Post | Martin Hurych

It's costing you more than you'd like. They don't carry as much as you'd like them to. But it's not necessarily their fault.

In Saleskit's experience, salespeople spend 60% of their time on non-business matters. Plus, up to 30% of the leads you want to process after nothing are irrelevant to the business.

It's costing you more than you'd like. They don't carry as much as you'd like them to. Clearly, it's not just their fault.

It is therefore necessary to focus on the quality of marketing. "Some" marketing is no longer enough. You need to incorporate data and detailed knowledge of your market. Which - sorry - is still not standard for a bunch of marketers. This is what we agreed with Petra Vegnerova, CMO of Saleskit (formerly IMPER CZ). And for an encore, we discussed how this phenomenon manages to elude them. We discussed for example

🔸 How to qualify correctly?

🔸 How do they work with less relevant leads?

🔸 What metrics do they evaluate in marketing?

🔸 How do they segment the market in detail?

🔸 What marketing automation do they use?

HOW TO PROCESS IRRELEVANT LEADS AND INCREASE BUSINESS EFFICIENCY (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)

Who is Petra Vegner?

Martin Hurych

Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. If you like anything that I'm doing, whether it's a podcast, a blog, newsletters, then run over to my website right now, www.martinhurych.com/newsletter. Sign up for my newsletter, which at this point is already subscribed to 1,100 owners and CEOs of engineering, technology, and manufacturing companies. You won't miss any more of what I have in store for you, and you'll help me attract even more great guests like today's. Today, I'd like to discuss such a pretty pressing and thorny topic, the marketing to sales connection, with the person who is in charge of Saleskit's 30 salespeople, the CMO, Petra Vegner.

Petra Vegnerová

Hello, Martin, thank you for inviting me.

Where does the reality of countries differ most from a travel catalogue?

Martin Hurych

Before we get into the subject, I found out you like to travel. I don't have the 50 flags in the atlas map, so I was wondering where the reality might have been most at odds with the catalog photos.

Petra Vegnerová

Brazil was very interesting. I lived there for a while and I have to say that the reality of everyday life is very different from the tourist life on the beaches. Living there after being mugged twice in a month was really different than going to a hotel on the beach.

What is Saleskit?

Martin Hurych

I mentioned Saleskit right at the beginning, it's probably fair to say that Saleskit is a former Imper. We had Milos the Mouse here a few episodes ago, we've heard a bit about that, however for those who maybe haven't heard Milos, let's tell you what actually happened.

Petra Vegnerová

It's kind of an evolution, we're gradually turning Imper into Saleskit. We announced the change a couple of weeks ago, we introduced the new brand and now we're waiting for other things, so officially the change won't be until 2025. It's going to be a big improvement in our tools and it's kind of the first step towards some

the future of sales. We're already looking ahead to what sales will look like, some sales AI, and Saleskit was such a clear step for us down that path.

What's changing in Saleskit products?

Martin Hurych

What is currently changing for me as a user of Imperium products?

Petra Vegnerová

Nothing at the moment, but we have a lot in store for 2025. We've got a lot of improvements and a lot of things that clients have been asking for that maybe they missed, so we'll start adding that in gradually. It's all coming in early 2025.

How do you serve 30 merchants with 1.5 FE?

Martin Hurych

I pulled out of Milos the other day that your sales team has 30 heads, which includes assistants and BDRs. How many heads does your marketing team have?

Petra Vegnerová

If I were to count just Saleskit, 1.5 heads.

Martin Hurych

How are you doing? With 1.5 people to cater for such requests, in the preparation you told me that you cater for 300 leads a week for your marketers.

Petra Vegnerová

More like monthly. We have to automate a lot, we measure everything a lot and we optimize everything a lot, those are the 3 main things. Me, when I started working at Impero 5 years ago, the sales team was probably only 5, 6 salespeople and I was there by myself. I was still disconnected with one company and gradually the number of salespeople increased. But you can't do it so that there are 30 salespeople and a commensurate number of marketers. So I think there is more pressure on marketing to work more efficiently and automate more.

How does Saleskit generate leads?

Martin Hurych

So let's break down in detail how data-driven marketing can be and how it can be automated in a company that sells data-driven tools and is positively known for automation. Let's take a peek into your kitchen. For example, what does lead generation for marketers realistically look like? Because every salesperson today wants the owner or the marketer to tell them where to call and they will call there.

Petra Vegnerová

There are a lot of channels that we use to generate leads, and we have quite a few that work. We have webinars, trade shows, conferences, all of these are great leads. Then, of course, online marketing, classic PPC, campaigns, and there are really maybe 30 channels like that, and every month we get a few dozen leads from each of those channels. But then I think the power of that data is mainly in the qualification, because if you're asking how do we keep that sales team happy, a lot of times salespeople get leads that aren't completely relevant. Then a lot of times salespeople are doing work that's not completely related to the business, and salespeople don't like that either. We've even got some numbers on that, we have 2,000 clients, so we know how it works there and we know that 60% of the time the average salesperson is doing things that are not sales related. 1/3 of the leads that a salesperson gets are not relevant leads for that sale. I think that's terribly important to realize, because once you can filter out those leads and you can give him away the work that he's doing unnecessarily, the salesperson suddenly starts to be happier. So I hope ours are happy.

Martin Hurych

I have to say, I think your data is very optimistic. If it's from 2,000 of your clients, I would assume they're already data-driven in some way.

Petra Vegnerová

In my opinion, even the client who comes to us already has some awareness and maybe there will still be a segment.

How is the qualification process?

Martin Hurych

I mention this because I see that salespeople in a lot of companies get almost everything that comes into the company. Qualification is often done on their end and it is not uncommon for 95% of leads to be bad. The salesperson is calling completely unnecessarily, at the wrong time, to the wrong contact, etc. Come on, tell me how you qualify those leads.

Petra Vegnerová

In the beginning, you need to look at the whole market in each company and what the mix of clients looks like, look at the different segments. Every firm is going to be a little bit different, but we look at turnover a lot of times, we look at how many years the firm has been in business, we look at how many salespeople they have, and we also look at industries. We can segment the market that way, we know how many potential clients we have in the market, which is something that not many marketers or marketers know. When you answer that question, you're able to look at the leads that you're getting and you're able to tell what success rate you have in what segment and you're able to calculate what the market potential is still. Also, in some segments there are differences of maybe tens of percent that a lead comes in and when I look at that data on that lead, I know I'm going to sell there with maybe a 20% success rate. Then a lead comes in from another company and all of a sudden I see that there's only a 3% success rate. So when we get those leads coming in, we segment them, we look at those parameters and we calculate that probability of being able to sell. I then only pass on to the salespeople those leads that have more than some x percent probability of selling. So the merchant knows that for every fifth lead that comes from me, he will sell.

Martin Hurych

We're at the marketing-sales collaboration, because if I understand correctly, the success rate is taken from deals already tried and from CRM, back-calculated to what the probability is again. Two other things interested me there. Why is it important to you how long a company has been in business?

Petra Vegnerová

It's mainly because of how it works for them, how their processes are already set up. Often it correlates with the fact that a new company won't quite have a big turnover yet, unless it's somehow bootstrapped and probably doesn't have that many employees. So we know from experience that the best probability for us is 5 years or more in the market and when I look at those numbers, that success rate disappears there with each year down after that.

Martin Hurych

If I want to sell CRM to companies that have a lot of salespeople, how do I find the number of salespeople in Merk?

Petra Vegnerová

In Merk, LinkedIn is connected. In Merk there is data about companies and when I put the employees field there, the data is there via LinkedIn. It's quite good to look at whether that company has, for example, recruited salespeople recently, so we have job postings and things like that there.

How to work with less relevant leads?

Martin Hurych

What happens to those leads you deem less relevant?

Petra Vegnerová

There are a lot of them, most of them actually. We have created a pseudo trader of ours who doesn't exist at all, we call him Jakub Novotný. Jakub Novotny is a colleague of ours who has his own e-mail address, he even has his own LinkedIn profile and he generates normal offers in Pipedrive. He gets in touch with that potential client and tries to get that client to communicate. Because we've found that a lot of the time those salespeople spend on those non-relevant leads is emailing them, is calling them, is trying to get them to communicate, and that's why we send that James in there. Jacob is an automation, it's actually a sequence built in Mac that takes different data from Merk and connects it to Pipedrive. When it comes into contact with that person, it even adds them to LinkedIn, and that person responds, Jakub passes it on. He writes on Slack to his colleague, a real marketer, who he sends a lead to because that client is communicating and interested. Now we're talking about inbound, but we also use it for outbound, which is where Jakub is also handy. He sends, for example, personalized videos and tries to communicate with people who are in the outbound.

Martin Hurych

Do you have a calculated probability that James will talk this guy out of it?

Petra Vegnerová

I don't know the number off the top of my head right now and I don't know if it's maybe a different number than if it was on a real trader, either way it saves that trader time. We looked at it during the first month we ran it and it was a great number. James even sold himself that he sent an offer and the guy wrote back and said he was taking it.

What metrics do they evaluate in Saleskit?

Martin Hurych

If I remember correctly, Martin Hošek once told me that in the first few weeks it was close to 3.5 million. What other metrics do you evaluate in marketing?

Petra Vegnerová

We're looking at an awful lot of metrics, we're looking at those individual campaigns, we're looking at how many MQLs those campaigns are bringing in, but we're also looking at the quality of those leads depending on the channels. So we're also looking at what companies those campaigns are bringing in and not just conversions. That's what we use Leady for, our app that shows those companies that are coming through those channels. So then when I run a campaign, I can see which companies are going there and I can optimize that campaign accordingly. So it's definitely a campaign, MQL, SQL, conversion, ROI in B2B marketing is complicated to calculate, but we try to do that.

Of course the multi-touch point, the client journey is complicated in B2B. Then we have the classic marketing campaign data, but I think the important thing is just putting that data together with the data we have in Pipedrive and looking at it holistically.

What is MQL and SQL?

Martin Hurych

When I look at MQL, it's probably obvious there, you sign up for a webinar, fill something out somewhere, etc. So what is SQL for you, when does the salesperson approve it and go to work on it?

Petra Vegnerová

SQL is already a meeting, these are really meetings that have taken place. I don't even count a person signed up for a webinar as an MQL much, an MQL is more like a lead that came in and maybe hasn't just become that meeting yet.

Martin Hurych

So what do I have to do to become an MQL with you?

Petra Vegnerová

Ideally, you should register for our app.

Martin Hurych

So that means some kind of trial version, but that means that I probably already had some contact with your merchant, because merchants often give a trial version. Is that right?

Petra Vegnerová

The marketers probably do too when they do some of their outreach, but it's the marketing that pulls the leads that we pass on to the business. We have different campaigns, x number of channels and from those campaigns we pull them to our website. The goal is mostly registrations, or it could be just some webinars or it could be offline events and things like that, but the registration is probably the most valuable for us.

Martin Hurych

So the webinar is before the MQL, then I register, do I drop you into some process where, because of all the data that you have, marketing qualifies the SQL for the marketer?

Petra Vegnerová

If I have the data from the webinar, then of course I qualify the leads. That is, I run them through Merk, look at all those parameters we talked about, and then I split those potential leads among the traders.

Martin Hurych

The 30-headed sales team then has other duties than to qualify someone.

Petra Vegnerová

I'm sure. They're already getting it pretty qualified and then their job is made easier by marketing in other ways. For example, we have presentations for salespeople, those classic sales presentations, offers that are automatically generated on a button in Pipedrive. It's actually another automation that we have, where this automation pulls in an awful lot of information from both Merk and maybe the person's website, takes a screenshot or pulls in a logo. That presentation is personalized, it's got the client's logo in it, it's got the client's name in it, and the marketer gets that presentation in one click, they can download it and send it straight to the client, they have it editable even in PDF.

What do the day-to-day activities of marketing look like?

Martin Hurych

I'll repeat again, there are 1.5 of you. So what does this really look like, who is helping you with all this?

Petra Vegnerová

I have to say that our CEO, Tomas Berger, does quite a lot of that, a lot of that stuff is off the top of his head. We've got a part-time person there to help us with the automation.

Martin Hurych

Do you use any outsourcing, any outside marketing people?

Petra Vegnerová

I'm sure. We have an agency for online marketing and then we have a lot of freelancers, like for graphics, for shooting videos, so it's 1.5 people and another x freelancers.

What marketing automation do they use?

Martin Hurych

We were talking about Jakub here, we were talking about some smart automation for those presentations. Is there anything that you guys use purely in marketing for yourself beyond the automation that a similarly-abled, lone marketer in a mid-sized company can build?

Petra Vegnerová

I think it's awfully simple. Despite the Make that I mentioned, I think anyone can build a simple automation with 5, 10 steps. Like a totally simple one like the one we have for webinars or all the leads that we get from somewhere. I have campaigns on LinkedIn and then I automatically have those campaigns connected to other tools. Those leads automatically drop into all the other ones, like Demio, which we use for webinars, or

some mail tools and stuff. All these steps, which were probably done manually before, are now automated.

What are Saleskit's plans for the future?

Martin Hurych

What do you plan for the future in Saleskit? Can you reveal a little bit of the secret, whether Saleskit will be both a product and a company, or is Saleskit really a company?

Petra Vegnerová

It will be both a product and a company. Imper has been on the market for 15 years since 2009 and we launched Merk in 2012. That Merk helped clients find the market and solve things for marketers, mainly finding leads. Then we put Leads on the market, which again helped with that inbound, putting a little bit more quality Leads in the hands of the merchants. In 2020, we put Data-Driven Sales into the market, where we combined that idea of those two apps and started implementing not only those two products into companies, but the whole idea around that. We started to say, look, you guys need data a little bit differently than just a login to an app here, come start thinking about it with us. That's where that change started and those clients themselves want that connection. It's awfully cool to take Merk, make some target in it and import that into Leads and then I can see if those people in my target are coming to my website. It's all going to be one button now, so that's what we're going to do, that linking, but then there's going to be so much more.

Martin Hurych

As far as regions are concerned, do we stay primarily in the Czech Republic?

Petra Vegnerová

So far Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Leads work globally as well, so it's not changing there for 2025 yet.

How does Saleskit use its own products?

Martin Hurych

How does Saleskit use Saleskit marketing on a day-to-day basis? You've said a bunch of stats across different segments here. What level of segmentation are you even going to today? If I'm looking at the database, what level should I go to, should I just segment by market sector, or should I combine it down to the county or district level? How big does this matrix need to be?

Petra Vegnerová

I think every company will have this differently because every company has different potential in that market. If I have a potential of 21,000 companies, like we have, there's not much to look at in terms of segmentation. It's also about how those salespeople make those appointments. Face-to-face meetings are not as common, so I don't have to look at the location, the place afterwards, but other things are important to me. But then there is a consultant who needs to find potential customers here in Prague and Central Bohemia because he doesn't want to go to Ostrava. So that's where it could be then, he does a webinar and segments those clients not only by turnover but also by that location.

How to segment the market in detail?

Martin Hurych

I actually see a lot of companies using Merk so they have 21,000 companies and that's it. I know the package, but when I look at my clients, my clients, for example, currently even in terms of what segment I do, are in the historic industrial centers, or we have two or three Silicon Valleys here. That's why I was wondering how in depth are you guys going because I'm also looking at it in terms of, for example, if I'm going to send Martin Hosek or František Školník or Kuba somewhere.

Petra Vegnerová

Those industries like manufacturing companies or IT companies, that's really cool because we have a lot of salespeople and each salesperson tends to do a little bit of a different segment of companies. Maybe he has some background, so he's closer to those manufacturing companies or maybe logistics companies, he's already sold to three of them, so it's probably easier if he sells to the fourth and fifth one because he already knows those salespeople. So this segmentation is definitely good too and we use it when we do outreach. For example, when I prepare some datasets for marketers, we usually go after those industries. The datasets there are exactly the turnover, the number of years on the market, the industry and then maybe the number of employees or the number of traders.

Martin Hurych

So does this mean that every marketer has a preferred or natural segment that they cater to?

Petra Vegnerová

Not everyone. For example, we were at the International Engineering Fair and there were people who are closer to it because they understand the issues, so you can play with that in the data.

What experience do they have with using AI in their own products?

Martin Hurych

It hasn't been that long since MerkAI appeared in your place. What has been your experience with it and what are your plans for the future?

Petra Vegnerová

We've had MerkAI for a few months now and it's sort of the first version of AI that helps prepare a salesperson for a meeting. I say the first version, but we've already got a couple of versions on the backend and the feedback has been good so far. A lot of companies are using it because if a salesperson has 5 meetings, they're not keeping up, this MerkAI can get them ready very quickly. There are definitely more plans, I don't know if I can reveal them all here, but probably everyone who works with AI will realize that it would be nice if the AI could also interact more with the human. The human can put their imput in there, so already that MerkAI is looking at what the client is doing and what you're doing and putting that data together and giving some hints, some advice, some questions that the salesperson might expect in a meeting.

If you're a trader and if you had a normal, say, ChatGPT, you would ask some additional questions afterwards.

Martin Hurych

That's great, we'll put that request into development, because if a salesperson doesn't really have the time, I too often chat with ChatGPT between meetings to prepare for the next meeting. Because often there's no time and I'm less and less interested in chatting with Chat, it's much more interesting to talk on Chat. What else can you reveal?

Petra Vegnerová

We can definitely look forward to better UX and UI, because those apps haven't changed their visuals much in a couple of years now, and now we can look forward to them being prettier and easier to use.

How to get the most out of Saleskit for marketing?

Martin Hurych

Finally, if I had a way for someone who maybe was relatively new to your applications and wanted to saddle up as much as possible, which way would you lead them? We'll make that into something like 5, 7 points of kind of a final guide.

Petra Vegnerová

It's always good to look at the market first. I think marketers don't work with Merk as much as they realistically could because, for example, the Leads for marketing are a bit easier to grasp and they see the use case right off the bat. I think marketing can't start planning campaigns, can't think about the channels they're going to use for those campaigns if they don't know their target audience. We're no longer in a time where we're shooting at everything that moves, but we've got some account based marketing and we need to choose where we're going to send those campaigns and where we're going to send that money.

Martin Hurych

We'll have to cash that in, because that certainly doesn't happen by default, at least in my bubble.

Petra Vegnerová

So you need to find that market and look at how many companies you have, what kind of companies they are, maybe do some marketing personas based on that, I think that's always a good idea. You don't need to suck those budgets out of your fingers, you need to make them based on that and think about where can I target those people. The next step is I'm going to take those target audiences, pour them into those Leads to see if those campaigns are pulling the right people. It's not that those companies aren't there in the Leads, but it's more like I'm going to see it right the first time. I'll run a campaign, tag it with UTM to see what campaign it is, and all of a sudden I can see in Leads which companies are coming from which campaign. I've got it all filtered in there and then I start optimizing those campaigns based on what companies are coming in from those campaigns and I can see if they're the right ones. For example, I have a campaign on LinkedIn that's targeting manufacturing companies, but I'm seeing some small IT companies pulling in, so I guess I need to change something. It's great for that, and I think the Merk and Leads collaboration can save a lot of money and time.

Then marketing can continue to work with those tools. I can connect Leady to MailChimp, Ecomail or SmartEmailing and then I can see the businesses that come from those mail campaigns and how they move around the web. Every time they go back there, I can see that activity, so I can better evaluate those mail campaigns. That data can then be uploaded into Google Analytics, and then Google Ads, and I can create remarketing audiences and target that remarketing, and I can do the same thing on Facebook Pixel.

Martin Hurych

That looks like an automated marketing machine. I do thank you for taking the time to share information here and I'll keep my fingers crossed that you get it right and that you can supply those 30 hungry mouths for leads.

Petra Vegnerová

I really appreciate the invitation, thank you very much.

Martin Hurych

You see, Petra and I discussed how to do marketing well in the data age. Today we have looked at the tools that we have already discussed several times here, either with Martin or with Miloš, from a slightly different perspective. If you liked this episode or have an idea on how to improve your company's marketing, then Petra and I have done our job well. In that case, run over to my website, www.martinhurych.com/newsletter, and sign up for my newsletter there, which is subscribed to by over 1,100 owners and directors of engineering, technology, and manufacturing companies. I didn't mention it in the piece, however, I will gently coax a bonus out of Petra where she will immortalize what she said last time into some materialized form for us. For the bonus, run to the same website, but in the Ignition section. I have no choice but to keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.

(automatically transcribed by Beey.io , translated by DeepL.com, edited and shortened)