Bunes & Ferenczi

At Bunes & Ferenczi we believe in today’s uncertain and ever-changing environment there is a smarter and faster way for B2B Tech companies to acquire new customers than only by increasing sales capacity​.

We work with early-stage companies, companies looking to geographically expand, or someone looking to expand their solution portfolio to:
* Co-create their Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) in which their value creation is the highest
* Build a Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) which is prioritized order of all the ICPs
* Audit and recommend data/analytics tools for sales and marketing to support the acquisition of customers
* Provide interim CMO/CRO support for expansion

| Co-founder |  B2B Tech Growth Strategist | 

GrowthMentor

I am grateful for the opportunity to support NEXT GEN entrepreneurs with some of my experience through specific conversations about their challenges. The best part of this? I learn so much myself every time,

Growth Mentor

GlobalGrowth Consulting (GG Consulting AB)

Experienced hands-on business executive with strong focus on teamwork and managing multi-cultural teams thrives at driving global or local growth or profitability-focused change initiatives

AREAS OF EXPERTISE
* Development and advice on Sales and Marking programmes, Business Strategy and Planning
* Design and implementation of organisational change including providing interim management  
* Deep industrial knowledge of IT and telecoms, both B2B and B2C
* Set up and management of new international businesses including creation of company structures

| Principal Consultant | Business Owner |

Bisnode

Advising Bisnode B2B Marketing Steering council with GTM plans for new offers.

B2B Sales and Marketing GTM Advisor

Vendemore

Enabling global companies to implement Account Based Marketing as a part of their marketing mix.

Developing internal sales and marketing strategies at Vendemore.

Global Account Director

GlobalGrowth Consulting & Investment LLC

Vision: 
Grow local small businesses to International medium-sized businesses

We are: 
Senior practicioners with experience from both small businesses to  Fortune 20, including experience in sales, marketing, business development, business management, and Management Consulting.  Proven track record of developing international businesses

Our approach: 
Focus on technology firms (Internet, SW, and HW) with base in Scandinavia looking for international expansion or businesses looking to expand to Scandinavia. We look for 1-4 year exclusive partnerships focusing on profitable new business. Our model can be tailored to each engagement. In some cases, we may make a significant investment in the business. However, we exclusively engage in businesses with a buy-out plan

Founder, Majority Partner, and Chairman

Libendo Education

Member of Board for holding company in Luxemburg (Avaros SA)

Member of Board

Managing the Libendo Group business across all markets

Managing Director

Member of Board Libendo Norway AS

Member of Board Libendo UK&I Ltd (Dormant)

Member of Board Libendo Sweden AB

Driving the expansion of Libendo from Sweden to UK and Norway.  In charge of all expansion work in addition to hosting the management structure, business planning, and overall sales results for the business

Global Sales Director

SPConsulting

Consultant in Change Management Practise at SPConsulting: Boutique global consulting firm based in Stockholm, Sweden

Consultant

Build HP's Direct Online sales in EMEA; employee number 1

Our team took an existing business from $35m to $105m over two years.

Consumer Online Business Development Manager EMEA

Managed a product line E2E, turning around $5m loss to $3m in profit in two years and order book grew by 30%.

Member of management board, and numerous project steering committee chairman roles as well as sponsor.

Business Line Manager EMEA

Provided country representation to EMEA based organisation for support experience and delivery models. Included business development of support services (fee based). Also included deployment of retail channel support programmes.

Consumer Support Country Manager Nordics

European Product Manager for the HP ScanJet line of products. Core focus on all 4 Ps

Product Manager EMEA

Provided final level support for WW contact centres for HP ScanJet products. Would drive current engineering for updates of current products and ensure fixes were transferred to the development of next generation products.

Escalation Manager

I help B2B Tech companies to grow by focusing on the right customers.

I am passionate about B2B tech, but more passionate about the customer value deriving from deploying the right technology. 

It’s always about the customer, and it’s always about the value they get from technology.

The rest are just means to an end.

I am your international businessman of mystery! 

I have lived and worked in Norway, US, Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden.

I am like the business equivalent of the Swiss Army knife, a utility you can use to solve many a challenge. 

I have done sales, marketing, financial management, management consulting, P&L ownership, product management, customer support/operations, escalation management, Account Based Marketing, EdTech, AdTech, MarTech, B2B, B2C, B2B2C. You name it, I have done it!

I have worked for myself, in an organization with four people, in an organization with +300,000 employees and anything in between.

Hans Bunes

Mark Stouse

ProofAnalytics.ai

Chairman and CEO

Vaulting Ventures

Vaulting Ventures is a family office that invests in companies that are disrupting current approaches to key corporate functions such as HR, Marketing, Sales and R&D.

Partner

MarTech

Regular monthly columnist writing about Marketing, GTM and Martech from a business perspective.

Columnist

Forbes Business Council

Contributor to Forbes and Forbes Business Council

Commentator

Association of National Advertisers

Member, Brand Valuation Work Group

Marketing-Accountability-Standards-Board

Co-Chair, Modern GTM Organizational Structure

Hard Skill Exchange

Consulting Member

Accelerating Value -- A Weekly Podcast

Host

Proof Mark, Inc.

Founder

BMC Software

CCO and Vice President, Solutions Marketing & Management

BMC’s CEO asked me to return to reinvigorate WW Marketing & Communications and to take over Customer Connect, BMC’s customer success and education organization. We used Customer Connect to help begin to align Marketing and Sales in a company where that had never happened. 

Unlike my first tour, I rejoined BMC at the beginning of a very tough period. BMC’s performance had slipped. A powerful activist shareholder was shaking up the company, and all the signs pointed towards privatization. My organization focused on rebuilding trust and confidence across a wide array of BMC stakeholders, including customers, partners, investors, employees and the influencer community.

During this time, innovation remained on the front burner. We deployed a vastly more mature version of the analytics platform that had been such a success at Honeywell and my first tour at BMC. This enabled us to continue to run our operations like an "investment fund,” combining predictive analytics and proven, contemporary approaches to connect with the company's audiences. We drove small gains in deal expansion and sales velocity in 2013 and into 2014, despite the corporate reputation issues that were impacting BMC’s fortunes at that time.

During this period, our analytics platform began to attract a growing amount of attention from the marketing profession and the marketplace. In 2014, it was recognized as the Innovation of the Year by a jury drawn from across the marketing and communications profession. It subsequently won additional honors, including the Holmes Report’s Diamond SABRE.

CCO & Global Vice President, Customer Success

GTM Economics | 2023 GTM 50 | CMO ➡️ CEO | Plan | Predict | Prove | Pivot | 50 Startups to Watch for 2023 | Ten Most Influential Analytics Leaders

As CEO of ProofAnalytics.ai, I lead the team with the only AI-native, MASB certified causal analytics platform that enables GTM teams to plan, predict, prove, and pivot their investments in real time. With over 26 years of experience in marketing, communications, customer success, and commercial strategy, I help transform business performance with data-driven insights and agile decision making.

I also leverage my expertise in GTM analytics and economics to co-chair the Modern GTM Organizational Structure at the Marketing-Accountability-Standards-Board, and to serve as a member of the Brand Valuation Work Group at the Association of National Advertisers. In addition, I have been recognized as an innovator and leader in the analytics field, with multiple awards, patents, and publications. I am committed to advancing the practice and standards of GTM accountability and optimization across industries and markets.

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Pressure, Flow, and the Art of Causality

A lot of people have asked me how they should connect the dots in my career. One product leader boiled it down to perhaps the most essential question about any of us: who are you really?

CEO?

CFO?

CMO?

Technologist?

Academic?

Writer?

It’s a tough question to answer because so much what is visible retrospectively wasn’t at all part of the foreseeable plan. And most people know me in only one or two ways. 

I’ve spent much of my life obsessed with pressure and flow.  What started for me very tangibly evolved into what I do today. 

My first company—thirty-five years ago—used electrochemical micromachining to perfect the taper-bore cannon. At the time, it was considered technically beautiful but economically impossible.

We changed that in 1995 by turning electrochemistry itself into a sculptor of metal. We let ions, not tools, decide how changes to interior ballistics could fundamentally alter performance on targets.

What emerged wasn’t just a better barrel. It was a responsive system.  The pressure curve flattened and the energy available to do work rose. The cannon no longer exploded its energy—it translated it. Lower peak, higher sustain, longer life, greater velocity. Pure cause-and-effect, rewritten in metallurgy.

This morning I was standing at my kitchen counter, watching a Nespresso machine build 19 bars of pressure. The logic is identical. Constrain, saturate, release. A pressure waveform engineered for consistency, not chaos. It’s a tiny act of applied causality: a system built to reveal flavor without human skill.

Espresso, like artillery, is about time–pressure choreography. Push too fast and you scorch the shot—or blow the barrel. Too slow, and the energy dissipates before it can do its work. Somewhere in that waveform lies the truth of every designed system: you don’t command energy; you negotiate with it.

Which brings me to causality—the field that, these days, defines my work.

Whether it’s modeling functional performance or team synergies, the challenge is the same: turn noise into signal, and signal into flow. Understand how inputs evolve under pressure and constraint. Find the “taper” that focuses information — the energy available to do work — into impact and value. 

It’s like watching the crema form tiny golden bubbles sustained by pressure, temperature, and time. 

It’s the same thing I saw when a 30mm super-alloy test barrel glowed but endured rather than needing to be replaced. 

It’s what I see in a causal model that captures the way a business actually operates in its environment.

The lessons are unchanged:

You don’t need more force. You need better geometry.

You don’t need more data. You need clearer causality.

You don’t need more “power.” You need less friction. 

Every system that lasts learns the same truth, whether it’s a cannon, an espresso machine, or a company:

Sustain the pressure. 

Shape the flow. 

See the causes and effects.

Change them as needed.

The Rules of the Road for Understanding and Using #CausalAI

Most analytics still confuse what moves together with what causes what.

That doesn’t just fail in an open system — it fails everywhere.

It’s only hidden longer in closed systems, where variables can be tightly constrained and change is artificially slowed.

You know what a framework is?  An artificially closed system.

But the marketplace isn’t closed. It’s open. Competitors and conditions shift constantly. In that world, correlation collapses the moment the context moves.

Here’s what Causal AI teaches us about driving in the real world:

1. Correlation ≠ Causation. Correlation describes, but only causality explains. Without that distinction, every dashboard is a governance risk waiting to surface.

2. Directionality matters. Effects don’t push their causes. Understanding which way the arrows run — and how long it takes for one thing to influence another — is the core of accountability.

3. Time lags are real. For example, Marketing spend today might not show up in revenue for months. Causal models normalize for lag; traditional analytics bury it in noise.

4. The system is open, not closed. Competitors, markets, regulations, shocks — everything interacts. Static correlations can’t survive contact with an open ecosystem. Causal modeling does — because it adjusts as reality evolves.

5. Predictive ≠ Forecasting. Prediction assumes the past continues. Forecasting opens the door to asking, what happens if we change something? Prediction is passive. Causality is active.

6. Interactions compound. Most people think in straight lines — one lever, one effect. But real systems are networks of feedback and amplification. The more gray swans you have — small, underestimated risks — the closer you are to a black swan event. Causal AI makes those invisible synergies visible before they erupt.

7. Counterfactuals are where learning happens. The key question isn’t what happened? It’s what would have happened if we’d acted differently? Only causal models can simulate alternate futures — the essence of innovation and resilience.

8. Agency requires understanding. Don't ass-u-me. Causal AI gives true agency — the ability to act while knowing the likely consequences.

9. Causality is governance. Once you can explain why something happened — and what will happen if you change course — you’re not analyzing anymore. You’re governing.

10. Denial is expensive. Open systems don’t care how long something “used to work.” Causal AI doesn’t humiliate your ideas — it rescues them, before the market, the board, or the law takes your version of reality apart.

Causal AI is about giving yourself and your team the ability to be responsible for an open world where systems interact, swans multiply, and only causality keeps you from mistaking motion for progress.

(I’ll be exploring Causal AI further with 3 experts: Bill Schmarzo, Samir Sharma, and John Thompson in an October 15 event. See details in comments)

I do this and it is a major league plus if you use a script.

LinkedIn Top Voice on business transformation and leadership. Mike’s passion is supporting the next generation of founders and CEOs.

Martyn Lewis once taught me a brilliant public speaking trick.

No, not the money saving expert. I mean the OTHER Martyn Lewis - the one who anchored the BBC News for years. 

A lovely man and a very experienced public speaker.

He told me: when you’re reading a script, never let the text run all the way down the page. Stop halfway and continue on the next sheet.

“Because if your eyes drop too far, your chin drops too. And once your chin’s in your chest, your voice gets strangled.”

Martyn was absolutely right. I’ve followed that advice ever since.

What’s the best piece of public speaking advice you’ve ever been given?

————-

If you’d like to hire me to speak at your event - with or without a script! - then please contact my speaking agent Georgia Milligan at YMU and give her your brief. I talk about strategy, leadership and how to win in the Boardroom.

We've all seen the different conversations about the issues with GenAI.

What you might not have seen is the statistical analysis of what happens when GenAI averages the ~70 percent of the internet corpus that is nonfact -- opinions, unproven arguments, lies -- with known facts.  

In a phrase, it's no bueno.

Open article: GenAI and Statistical Nullification of Fact by open.substack.com

GenAI and Statistical Nullification of Fact

There’s that old saying that what got you here is not at all what will make your successful now.  It sounds profound and accurate, but why?

Because the Past is not Prologue. 

What people think worked last year in last year’s circumstances is almost never what’s working now, or what will be true next year. 

That’s not because you’ve suddenly peaked. It means that what’s happening in the marketplace that impacts your “best practices” has invalidated some or all of those learnings. This is why frameworks without evergreen analytics aren’t effective: the volatility and rapidity of change changes the game. 

How much does it change things?

About 70-80%. 

This means that achieving your objectives requires the ability to navigate, to change course and speed as the environment dictates. 

It means you need a “business GPS” integrated with the ability to course-correct incrementally when possible and more significantly when necessary, all while remaining focused on your destination. 

#CausalAI

Part of the eternal debate among AI researchers is the definition of intelligence.

If Generative AI and Analytical AI are artificial, stochastic mirrors of human learning, then the premise is simple: intelligence requires learning. 

But these systems don’t actually learn — they accumulate. They encode correlative relationships and seek to synthesize them into even higher-order correlations, “meta-patterns” of data as a representation of intelligence. 

This is not learning, for one simple reason: learning is axiomatic with unlearning. And while humans often resist unlearning, these systems simply can’t do it. Their knowledge compounds but never transforms.

This also is why the premise of scaling data and compute as a route to AGI is such a red herring. Scaling = accumulating. Accumulating does not provide for unlearning. This is the essence of regression to the mean, the Achilles Heel of these approaches. 

There is, however, an AI discipline that both learns and unlearns. It’s called Causal AI. Unlike generative or analytical systems, Causal AI maps the directional relationships that give rise to events — the why, not just the what. It reflects reality as it changes, accounting for the interplay of past, present, and potential futures.

When variables strengthen, weaken, or vanish, Causal AI revises its structure. It lets obsolete relationships go. In doing so, it behaves more like a living system — one that prunes in order to adapt.

Dr. Lisa Palmer John Thompson Samir Sharma Genevieve Hayes Bill Schmarzo Malcolm Hawker Jon Cooke Beth Bauer

I doubt that the term offered in this article will catch on, but Anti Intelligence is a fun tag.  

I am enjoying the evolution of this dialog.  

This article holds that LLMs and GenAI represent intelligence without cognition, and they are calling that fact Anti Intelligence.  Interesting thought and fun word play, but almost a statement of the obvious.

Open article: Artificial Intelligence and the Inversion of Intelligence by psychologytoday.com

Artificial Intelligence and the Inversion of Intelligence

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Hans Bunes

Mark Stouse

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