Foreign Companies Keep Losing Polish Deals They Should Win. 3 Reasons Why.

Speaker A: Most prospects told the same thing after every demo. It looks nice, but it won't work with our company. By the end of this video you will know three structural reasons why foreign companies lose Polish deals they should have won and what to fix before your next call. This is for B2B companies planning Polish market entry sports. Specifically companies selling software, hardware or technical solutions with a sales process that involves demos and uh, procurement commits. Poland is a growing market. It is also one where the same um, avoidable mistakes show up in the project after project. We have seen all three of them enough times that they deserve their own video. I'm Dominique van Tuch, founder of Architecture of Sales, a lead generation and sales crowdsourcing agency that helps companies enter the Polish market. We are a team of Polish speaking SDRs that completed over 30 uh go to market projects in Poland. And what I'm going to tell you today comes directly from these projects, not from thiori. There is a pattern we see across failed or stalled Polish market entries. The product is good with strong unique selling points, good market value, customers are super interested, but nothing go further. We figure out why in most cases it is not. The product is the three things the company did not prepare for before they start going to the market. Polish mid market and enterprise companies are risk awares by default. When procurement gets involved, legal uh, gets involved. And if your product touches personal data, employee records, user identification or anything that lives in a database, you will get one question on almost every where is the data stored and how does it comply with gdpr? This is not an objection you can handle on the spot. It's a problem procurement gate. If procurement and legal do not get good answers, they will queue the deal. We have a client providing a highly innovative solution to construction sites. The product can prevent workplace accidents. The technology is ahead of what is available locally and they are stuck in over a dozen active sales processes. Not because buyers are not interested, they are because their legal teams are unsure if its customers can use it. And guess what? Board members, decision makers will always listen. Legal solution is simple, but it should be prepared. Before you start calling, get legal opinion from a Polish lawyer on paper. Have it prepared as a document, Send it with your proposals. Prepare the dedicated note for legal, wrote a blog post, record the video or anything like that, but with legal signs with the opinion and it will protect you and won't stop the deal. If you are entering with something innovative or if your product touches any personal or operational data. This is not optional. Get the legal opinion before the first meeting, not after the first objection. If a Polish company can choose between your solution and a local alternative with similar functionality and pricing, they will choose the local one almost every time. Local support, local language, local reference and local contract. They do not have to explain anything to their board. This is not a complaint, it is just the market. The question is, what is your advantage that the local competitor cannot match? If you cannot answer that in one sentence, you will lose. This matters especially in the small medium business segment where buying decisions are faster, but risk tolerance is even lower. A smaller company will not experiment with a foreign vendor. If a Polish alternative exists and is good enough. Before you enter, write the sentence, not a paragraph. Why you, not them? Of course. If you work with us, we will help you identify your unique selling points. Poles do not buy potential, they buy proof. Specifically proof that your solution works for a company that looks exactly like theirs. If you run a demo with generic data, external case studies from other markets, or screenshots from a different industry, you will hear the same sentence after every call. It looks good, but it's not for us. That is not a price objection. That is, ah, a real killer. Because of the perception problem, here is what we did with the client I mentioned at the start. Before the demo, we pulled the prospects employee list from LinkedIn, 15 minutes of work, we loaded it into the system, prepared the uh, demo environment. Based on this, the deal was signed. On the other hand, we ask about the problem and situation during the call and prepare the answer in the demo. When the prospects saw their own company data inside the product, the conversation changed completely. Same with solutions for dedicated problem. Think means believing customers bought it. So ask about the data, put it to the demo environment, do anything to prepare the demo to be maximum. Adjust to the customer's situation. The bar is not high, but it requires preparation before every demo. Research the company, identify one or two pain points specific to their business and load something that makes the product feel like it was built for them. If your product has a Polish language version, that matters too. We had a client where 8 out of 10 prospects flagged that the software felt, uh, foreign. After translation, the objection disappears entirely. If your demo looks and feels foreign, your prospect will find a local alternative. Um, if it looks like their business, you are already on the shortlist. Three things that kill Polish pipeline before it has a chance to develop legal generic demos. Lack of differentiation. None of these require a bigger budget. They require preparation before you go to market. If you are planning to enter Poland and want to know which of these three applies to your specific product, and we would like to discuss your case, book a call with me on our website architectureofsales.com in the top right corner. Subscribe because every week I break down a real market entry mistake straight from conversations with companies trying to sell in Poland. And of course leave us a comment under this video. If you are thinking about these three problems during your go to market plan.