Why Polish Distributors Ignore Your Product - And How to Fix It Before You Sign

Speaker A: Almost every week someone writes to me. Mr. Van too. We need distributors for our product in Poland. Please find them for us. Sure we can find them. You will sign the deals and nothing will happen. Let me tell you why, because this is one mistake cost companies a whole year. By the end of this video you will know why. The distributor model space for unknown brands in Poland. What distributors really calculates before he touches your products or software and what you have to do first if you want this model to work at home. This is for companies selling physical product or software in B2B that want to enter Poland through resellers, agents or for distributors. Especially if your plan is to find partners, let them do the selling and just take a share of the profit. If that is your plan. Watch this before you sign anything. I'm Dominique Van Tuch, founder of Architecture of Sales, a lead generation and sales outsourcing agency that help foreign companies enter the Polish market. We've done over 30 go to market projects and big part of them were part of building the partnerships network for our customers. If you are entering Poland and want this kind of breakdown regularly, please subscribe. Now let's get into it. On paper, the strategy looks perfect. The distributors generate, the sales reseller handles the customers. He cares about all all of the costs, all of the risk of the running a local business and you just take a share of the profit. Low risk on your side, the partners does all of the work. Sounds perfect, right? It doesn't work this way. And the distributor is not the one to blame. Here is the honest version. A company with a low budget and a branded doesn't exist in Poland. Wants to find a distributor to do all the sales job for them on a success fee. I'm sorry, but Poles are not suckers. They won't do it. Maybe they sign a deal, maybe they try once or twice to sell it and then nothing moves forward. That's the ground where all customers say doesn't work. Six months later you hear the market is not ready, the price is too high, the timing is wrong. That is not the real reason. The real reason is simple. You put no skin in the game. There is a common sentence, skin in the game. Let me ask you, what is the investment on your side? I can openly tell you. If you don't invest in demand generation or brand awareness, nobody will care about your product. Not the distributor, not his salespeople, nobody. Winning customers and getting into a strong business network takes investment and it takes trust. Don't get to skip both and hand the risk to someone else. Think about it before enter Poland this way. Because there is one more thing nobody tells you. When you build distribution channel, you you always need to sell twice. In the beginning, you need to convince resellers for the cooperation. Once you do that, you need to show them that they can make money together with you. Without it, nothing will happen ever. And remember who you are talking to. Distributors are not idiots. They calculate if putting your product on the shelves makes sense, what does it cost them to add it to the portfolio? And if there is no money in it, they won't invest. Same with sales guys. If they don't get a good commission from your product or any reward, they won't care about it. They will sell what pays for them and your product goes to the bottom of the bag. In every B2B company with good distribution, you have owner, salesman and the end customer. Free people should make money or get good value from the cooperation with you. Remember about it. The owner needs to see the business case, what margin, what volume, what it costs him to take you on, uh, and what he gets back. The salesman needs commission worth fighting for. If your product pays the same or less as product product that it sells itself, you lose every time. The end customer needs a real reason to buy. And prove that someone in Poland already trusts you. If even one of these three makes no money and provides no value, the channel stop moving. Resellers will go straight to a profit share deal only if you have a strong position, good brand awareness and and the demand already exists for your product. So what works in the beginning? You can sign a deal with some resellers, then start demand generation for them to convince them that they can make money together with you. Second option is that you start selling yourself. Prove that you can make money and uh, there is a demand on your product or software. And then you go to the distributors with a strong position. You are no longer on an unknown brand asking for a chance. You are a vendor with Polish customers offering a partner something that already works. And here is when we can come right. The distributor model in Poland works, but not as your first move and not with zero investment on your side. A Polish distributor will not build your brand for you. They sell what already has a demand on the market. Your job is to create the demand. Remember two things. You always sell twice. First to the distributor, then through him. And three people have to get good value from a cooperation with you. The owner, the salesman, the end customer. So if this changed how you think about entering Poland through um, resellers or distributors do three things before you go subscribe because every week I break down a real market entry mistakes like this one straight from conversations with companies trying to sell in Poland. Leave a comment and tell me what you sell and which market you are coming from. I read every everyone and I answer. And if you want to talk through your own situation, book a call with me directly@architectureofsales.com on the top right corner. Tell me what you sell and I will tell you honestly what the right order looks like for your product and whether the distributor model makes sense for you at all.