How Marcando went from zero cold calls to 5,000 a quarter

The company

Marcando builds B2B e-commerce for wholesalers and manufacturers in the SME mid-market. Their customers are often in the middle of an ERP transition, and many still send a representative round in person. The company recently passed €1 million ARR with more than 200 customers and a sales team of four.

We spoke with Michiel Olbrechts, CCO at Marcando.

The challenge

Marcando's early growth came from partnerships, which worked well but came with a ceiling built into it.

"You can't really put your foot down there, since you depend on how many leads you get passed on. And by putting pressure on them to send more, you're on thin ice in terms of straining the relationship."

Building an outbound motion meant going out and finding companies that are, by definition, hard to find. A large part of Marcando's customer base isn't on LinkedIn, or at least not actively. That rules out most of the tooling built for this job.

"It was hard to build lists of wholesalers through tools like Lusha or Apollo, given how heavily they rely on LinkedIn for their Belgian lists."

The Belgian alternatives had a different problem. Filtering was limited to NACEBEL codes, which are often outdated and therefore irrelevant, and getting a company into HubSpot meant having an integration written by a partner.

So the first lists were built the hard way.

"Before Bizzy we worked with a simple Google search: wholesaler, region X."

The solution

Marcando's team filters on activities, sometimes adding website topics to surface a specific niche, and regularly layers on gross margin or EBITDA. The experimenting is ongoing.

What changed the qualification itself was being able to see who a company belongs to.

"Sometimes ICP companies have poor figures, so you'd disqualify them. But when you see they're part of a very large group, you can still do outreach, because those figures are usually purely accounting and the company may well have enough budget."

The HubSpot integration takes care of the rest. Michiel estimates it saves five minutes per company just getting a record into the CRM, where Companyweb never offered one out of the box. Lists get built in Bizzy, pushed one company at a time so nothing lands in HubSpot that shouldn't, and an automation creates a call task the moment a record arrives.

The impact

Michiel dialled the first five hundred numbers himself, as a test.

"When I noticed I was hitting conversion ratios from dial to connected to meeting booked that exceeded the industry benchmarks for SME SaaS, I decided to build out the team to drive up the volumes. Successfully."

Outbound went from nothing to a motion that now carries most of their lead generation.

"We've scaled our outbound from zero cold calls to 5,000 a quarter. And I think that without Bizzy, that absolutely wouldn't have been possible. We used to be 100% inbound. Now 80% of our lead generation is outbound."

Why Marcando recommends Bizzy

Michiel points to three things. The time saved by the CRM integration, where one button leaves a company ready to contact. The data quality for the Belgian SME market, where Bizzy outperforms the American alternatives. The Belgian ones only let you filter on NACEBEL codes, which are often outdated. And, as Marcando signs more mid-market customers, the Chrome extension, which lets them pull an interesting profile from LinkedIn straight into the CRM with the contact details attached.

"Bizzy is indispensable for us."

Ready to build an outbound motion, like Marcando?

Discover the platform in a live demo →