The math is changing for Bulgarian businesses. Costs are rising, Western markets are watching, and the era of competing on price alone is quietly closing. The companies that will survive the next few years will be the ones that figured out how to do more with less, faster, and more intelligently than before. That, increasingly, is a B2B growth question.
On May 8th, Sofia Tech Park will host the first B2B Growth Conference: a one-day event co-organized by BrainDonors and HubSpot bringing together founders, growth teams, and revenue operators to do exactly that: talk about what’s actually working in 2026. Ahead of the conference, we sat down with Andrey Petrov, founder of BrainDonors and one of HubSpot’s fastest-rising partners in the CEE region, to get an early read on where the field is heading.
The agency that had to move to find its market
BrainDonors launched in 2020, exactly as COVID hit. “The Bulgarian landscape was very unfavourable,” Petrov says. “Bulgarian companies weren’t really technical enough to understand what we did.” The early years pushed him abroad – first the Netherlands, then Spain, chasing international clients in markets where B2B processes were more mature. Over six years, the agency repositioned multiple times and eventually split into a group of four. Its most recent pivot was into pure B2B growth. “Our entire tech stack, our customers, our results – they’re all in this space.”
The HubSpot partnership followed naturally. BrainDonors’ web agency kept integrating HubSpot for incoming clients, they explored it internally, and joined the partner program. What happened next became something of an internal joke: they blew through their two-year targets in three months, then the next tier in another three. “They kept changing our partner manager,” Petrov laughs. “Every other month there was a new guy. They said – you just keep over-reaching targets.” Today, BrainDonors is one of HubSpot’s largest partners in the region, with half their business outside CEE entirely.
Why Bulgaria needs to stop competing on price
The idea for the conference started as a co-marketing activation with HubSpot and grew into something Petrov felt was genuinely needed. “Bulgaria is still good, still cheaper than Western Europe, but not as cheap as it used to be,” he says. “Bulgarian companies either innovate or die.”
His argument is direct: the era of cost advantage is compressing. As wages and operating costs creep toward Western European levels, the only path forward for CEE companies (in tech and beyond) is productivity. And productivity, in 2026, means AI adoption, process digitalization, and a willingness to think beyond the domestic market. “If you’re sleeping on this, sooner or later you’ll be out.”
The 2026 B2B playbook: what’s actually working
Petrov breaks B2B growth into four pillars: outbound, inbound, events, and partnerships. He’s candid that events and partnerships, while valid, aren’t where the real inflection is happening this year. The action is in outbound and inbound and AI changes both.
On outbound: the old model was volume. Get a list, run a sequence, hope for conversion. The new model is signal-driven. “AI can now scan someone’s latest LinkedIn post, summarize it, and incorporate that into your outreach email. It can find which conferences they’ve attended, what content they engage with.” The result is campaigns that feel less like mass outreach and more like a conversation, already producing outsized results for the teams running them. A new job title has emerged to manage the complexity: GTM Engineer, responsible for collecting signals, enriching lists, and orchestrating the systems behind it all.
On inbound, the opportunity is AEO/GEO (Answer Engine Optimization/Generative Engine Optimization). As buyers shift from search engines to AI tools like ChatGPT for research and vendor discovery, companies that have structured their content for these new surfaces are capturing attention their competitors haven’t noticed yet. “It’s underpriced, under-competitive. I see more companies talking about it every week, but right now, there’s still a real window.”
One city, then the Balkans
If the May 8th event lands well, Petrov’s ambitions don’t stop at Sofia. The next iteration could expand region-wide through individual events in Bucharest, Athens, Zagreb, and Germany. The goal is less about scaling a conference brand and more about building a community of companies with a specific orientation: fast-moving, globally minded, and unwilling to stay local.
“We want companies that think globally,” he says. “Because Bulgaria — even CEE sometimes — is not enough.”
The B2B Growth Conference takes place on May 8th at Sofia Tech Park. Register here.
