Activation Engine supports the following processes:

  • BNZSA Intent Data Pool: An aggregated database of billions of global, weekly intent records.
  • BNZSA Tech-Lab: An AI, NLP platform that analyzes intent potential and selects relevant records.  The NLP supports twelve European languages and combines it with machine learning and knowledge graphs.  High-intent records are matched with “client TALs [tele-prospecting accepted leads] for advanced re-targeting and adapted nurture tracks” while “the remaining selected data is further filtered by criteria specific to clients’ needs.”
  • BNZSA OmniDatabase: A reference database holding millions of company records for firmographic and technographic enrichment.  The OmniDatabase gathers data from half a dozen third-party data sources and is enriched by BNZSA’s data research team.
  • BNZSA Pipeline: Local-language demand-generation teams engage with prospects to generate a “predetermined number of highly qualified, information-rich leads” that are delivered to client sales and marketing teams.  The demand-generation teams support fifteen languages and places 15,000 calls per day.

BNZSA does not publicly disclose its data partners, but they are all respected firmographic, technographic, and intent data sources.

Leads are fed to Marketo, Salesforce, PipeDrive, and Microsoft Dynamics.  They also support warm handovers to clients where the demand generation rep schedules the call and joins the first meeting.  Because leads are BANT qualified, 70% of leads convert to opportunities with a 35% faster lead-to-close window.         

UK Country Manager Paul Stacey argues that personalizing messaging through digital campaigns alone is difficult and that ABM campaigns should never be purely digital.  The need for a human touch is even more important during the pandemic when face-to-face meetings are no longer possible.

“If you read the ABM technology vendor’s marketing claims, you would be led to think that automation can overcome marketing and sales teams’ current challenge for intimacy with clients and do it all instead – identify, reach, and engage with your highest-value prospects – at the touch of a button.  But can these off-the-shelf solutions truly automate at scale while retaining key customer insights and preserving intimacy?  I think not.

There is a place for automation of course, but it’s worthless without high-quality data, and essentially, the intervention of people. 

I would argue that the human touch is necessary in at least one, if not multiple, touchpoints in any company’s ABM campaigns.  Demand generation must ultimately be powered by people.”

BNZSA UK Country Manager Paul Stacey

BNZSA is based in Europe, so it is well-positioned to conform to GDPR and country-specific data privacy regulations.  It was founded seven years ago as a marketing agency focused on tele-based demand generation.  It has steadily grown at 30% per annum since launch and employs 200 in Spain, the UK, France, and Morocco.  Last year, it grew revenue by 38%.

BNZSA has over 100 clients and a 95% client retention rate.