"Never forget the outbound. Always have someone in the firm who falls asleep and gets up with the desire to get new clients for the firm, and has that as their main job. And keep yourself in touch with the day-to-day business realities."
Miloš Myšička | COO @ Imper CZ s.r.o. & Mediaboard s.r.o.
He's six feet tall. He's a self-proclaimed talker. And he has slightly unorthodox views on B2B business. The perfect combination to make this guest impossible to miss.
When he came to the new company, he started trading right away. He didn't have to. He could've hidden in the warm place of the second highest in the company. But he wanted to see how hard-core the traders were. To know where and how to take the company. Where the targets were.
He recommends this to all other directors and owners. Can you see why he's pretty unpopular with a lot of them? Miloš Myšička from Saleskit (formerly Imper CZ) has his reasons. Quite convincing. He talks about them in the next episode of Ignition. And what else?
🔸 Why should management do business?
🔸 Is it enough to trade at the beginning of your career?
🔸 Why definitely not reject outbound?
🔸 How to build an outbound from scratch?
🔸 How busy is a successful company in the outback?
BONUS: OBCHODNICKÉ PATERO MILOŠE MYŠIČKY
(Kód bonusu: OBDEMM)
WHY MANAGEMENT NEEDS TO GET INVOLVED IN ACQUISITIONS (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Guest introduction
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Before I introduce you to our guest and today's topic, I have one request. If you subscribe right now, like or forward the information about Zážeh to a friend, a friend, a colleague, a colleague, we both win. If you subscribe, you won't miss any more episodes and in any case, you'll help me navigate the social media algorithms better, which will help me to invite even more great guests like the one today. Today's one is the COO of Saleskit, formerly Imperu, COO of Mediaboard and my almost neighbour from Čelákovice, Milos Myšička, hi.
Miloš Myšička
Hi, thank you so much for inviting me.
What has he never told anyone about himself?
Martin Hurych
What have you never told anyone about yourself? We won't tell anyone here afterwards either.
Miloš Myšička
Considering how talkative I am, I have to admit that I've talked an awful lot to myself in various podcasts. I've just started a podcast with my former colleagues and friends about fatherhood and how hard it is for dads of young children, where I also spill a lot on myself. When my friend Tomas and I were little and we were in like first, second grade, we used to collect these Star Wars cards and one time we stole a card from a store. It was horrible, I never did it again after that and I had a bad feeling about it, but now in retrospect I know that we held on to those cards for a long time after that. It defined us for the next 2, 3 years when we deleted those Star Wars cards.
Martin Hurych
Where did you live then?
Miloš Myšička
I used to live in Karlovy Vary, I'm originally from Karlovy Vary, so now I hope the police won't be waiting for me at the door. But I know that Master Yoda was just in those cards, and that completely defined us, that we suddenly knew who we were. Plus, even President Paul admitted that he was driving drunk and had his license taken away, so everybody's gonna snitch on each other.
What is Saleskit?
Martin Hurych
I also introduced you as COO of Mediaboard, however, I would like to focus more on Saleskit today. What is it?
Miloš Myšička
Saleskit is the former Imper, now there's been this rebranding where we're moving a bit differently. Imper was the umbrella brand for tools that are fairly well known in that trading community, and that's Merk and Leads, which have kind of defined data-driven commerce here for the last 10, 12 years. But we're taking feedback from clients and we're seeing where that data-driven commerce is moving and we see that that's definitely the future. That market itself is growing terribly and it's going to define so much how business is done that we've found that 1+1 doesn't necessarily always mean 2. Those firms that are using it and have that process set up well, they're combining the information and data from Merk with the data from Lead, where again, there's web tracking, so in the end that 1+1 can equal easily 4. So in the long run, it didn't make sense for those firms to have that apart since they're buying it together anyway as a DDS, data-driven deal. By merging it together and keeping that trader there or helping with those scenarios that may be useful to the individual firms, it also allows for significantly better analytics. Now the tools are partially connected, but it's not one tool with two modules, as it will be and as we're working very hard on it now.
Martin Hurych
When I use one of your tools, how quickly is it felt or what will I expect?
Miloš Myšička
It depends on how you have it set up and what you primarily want to solve. A tool is specific in that it's some thing that you can use in different ways, and you buy a tool and you want it to solve a problem. Very likely our salesman who came to you asked you what your problems were and screwed the tool onto some of those pains. So it really depends on what you want to do about it and what stage you're at.
Martin Hurych
So what will change for me now? You rebranded, what changes for me?
Miloš Myšička
We don't want to do that kind of rebranding that suddenly everything changes, you get up in the morning, you look at the app and everything is different. Suddenly you find you're ordering food not through the red app, but through the pink one, and you don't know where it came from on your phone or what the hell you're supposed to do there. We definitely want to do it in phases, in the beginning the modules will continue to hold similar patters like Leady had, like Merk had, and screw it together more and more. Of course, it depends on it having a common unified platform underneath and the more we screw it up, the more we'll be able to give that analytics.
Doing a good rebranding and a good change to that product doesn't mean you repaint the whole thing and suddenly launch it. I remember very well, I was at a Slevomat talk 3, 4 years ago, where the head producer of Slevomat was talking about how they had been working very hard for a year to redo the whole Slevomat. They're going to put that navigation bar that they had up there on the side, it's going to be beautiful, everybody was in this bubble of how amazing it was going to be, how it was going to rock the world. Now they've launched it and they got terrible hate, terrible lens because these people were going there, they were used to it and suddenly they couldn't find anything. So we're definitely not heading in that direction, but as those changes happen there, we're putting together classic educational videos, we're putting things together so that our clients and those users have the smoothest experience possible. Obviously there will be issues, if there weren't there, I don't think it would be the right switch again, because there are always issues, but you learn a lot from it.
Why should management do business?
Martin Hurych
If we weren't learning new things, we'd still be bushwhacking in caves. I didn't invite you here today for a data-driven trade, though I have no doubt we'll touch it. When we first met for a beer at the Elbe, you surprised me with a very enthusiastic view of outbound and management trading. Those are two topics I'd like to discuss here at least superficially. The situation that I see in a lot of my companies, a lot of owners have grown the company to some success, to some greatness, but they are not traders by origin. They are very happy to get rid of the business, find someone and throw the business over the hump and try not to care about the business at all. At the same time, I see with the younger generation that there is a much promoted marketing approach, ideally don't go anywhere, GDPR won't allow you to do anything anyway, don't make any calls, try to get everyone to come to you. I wrote a post on LinkedIn today that I think a lot of sales departments are turning into bid departments, which I think is very stupid. What do you think, what's your take on trading management? Because you were actively trading before you took your position when the company changed. Why did you think that was important, why do you think management should still be in touch with the market?
Miloš Myšička
I think you have to know how it works. I think an awful lot of companies have ended up not being able to get their good product to market and sell it in the end. I'm now primarily in Mediaboard and Saleskit primarily looking after the growth of those companies, the business part, before that I was in charge of the sales department at LMC for the biggest companies, so 70% of the turnover. I still do some consulting occasionally, I don't have much time for that now, so I used to do more consulting for individual startups. I think that the idea that I'm going to make a product that's so damn good that it's going to sell itself has been successful for a few companies. In the beginning, with the sales, the craft, you really have to validate it, validate if the clients want it, get good feedback to move the product forward.
Very often they end up not being able to convey the idea at all. If the management has no idea what the sale entails, then they are shooting in the dark. That target is put up there somewhere and they shoot into the dark and hope they hit it, and sometimes they hit it and they tell themselves that they're probably not going completely wrong, but they never pick up that gun themselves to try it out for themselves what it's like to shoot into the dark. That's still the stage when they have some sort of sales department.
There are an awful lot of companies where the owners themselves don't want to do business, but they don't want to get a salesman either, or if they do, they only pay him for what he brings them, they don't give him anything in hand. They don't even measure how long the business cycle lasts. Some products have a quick business cycle that I'm able to sell in a month, I sell it like rolls, but some of those products have that business cycle of six months. They hire a salesperson, find out that he hasn't sold anything in 3 months, that it's in costs, and they send him away. Then they think it was a bad idea and shut the whole thing down. An awful lot of companies have ended up doing that, and I think if the management goes through that, they can then understand what they want from their salespeople much better. It's very hard when you're being managed by someone who doesn't understand your job at all.
In one company, the entire management grew out of the product branch. It's a big company, it has over 1.5 billion in turnover and as it grew out of the product branch and product marketing, nobody did the sales and to this day there is no sales department. They recently fired the CEO after a long time, put in a new one and he says they don't have a sales director. Surely the sales department can't be placed under the marketing director. In the previous company I worked for, again, everyone went through that sales branch, from the CEO to the product manager who was the sales director for 2 years, because that company was very sales-driven. Of course over time you forget that, but without that you're not able to lead that sales team and that company in my opinion.
Just trading early in your career?
Martin Hurych
Marketing or production people often say that marketers are in the market, they will bring us the information. You know yourself that not every marketer is perfect, not every marketer will ask for anything. I, when I always asked if there was any contact directly between the marketer or the produce guy and the market, there was none. So these people should be in permanent contact with the market, or would it be enough that there's some kind of marketing stage at the beginning of their career in your opinion?
Miloš Myšička
I think they should go to those clients from time to time. It's very bad, no matter how high up the person is, if they don't come to the clients from time to time. Very often what happens is that the higher up you are, there's this filter that works, that the little problems get solved by the salesperson. Slightly bigger problems are solved by the team leader, then maybe the sales director, and then the biggest problems come to that director or that owner. So he usually only gets to the worst possible problems and very often those directors don't even want to solve those problems because that's what they have the structure for. So over time they start to lose touch with the fact that they're living in their bubble of where to take the company versus how it works.
What's even worse is that they may have done the business in the beginning, but it's been 10 years and they're still living off the information that worked for them before. The fact that the product has evolved somewhere else, that the market has evolved somewhere else, they don't take that into account anymore. Also, I remember not too long ago when I was talking to a business owner, they were doing some cyber security and he said it always worked for him to reach out to the CEO. So he wanted us to pull all the executives and their contacts from Merk. But don't we want to look more into why you're selling and who you're selling to? In a lot of big companies the managing director won't want to talk to you at all, he's not in charge, he's got someone else there to do that.
Why definitely not reject outbound?
Martin Hurych
The other thing that I'm seeing, especially with the younger generation or the more marketing-oriented generation, is that we grab everything through PPC or through advertising. There's no point in calling anyway, it's illegal to send letters, we're afraid of getting flack. You're of a diametrically opposed opinion, your marketers are calling like mad and it's obviously driving some success because you're growing dramatically. What would you say to these people who refuse outbound?
Miloš Myšička
I think that's wrong. I think the contact, the fact that someone calls you is still the key to success. Marketing preheats it up, it helps you to reinforce that brand and that when Martin Hurych calls somewhere, everybody knows it's from Zagazh and that you're doing B2B acceleration. If you call somewhere and somebody tells you what you want and if you're selling gas, that's wrong. If you've got it pre-heated with some ads, PPC, LinkedIn, that's fine. That's maybe why it's worth it for me to go into that LinkedIn because the only time that's happened to me and that was hundreds of people that I reached out to that somebody said they didn't want to meet me. My assessment of that is that it's very likely because they know me in some way through these social networks, they know who I am, they know what my opinions are and maybe they're interested even if I don't have anything to sell them. So that helps a lot, that's how the personal brand works and that's how it works for the corporate brand.
It's good to chase some leads, to have some inbound, but what got us to this point is that there's been a boom here since 2013, 2014. It was growing, everything was great, there was an awful lot of money in the market, startups were getting tens of millions, hundreds of millions of investments and building big teams and air castles, and that's dropped off a lot now. I see it as 2, 3 years where it's dropped off, and that means it's been like 10 years where there was some inbound and it was just a lot of marketing and a lot of companies just completely blew off the outbound. Logically, you always have a higher conversion when you're trying to convert an inbound or some more qualified lead from a campaign. Those marketers themselves want to get leads because it's easier than picking up the phone, picking a group to call, having that given target list. That's significantly harder, there's significantly less conversion, and so over time that thing started to completely disappear. 10 years is a long time, so there are people sitting in a lot of sales director positions now, and I'm one of them who hasn't experienced that shortage.
At the same time, I perceive that there are 3, 4, 5 companies that I have dealt with, how they were running out of leads and suddenly it dried up and they don't know what to do, where to get the people. The sales people don't want to make the calls, so they have to find an acquisition guy who will make the calls, and they're trying to get the acquisition deal started. What they don't realize is that the whole thing can take anywhere from six months to a year to get off the ground, that it still depends on the sales cycle. Now the classic thing is they call all the clients they had and they've gone away, so it's called recycling. Then the classic is, we'll try to upsell our clients that have stayed and haven't left yet, or we'll try to reach out through our clients and references to their competitors and deliver the same thing to them. But very few have any idea what their market is that they should and want to conquer. Even if by some chance someone helps them define it, they don't have the troops ready to go out and conquer that territory and now they're trying to learn. Very often it's that they've got some sort of bonus reward system that they give to those salespeople who are used to that inbound, which has dwindled after the 10 years or 5 years when it was really going well. Because it was significantly easier to acquire, so all of a sudden I'm not going to pay him a bajillion money, so that reward system was getting smaller. All of a sudden you throw in this hunter, this pike that's supposed to be hunting and now he has no clients, and on top of that you give him the same reward system.But of course, he doesn't have a conversion rate of 5%, he has a conversion rate of 2%, so he doesn't make any money, he doesn't enjoy it at all, he picks up and leaves.
Martin Hurych
Before we get to the how to get out of it, I guess what I'm hearing here about why outbound isn't being done today is the fear of it being something completely new to people of your generation.
Miloš Myšička
That's the first thing. The second thing is that there were easier ways to meet the targets. So there was the easy way, but I think the outbound should never be forgotten. If I think back through my career, I joined a smaller staffing company where it was a tremendous school for me. You as a consultant out of school, you're basically kind of half salesman, you're selling these candidates, these companies, and this owner came in and said it would be good to do some acquisition. I was 24 and I didn't know what to do. My first idea was of course to see what companies were advertising jobs and call them to see if they wanted to try it through us, only they get a bambillion other recruitment agencies calling them like that. I didn't really know what to say to them, how to call them, how to get a contact. I did make a few acquisitions, it was very often just on the basis that I had done a good service and the candidate that I pulled over didn't end up getting hired, but he said that he liked the approach so much that he wanted to help out with them. But to do that cold call acquisition, I think I've done that maybe once or twice where I've picked a company, I've called the company, I've gone there and I've really snagged the company. We didn't have any notes on it and a lot of those firms don't have the notes at all and they don't have anybody to write the notes for them. So then they look for outside help, which I think is ultimately good because if they have someone outside helping them think about it, it significantly saves them the time of having to figure it out on their own. I, before I came to Imperium, I never really did that pure outbound, that pure acquisition except for the HR stuff either, because there was no need for it. Because that previous stint had such a strong market position that it wasn't needed.
How to build an outbound sound?
Martin Hurych
So how would you put it today if you took on a big challenge and went to a company that hasn't built up such a reputation yet? How would you start outbound from scratch? A lot of the reactions I get are that people already know you, people know Merk, they have a big brand, I can't have that anywhere in Jihlava, Liberec, Karlovy Vary.
Miloš Myšička
It is very important to realize what kind of sales game you are playing. I handle the acquisition process for both of those companies, not only Saleskit but also Mediaboard, which are two very friendly companies under one owner, but each playing a different sales game.
Martin Hurych
The bubble that primarily listens to us and that I'm trying to target are people who have something in their hand in the perception of the buy side that is expensive, hence risky, hence the long sales cycle. There's a bunch of people bullshitting into that and it takes 9 months or more.
Miloš Myšička
But there's pretty clear competition. Saleskit and data-driven sales is building a whole new market. Those salespeople, where Martin Hosek, Martin Skalicky, Fanda Školník, are going to companies and it's like those companies are lighting a candle and they bring them electricity and a light bulb. In the case of Mediaboard, the pie of the media monitoring was quite clearly defined here, which was 95% owned by one company, which had no tendency to innovate. The reason why Mediaboard became the market leader and the most used media monitoring tool in that time, in those 7, 8 years, was that we had to know what we were going to take that pie with, what advantages we had. The advantage of Mediaboard was in a way simple, that by the way that player was a monopoly, it didn't innovate and even if it's only maybe 7, 8 years ago, it froze sometime in the 90s. Of course, that's changed a lot as well, which is why that competitive market is so terribly important because those companies are pushing forward. Back when everything was one-click online, they were doing updates once a day at 8 in the morning. Imagine you're reading an article on iDNES, but it doesn't show up in your media monitoring until tomorrow. The advantage of Mediaboard, the monitors at the time, was that you came in and you had real-time data, it was there within minutes. You always have early adopters who are not as happy with that particular offering that's out there in the market. So being able to do that market research at the beginning is very important so that you have any market fit at all and so that you know where you have that preposition. So you need to lay out what the pie looks like and find your position. I combine all the mistakes that company A and company B have, I can replace them and take those unhappy clients from both sides or just upgrade it.
A nice example is that the trend now, a lot around these startups, has been that we have to come up with something super new and super disruptive. It doesn't always have to be that way. That's the thing about Saleskit, is that when Tomas came up with Merk and then gradually with Leady, that was something that defined that market and everybody else is kind of a follower. The hardest thing about being number one is that you set the trend. When you're two, so you try to do those things better or erase those mistakes that One makes, catch up and at some point overtake them. A lot of companies have also been catching up to that number one until they became number one and then collapsed because they couldn't sustain it. The bottom line is that you have to know what you're coming up with in that market and that it doesn't necessarily have to be super innovative, which has never been there, but maybe you do a thing that everybody knows but you do it better or you brand it. That's also really important. Now there's a nice example of that Liquid Death, which is water, but the valuation of that company is incredible. It's a water that has a brand that has skeletons on the can and they sell water.
How does outbound work in Saleskit?
Martin Hurych
Come give us a peek into how you operate on the outback. Because the other thing I hear, besides the fact that we don't have a brand and we can't and we don't know where, is that my salespeople are doing like 3 meetings a week and they can't get any more done. Come tell us the secret of how efficient you are. I understand that with 3 meetings a week you probably wouldn't be where you are.
Miloš Myšička
Definitely not. The first thing is to divide the market again. You can use Saleskit to define who it is you want to talk to and also send the right people to the right companies. When we have such terribly good and senior salespeople like Martin Hosek, Fanda Školník, Martin Skalický, we can't send them to small companies that have small deal size. Their time is terribly expensive, they are a partner for those sales directors, they are a partner for those company owners and managers.
Martin Hurych
So you don't have it by region, you have it by size or type of client?
Miloš Myšička
Definitely. Of course, you can do the rating of those companies in many different ways, the first thing is turnover, the second thing is location, because companies in Prague and its surroundings are very often richer than those companies in some regions. The other thing there is that the IT segment is richer, manufacturing is usually richer than say agriculture. That means you have to dissect it well and know who you're attacking, that's the target, that's the territory that you want to get. Then you've got to know where you're sending who, where you're sending infantry, where you're sending cavalry, and divide it up well. Small clients, there's no point in having people in cars going around because it doesn't pay, you should build some clear acquisition telesales, call centre there.
So we've started to do that over time now since the beginning of the year and it's had great results because suddenly we have a product for small businesses that want to start up that very often don't have a salesperson. I've been on that staff where we hire a salesperson and let them sell, it's just that the tool is about that one person with the tool can work at the level of two people without the tool. So if you indulge those salespeople, they end up working better and that Saleskit always works out cheaper than getting another salesperson. It's like a game of Diablo where you had the piece and now you've given it different shields. You've got a trader and you want to give him a phone, so you give the figure a phone, he probably needs a computer, so you give him a computer. Ideally, he's going to need a CRM, a lot of companies still only have Excel unfortunately, so I'll either put Excel in there or I'll upgrade it to that CRM. Then I'll give him that Saleskit and he's able to suddenly be level 99 with that and beat a lot of these poor guys who are walking around with just that phone and have no idea what to do.
Martin Hurych
How is your AI trader?
Miloš Myšička
Kuba Novotny is our AI trader and I think it's a great invention, which happened before I came to Saleskit. Petr Vegner is doing really high quality marketing for us and we inbound build on that brand that's been built. So to make sure we don't just keep adding more and more marketers, we have an AI marketer. We've talked a lot about it, I think Martin Hosek talked about it here, so I won't go into too much detail, but he's there to do that basic qualification of whether it makes sense to call that company. You can look into that Merk with a lot of grayed out stuff and then want more information, so you register and a lot of those companies maybe in the end don't want to use it or aren't ready for it. With a set of some questions he can disqualify those companies that actually realistically don't have that interest, or it's more of a coincidence that they got in, or they're not creditworthy enough. There are different conditions that can change, of course, and we change them over time, but the moment there's some initial qualification, those leads are passed on to the telesales or then to the more senior traders.
Martin Hurych
How many calls does a person make in a call centre?
Miloš Myšička
If I'm not mistaken, we have a setup now to do 300 cold calls a month with some smaller inbounds in there though and I'm honestly not going to tell you the exact number right now. Of course, there's also that they have some follow-up meetings in there because there are some just leads coming in from Kuba Novotny. Logically, we don't want to throw those inbounds in the trash, we need to process them, but at the same time we don't want to forget about that outbound in our lives. Not only the telesales guy, but the senior sales people have a team that does the calling, so maybe we can go after segments. We know we're successful in this segment or that segment, so that team picks out a target group of companies that
he wants to reach out, and the BDR team, the recruiters are getting him appointments. They're already going to a meeting where the client knows exactly what they're getting into, and then the job there is to just maybe have that Martin, Fanda or the other Martin do the show.
Martin Hurych
So do you have 3 acquisition salespeople that are in meetings or do you have more?
Miloš Myšička
In total, I think there are 12 people in the acquisition team. That acquisition sales is very strong in Saleskit and about 8 people are purely in acquisition sales. Then you have to add to that the BDR, where there are 3 or 4, but they also help the acquisition team in Mediaboard.
How busy is a successful voucher company?
Martin Hurych
I'm really interested and I really want to get to the bottom of this, how busy is a successful company. What I hear a lot is that we're doing outbound and we've already had 2 meetings this month. That's not outbound to me. So I want to get to the bottom of how it really works.
Miloš Myšička
We bring in dozens of ultra new clients a month. These are the new IČA's that have not spent a penny with us in the last 12 months. So they've very likely never been with us, or maybe they used the services a year and a half, 2 years ago. It's not like someone uses it once and then shows up again. That would be retention rather than ultra new, but in terms of capturing that market, that's dozens of new clients.
Martin Hurych
I'll lean on Fanda and Martin, whom I know personally. How many appointments do you want them to have, or is it purely up to them and they only have a monetary target, which if they reach without appointments, you don't care?
Miloš Myšička
I think they have 28 appointments a month. I think we're relatively pretty benevolent about this, and at the same time, these guys are very senior. With those senior guys, you should try to make sure they have the best conditions to do the job. But at the same time, I very much stand by the fact that those meetings just have to be there, that target for those meetings has to be there, whether it's in acquisition or retention. It's for one simple reason, at some point it stops working, it may stop working. I need to make sure that when Popeye comes in and all of a sudden he's not performing and I look and he doesn't even have appointments, it's clear because he's lazy and he's not working, he can't even perform. The moment I see that he's averaging 28, 30 appointments a month and he's fulfilling and all of a sudden he's got 45 of those appointments and he still hasn't fulfilled, I'm totally fine because I can see that he saw it coming but he's developed more activity to make up for it. So I'm a big believer in appointment targets, which of course salespeople very often don't like. But at the same time, it's not about making appointments for appointments sake. I've also unfortunately experienced that, where there were targets for appointments and then they went in just to get it done.
Maybe that's why we keep the target so low, to know that the meetings are meaningful.
Martin Hurych
Do you have physical meetings or are you in it online?
Miloš Myšička
It's also online meetings. Again, we leave a lot up to those salespeople to decide where it makes sense and where it doesn't make sense. Follow-ups are in there as well. An awful lot of firms operate in a way that they give some partial portfolio to a new trader to learn on and then they're tasked with filling their pond and whatever they catch, they keep. That's a very standard approach. I just interviewed some people from big brands and that's exactly what happened. I've got 150 clients here, I've got 220 now, I've got 70 of my own and I'm continuing to look after them, so I'm increasing my pool. That's where you get to that stage where that person has a limit, where that limit is like 250 clients, they get there, the more nimble one quickly, the slower one more slowly and then they stop doing the outbound altogether.
This is not how it works in Saleskit, we have a strictly divided acquisition team and account management team. I liken it to Age of Empires, I love those examples. In Age of Empires you start out and you have an army that conquers. You've got this map that's kind of black, so you don't really know where you're going, and you've got an army that's conquering these new places for you, and through that, you're getting new resources to kind of build your civilization. But then it can also happen that if you're just building an army, you get a lot of territory, but on the other side someone else comes and steals it from you again. But if you conquer that territory and then the account management takes good care of it, builds strong walls, starts growing crops and pigs for you, then in the end it can earn more than the looting army. They're two completely different characters, and the way we have it set up in Saleskit is we have strictly separated that acquisition team, which are the conquistadors that are acquiring new and new territories. The moment they acquire that new territory, they hand it over to the team that's there technically training, so they're showing where I click this, this, that, how to filter what and so on. Then there's a team that makes sure that that client is with us for the long term, is happy, and works for the long term and grows that wheat there.
Martin Hurych
What else does an acquisition trader have to do?
Miloš Myšička
It's got the target, it's got the deal size and it's got the number of meetings. These are some of the things that we included in the reward system that Ondra Synk and I redesigned relatively recently, about six months ago. We have what we call as accelerators. You have a purely financial target and a lot of companies have it where you get a percentage and then possibly a bonus if you hit that target. The way we have it set up is that you have a target and if you hit it, the bonus amount goes up by some percentage. If you hit those appointments as well, that's another percentage, it depends on the seniority of those traders and if the deal size is hit as well, then it increases again. So there's always something to fight for and at the same time I think it's clever in that the more money you bring in, the more of that crown you get. So there's no glass ceiling, which is one of the things that a lot of people respond to when they come to us for interviews. At the same time, there's a lot of blind spots in that market where those traders can go and conquer.
What does the reward scheme look like at Saleskit?
Martin Hurych
Are you building some kind of team file?
Miloš Myšička
I don't like it. I believe that the reward system should be transparent and should be influenced by everyone. That means that if Popeye doesn't give a shit about it and I don't get money because of it, I won't like Popeye and in the end it ends up breaking the team up. That's why there can't be public salaries, people don't have self-reflection. A lot of people think they are doing the best job and that they are giving it their all, but the reality when the manager reviews it afterwards is not like that. I believe that team bonuses destroy that company culture and that team cohesion rather than help it. At the same time, I think that if the team doesn't want to work together, they just won't work together, even for the money, for anything. So it's about the strength of that manager, what conditions they create for the team and what the expected behavior is there. You've got a fix and the expectation is that when a new person comes in, we help each other in the team because we're not primarily concerned with meeting our target. I'm a total soloist and I don't care how Saleskit turns out in 2, 3 years. If I have that short-term thinking, that's how it works in some companies and there are big spins. Someone was telling me in an interview the other day that they had 170 salespeople a year for a 70 person company. It's a firm that a lot of people probably know, I won't name it, I've been stoned once for kicking them on LinkedIn, but it's crazy.
The average time a trader lasted there was said to be perhaps 2.5 months. What kind of teamwork do you think you'll build there? Do you as a more senior trader tend to help the new trader? No, because he won't be there for a while, that's time wasted. With our people, I see how they support each other, when new people come in they teach them, they pass it on to them because they see it as the more successful we are, the more the company grows, the more we can grow because of that.
Where will Saleskit be in 6 months?
Martin Hurych
It's been a few days since you launched Saleskit, where will we be in 6 months?
Miloš Myšička
I'd like to know that, too. I have learned not to answer these questions in a very diplomatic and political way for one simple reason. This life and this job has gotten so much faster since I joined Saleskit and Mediaboard, and so many things are happening. It's now been a little over a year since I joined and I had an arrangement with Tomas Berger that for the first 3 months I would be a pure acquisition salesman to try and sell all these products and see what the reaction of these clients was. I tried selling the acquisition of both Saleskit or Merk and Leads and Mediaboard. The team knew about it, Tomas introduced me at the all-hands as a mini me, which was kind of funny because I'm 6'2". Somehow those people, again, perceived me very likely through LinkedIn and probably didn't expect me to go do acquisition business. But at the same time, I have to say that I got terribly positive feedbacks from them that I was willing to roll up my sleeves and go do it.
I also remember that we were sitting for maybe 4 weeks after I started, when I closed my first deal in about a month and a half. I set the target very high because I'm ambitious, so I didn't meet it, which was also because I was getting more and more involved in the management stuff as well, and it wasn't like I was purely doing the acquisition work. I had lunch with Tomas and after those 4 weeks he was going to ask what if I didn't sell anything. I said I hadn't even thought about it, but eventually it did and some things got in there and challenged.
The point I'm making is that I think these people appreciated it terribly. They knew that I was into it, I had the same problems as they did, somehow I solved them, and then we worked out together how I solved it, how they solved it, I asked them about it myself. I certainly don't think I can do everything, I certainly don't think I'm the best salesman, especially when I look at the lineup of the acquisition team that we have there. Even at Mediaboard, there's Otto Pilák, who is absolutely perfect and in total detail of that product, which I could never in my life imagine going into that kind of detail. He's been there for 10 years and he's grown up with that company, but every single one of those acquisition salespeople has something and I don't even have the inclination to measure up to them. I wanted to see how hard the bread was, if it was hard, and that the management decisions afterwards would be the right ones. Because I hate it when somebody comes in who has no idea what's going on and starts throwing out changes based on the fact that they've seen it somewhere else and don't get the gist of it. I like it when you understand how it's happening, what the problems are, and then you come up with a solution, not that you have a solution for everything because you fell out of the sky.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If there were to be 3 to 5 sentences left in the information noise from this podcast about the core topic we've been talking about here today, outbound and in-store management, what would it be? What should people take away from today?
Miloš Myšička
You have to remember the outbound, never forgetting that I should have someone who goes to sleep and gets up with the idea of getting new clients for their business and they should have that as their job. A lot of people have it ad hoc, they do their job as a project manager and still get the occasional client, which is also wrong. The other thing is probably towards those managers, not being afraid to go in with those people, to go try the job and still keep in touch with what the day-to-day reality is. It's so that they don't make decisions that don't make any sense at all, because that's going to poison their whole team and that team will gradually stop appreciating them and I never want to get there.
Martin Hurych
Can we incorporate this into some kind of patera, seven, ten of Miloš Myšička that we would give as a bonus to this episode?
Miloš Myšička
I'm sure it is.
Martin Hurych
Thank you so much and thanks for coming. Fingers crossed that you are doing well and I hope we will have a beer at the Elbe again sometime.
Miloš Myšička
I hope to see you too. Thank you very much.
Martin Hurych
You see, if you've listened or watched this far, thank you very much for that. If you have conceived an idea, if we have impressed upon you that outbound is not a useless and unfashionable thing and that as management it is a good idea to know your customers, then Milos and I have done our job
Good. If that's the case, again please subscribe, like or forward us to someone who needs us, it will help us get Ignition between more ears and to more eyes. Be sure to check out www.martinhurych.com/zazeh, where in addition to this episode and the bonus for this episode, there are all the other episodes. I have no choice but to keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.
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