Sign and fax.
A practice that older us find archaic and younger us may not have even tried. And fax machines are only seen in museums.
Yet, according to Jiří Voves of Onlio, there are countries where this is still a daily routine. At most, the more mentally advanced ones scan and email the signed document.
If you are now wondering which country still uses such processes, I may shock you. It's right behind Rozvadov. Yeah, you read that right. Just outside Rozvadov.
I won't reveal any more for now. Except that I asked the following questions...
🔸 What is the state of digitalisation in the Czech Republic and Europe?
🔸 How is CRM used in the Czech Republic and how to use it correctly?
🔸 Why is it good to be too innovative repeatedly?
🔸 Why is the worst salesman a "good guy"?
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Today we're going to talk about digitizing business processes with Jirka Voves, hi.
Jiří Voves
Hey.
What makes sailing in northern waters interesting?
Martin Hurych
Jirka is the Chairman of the Board of Onlio. Before we get into the digitalization of processes and boring business, one thing caught my attention. I know yachts more recreationally and always in the warm, you enjoy yachts in the rather unwelcoming environment of the north for me, Greenland, Iceland and so on. What draws you there and what interesting things have happened to you?
Jiří Voves
I'm drawn there by nature. It's completely different from the south. I've tried the warm waters, I like to go there to warm up, but the interesting sailing is up north. There's more water, the water smells different, it rocks differently, it blows differently and Greenland is a fabulous part of the world. I definitely recommend it, but the east coast, there are no people there. You'll see maybe two or three boats on the water in 14 days and the population density is about 1.5 per 100km2, so it's great.
How did Jiri get into business and his own company?
Martin Hurych
We said we were going to talk about digitalisation and automation. That's a word that jumps out at you from anywhere you open today. To see what perspective you're going to comment from, let's hear you describe Onlio and your journey there.
Jiří Voves
My journey has been long, I started in my studies in 90 by permission of the Local National Committee. This was long before the trade law. My professional history stretches back from then and the nomenclature has changed over time, but really we are still doing the same thing. We're trying to make a system, we're trying to make tools that help people. The software is often hailed as a mantra, but it's really nothing more than a pitchfork. It's simply a tool that can be used either right or wrong. Our goal is to make it so that it's good for people to work with, that it brings them some savings, that it brings them some value, because otherwise it's completely useless. It doesn't matter if it's red or green and if it's from a small company or a big company. What's important is what it's going to do for them and what good it's going to do them.
Martin Hurych
There are several ways to understand this. One way that I can think of right now is that you have a training company on how to throw pitchforks. I don't think that's it.
Jiří Voves
It's not quite like that. I admit we don't throw pitchforks competitively, but it's that we really try to help those companies with what they need. My experience is over 30 years and over time the tools have been called different things, the nomenclature has changed, but it's really the same thing. It's about the software helping to keep records efficiently, helping to process those things with some process management, collecting data along the way so it's able to report on how it's all going and measure it. What you don't measure you don't improve, so that's part of what we do, that's part of where our software can help.
Martin Hurych
What does our software mean?
Jiří Voves
At the moment we have three business streams where we've been partners with Atlassian since 2004 and we're one of the oldest global partners ever, among other things, because Atlassian was founded in 2002 and we've been doing it ever since. We are definitely the number one here in the Czech Republic, at least in terms of licensing business. The services are immeasurable, there is no data, so we can't benchmark it, but Atlassian is now the de facto standard in software delivery management, knowledge bases and so on. The second stream is CRM Pipedrive, which is a very efficient small lightweight cloud system that deploys very quickly and is rated by expensive agencies as the fastest growing CRM in the world. I can confirm from our experience that there is a real interest in CRM and it is helping those people. It doesn't help them report on work, it helps them achieve that deal, win that deal, close that deal and it does that record keeping as a side effect. The third stream that we have is document management, which is again processes, only it's not above tickets and above deals, but it's processes above documents. We have our own document management system called eDoCat, we've been making it for over 10 years, we have a number of references, a number of awards and dare we say we have really great value for money.
What led to partnerships with large multinational companies?
Martin Hurych
Before we get to the actual products, I'd like to know two more theoretical things. You started out as a custom software vendor, but usually these companies have this wet dream of having their own product, which you have materialized in eDoCat. What led you to resell software to these large multinational companies? Because I see a lot of localized solutions in the market within CRM and almost every small company is trying to do some kind of information or CRM system. So what led you to dive into more proven waters and resell?
Jiří Voves
There is a story behind everything and behind this too. We were looking for software to manage our software development shortly after 2000. We were doing quite big solutions for banks, for big Czech companies, custom development and it was the time of Bugzilla and similar tools and we were frankly unhappy about it because it was terrible. Out of desperation we wrote our own, which was even worse, but then we discovered Jira, version 3 had just come out at that time and it was like an efficient little English sports car. It didn't do anything more than what it was supposed to do and it did it devilishly fast, it was great. That was our story, we found out that nobody far and wide here could do it, was doing it, so we started doing it, we found out that it was really good, there was interest in it, and our partnership took off from there. In addition to overselling cloud and subscription for on-prem solutions, today we do consulting for custom development over this technology. Today, those companies that say they have a custom solution are often also reselling someone else's solution. Nobody writes SQL Server today anymore, they use it. For us, it's the underlying technology. CRM is actually the latest stream for us, we've been doing it for about two years now, and the reason for that is we've tried about 6 of those CRMs. We've been using one of our own for about 5 years and it's only since we discovered Pipedrive and tried it that we've found that it's the system that those salespeople want to use. This is the first time in all my years of practice that I've seen something like this. That's why we're using the technology, not because someone else did it, but because it works. So we have consulting, custom development, integration, we often connect it with the Atlassian world and with electronic documents, and as far as document management is concerned, we are in a similar position. Again, we use a foreign technology, the technology is called Alfresco, but we use the community edition, which is free. Our product actually overlays the front end of that technology, so that user is working with our software with our processes. In that package we have a lot of use cases, a lot of processes that are commonly used in that practice, especially in that European practice, and that's our added value. Everybody in the world can do Alfresco, but we bring that added value. We don't do primary research like pharma, we don't, we use a range of technologies like many others, but our product is in that package in that eDoCat.
Is Onlio more of a software house or a consulting firm?
Martin Hurych
Listening to you, do you consider yourself more of a consulting firm or more of an IT firm?
Jiří Voves
What is an IT company? Everyone is an IT company today. The biggest IT company in the country is Škoda Auto. It's an IT company, it has the most IT people. As far as we are concerned, we have both the consulting, which is Atlassian, Pipedrive, and we are also a vendor, so we have our own product, which is eDoCat in that area of document management system. But we also do the implementations on top of that eDoCat, we do the consulting, we do the support. We've gone from being a pure software house that writes customized solutions to a role that we primarily do the deployment and customization of the solutions that we already have in place. We're not writing this from scratch. It's usually unnecessary.
What is the state of digitalisation in the Czech Republic and Europe?
Martin Hurych
I know you're trying to go out into the world, you've already had some success. If you were to compare the state of digitalisation and automation in the Czech Republic based on how you talk to your clients, or what you see, and what you see out there, is it something to be ashamed of, or is it more something to be proud of?
Jiří Voves
This feeling of contentment is always the road to hell, so that is what we resist a priori, because we don't want to go to hell. The Czechs are much more willing to accept new things, new technologies, than the German market, for example, but it has happened to us repeatedly that we have been too early on that market. The technology was too expensive to be commercially successful in Czech conditions and abroad, although it was not expensive, the conservatism is much greater there. To illustrate, in Germany digitalisation means that faxes and sometimes e-mail are sent, so really the Czech market has nothing to complain about.
How is CRM used in the Czech Republic and how to use it correctly?
Martin Hurych
Now we'll move on to your streams. It occurred to me, when I ask people in my state of the business survey how they use CRM, a lot of times it's golden pages and at best some kind of notebook of what happened. That's clearly not how CRM is supposed to work, or it's a very poor use. I'm wondering from what you guys are seeing for example, what is the status and what is the hack for you that is not being used and should and will kick CRM to another level.
Jiří Voves
For me, it's in the word use, because the average salesman in the average Czech company uses some CRM, or Excel, or similar tool to keep track of business. He uses it for the reason that he is pushed into it and he has to. What we liked so much about Pipedrive is that they call it themselves, that it's a system by salespeople for salespeople. Pipedrive has historically been backed by the merchants at Skype who, when they sold it to Microsoft, got a new toy and started developing a new system for themselves. The way they designed it is that it's activity based, which means that when a new business case is created, activities jump in. I need to call in, schedule when, when I call in, a window pops up, I type in half a line, a line of record, hit OK and I can schedule the next action. It pulls me forward so I don't forget something, so I don't forget something. By doing this, by doing these activities, I am basically going through the different states of the workflow of the business process. That goal is to either close that business process negatively, whether it's long delayed with a scheduled activity, or they bought a competitor, it's a completely misidentified lead, but mainly to close it positively. That said, in our experience, really the percentage of successfully closed deals in the nomenclature of that CRM is much higher than those legacy systems that are a priori focused on record keeping. That recordkeeping in Pipedrive comes as a side effect. Of course it arises, it needs to arise, there's a lot of reporting that can separate the wheat from the chaff and it can show the bottlenecks in that sales process.
Martin Hurych
I use Pipedrive myself, I'm familiar with it and I like the insight that it helps the merchant. It's always talked about, but the real application often isn't like that because in the real application it's more the help means that the trader has data to rely on, but it doesn't help the real workflow.
Jiří Voves
It doesn't help the real workflow much and the usual CRM is similar to the usual document management system in that it is very often a competition for the highest number of buttons on one screen. A normal person just can't get to grips with it without training and if they stop using it, say on holiday, they come back and need training again. That's exactly the principle that we liked so much about Pipedrive because it's similar to our eDoCat, which we built from the beginning to keep the user experience simple. Everyone finds what they need there and if they need something more, they're allowed to have another button appear.
How to deploy Pipedrive in a large company?
Martin Hurych
Pipedrive suffers a little bit from being so integrated into small and medium-sized companies, because for those really corporate solutions, there are usually two or three things that fall down. It's some SAP tools, something from Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. But you surprised me by the fact that you also have corporate customers on Pipedrive in the Czech Republic. What do these big companies appreciate about that?
Jiří Voves
Exactly the same as the little ones. It's just that Pipedrive a priori targets SMBs, small, medium- sized businesses. We have a number of customers in the one man show category where you really just need to set up a trial in one online session, set up the basic parameters of the process and those people are happy with that and use it effectively. But at the other end of the spectrum, we really have corporates that have several thousand employees, the largest sales team has over 50 active sales people and that's a whole other dimension. Ironically, the process may not be that much more complex than those SMBs, there are much more requirements for reporting, but especially for security and integrations. That's the thing where the bread breaks then, because we know how to talk to these customers, we know how to get those integrations working for them, and I'm not really talking about the simple integrations like checking through RS. I'm talking about those complex integrations with their data warehouse, with their internal environment, with their ESB and that's really a different discipline.
What's in store for Pipedrive in 2023?
Martin Hurych
The way I see it in my bubble, Pipedrive is very likely the most common thing with RAYNET in those SMBs today. Come on tell us for those who have Pipedrive, what maybe we can look forward to this year because I noticed that relatively recently the project subprogram came up. So clearly we're stepping beyond what were pure CRM processes. What do you see coming up this year as partners?
Jiří Voves
We see a lot of other things in the beta today. Pipedrive is really undergoing a very dynamic development. By the way, one of the development teams is in Prague, and as far as the expansion is concerned, project management for small simple projects is already there, it's already in production, our customers are starting to use it. It depends on what types of projects it is to be used for, for the common ones it is of course enough, for projects like deploying a big system in a big factory it is absolutely wrong, because it is a terribly simple system. On the other hand, you can't control software development with it either. It's simply designed for a target group, and for that target group it brings very simple accounting in the same user environment. It's very efficient and I have to say it's been a great success with those customers.
Martin Hurych
Can we imagine this as a small-scale contract?
Jiří Voves
Small scale orders, scheduling individual tasks, I get an order from the template, it automatically creates a project where it lists 15 tasks that need to be checked off, completed and it's absolutely perfect for that. Honestly in this segment those projects are usually of that type. So the success rate is really very high. The second direction in which the Pipedrive development continues is towards marketing. It's gradually improving email campaigns, evaluations, it's working with chat and so on, so it's expanding the spectrum to be a full service sales tool including the marketing part. It's really common for those customers of ours to have a form on the website that when a prospect fills out their service, their product, it's set up right into the CRM and it triggers an email campaign with a sequence. That's the direction we're going in. In terms of going to features that are possible to implement in terms of the hugely complex records that are common in Salesforce and in Dynamics, that's not the direction to go. Indeed, the priority is an effective tool to achieve the deal.
Martin Hurych
What I say is very subjective, but I hear quite often that the competition is nicer and I want color. So when are the Pipedrive colorways coming?
Jiří Voves
I think it's just a matter of changing glasses. Really the appeal is to make the user experience quick and easy. I would generally divide CRM into two categories. One CRM is to help salespeople and the other is one that is to help clerical records. I find SAP and Salesforce and Dynamics to be absolutely excellent at the latter part. If you want to achieve deals, get Pipedrive.
What is the situation in the digitisation of documents?
Martin Hurych
Let's turn the page a little bit. The other thing that can still catch me off guard, and I just had a very fresh personal experience, here's your contracts, print them out, sign them, scan them, send them back, rip the paper and throw them away. If you do it once a year, I guess nothing happens, but I see it very often at the corporate level where they have binders. I was at the dealership yesterday with my car and I can't understand why 8 different papers are printed for a tire change. How do you see it? What is the situation currently in the field that you are in?
Jiří Voves
I am convinced that we will not get rid of paper for several thousand years. The question is where we have to use it everywhere. Even Pipedrive has support for electronic signing, it is the simplest possible system, but it is fully functional and fully sufficient for standard business contracts. There is no need to print it out on either side, it is simply sent, approved and signed and the deal can run. However, for many of the customers in that target group this is not acceptable. There are services that deal with by being able to sign it with bank identity support, it can be signed biometrically on tablets, on phones, it can be signed with an electronic qualified signature. The technology can do it all. That's one of the reasons, by the way, why we started to develop that document management system historically, because it was missing in the market. Today, we have a number of services of this type integrated there, we offer it, we can do it, some of our customers are using it, but I dare say we are currently somewhere on the edge of that breakthrough. At the moment it's complete science fiction for 90% of companies, it's elusive for them because the contract has to be on paper, signed and in the shadow. Even if they have it scanned and then they work with the scan for the life of the contract, that signature is a historical custom and it has to be signed on paper. That's also why they sign interstate treaties on paper, because that's the feeling of it being signed. The technology can do it, but the people can't, and therein lies the problem.
Martin Hurych
So how do you manage to work with a document management system in this situation, when the vast majority of people still prefer paper?
Jiří Voves
Thank you for the question. I'm going to go back a little bit when I said we were on the edge because I didn't finish. At the moment, data boxes are being used very massively and the state is opening up to the electronic agenda for tradesmen, and the trend is absolutely clear. We are really on the edge of a tipping point where within a very short period of time that perception will change and it will become normal for those people to send it electronically rather than on paper. But we are still a few years away from that becoming an automatically accepted fact in most cases. At the moment, really from our point of view, 10, 20% of our customers use it routinely and for the rest of them it's something weird, so we'd rather send the paper.
Martin Hurych
For those using electronic document approval, have you verified that nothing is actually printed anywhere? I was just thinking of a parallel that was said about e-mail. With the introduction of e-mail, paper consumption has paradoxically increased. Is it not also the case with your people that, although one side is the records, the documentation and some approval process, I have to read the contract and in the quiet of the places I often go to, even by myself, that I print it out anyway?
Jiří Voves
I read a statistic somewhere that the simplest principle that can be gleaned from publicly available data that measures a society's degree of technological development is a figure on paper consumption per capita. It's related. It's really about the fact that when you need to read 20 pages of text and get to grips with the type of contract, we humans really do much better on that paper. It's again about our habit, about our functioning. There are big monitors, our people nowadays routinely use three monitors to have a big work area. Still, we humans like the paper and we're used to it, so that's one part of the answer. The second part, one of our unnamed customers runs all the input factors he has through the digitization line. The ones that come in on paper, the ones that come in electronically, they either extract, because it's a scan at the source, or they use it straight in that readable form, either way they extract the data and put it into our document management system. The reason it's put in there is not because it can't be processed on the paper, it can't be found there. They've got 70million factors. It's really trucked out there again, what comes in the mail, nobody ever wants to see it there again because it's handled electronically all the time. That's where our help is. Finding a particular invoice means going to the archives and walking hundreds of feet along the binders there. I know exactly where to find it, but still, all that takes time, whereas in the electronic world, in our experience, we can guarantee that a specific invoice will be found in seconds. So here we are with the savings, here we are with the efficiency of the work.
Martin Hurych
How about you, have you banned your printers?
Jiří Voves
They haven't banned it, but we only have one. We only have one, and we're certainly not going to get rid of it, because there are places where a physical signature on paper is required, for example, for legislative reasons.
Why is Onlio repeatedly too innovative? What is the lesson here?
Martin Hurych
I'm going to use this as a little donkey bridge to another question. You mentioned in your preparation that you are eternal optimists and it has happened several times that you are way ahead of the market and that you are bigger innovators to the point that the market is not able to accept it.
Jiří Voves
It's just that we are always trying to find some way to help our customers, potential customers, in a different way, better than what is customary in the market. We don't want to be the 365th in line. We really have had repeated instances where we've come to market with a product, with a service that was too early. To illustrate, before 2000 we developed a solution, a combination of hardware and software for fleet management. Today it's quite common, it costs a few hundred. Back then, just the technology in purchase prices cost tens of thousands of crowns per car. We were too early at a time when we were driving around in lazy cars because the price war was raging. If we had come 5, 10 years later, we had a chance to succeed.
Martin Hurych
Of course this is normally discussed, it's said that there was no market fit and a bunch of stuff, in theory they know what to do next time to do it better. You openly admit that this happens to you repeatedly, so rather the question is why does it keep happening repeatedly. What is it that causes you to be unteachable?
Jiří Voves
I think that being unteachable in a good way is the drive to improve. The moment we start to be satisfied with what we're doing, with the fact that this is actually enough, it's going to be a rapid descent into hell, especially in our business.
Martin Hurych
So you'd rather risk being in the market early and putting something in a drawer for a few years than being late.
Jiří Voves
Sure, it's an example of our eDoCat as well. We started doing it in 2011, which is 12 years ago, and when I was going around our customers around 2012 and I asked them how they work with electronic documents, they said that they were fine, shared drives and mail were enough. When I asked what they would say about DMS, they looked at me and asked if it was those weird text messages. It was
simply too early, that segment of those companies didn't know the technology, it was about educating the market, not about the technology being wrong.
Martin Hurych
Market education is the most complex marketing ever, a long-term thing. How do you look at it in terms of, for example, return on investment? Because if I'm investing 11 years ahead, I have to be damn sure I'm going to get a return, or I have to be a big shot.
Jiří Voves
I'm a shooter and as for 11 years ahead of the market, we've slowed down for obvious reasons. We didn't invest as much, as heavily, in that 2011 year because we were validating that market, seeing how it was going and we found that really those customers were relatively few at that time. Today the situation is completely different, we have a mature product that has a lot of references, so our situation is relatively good. It's about the realisation in those companies that after Covid they need to lift the floodgates, so to speak, to let the water flow into those innovations, because the one who stopped, although he saved costs, but he started to be satisfied with the status quo. As I was saying a moment ago, that complacency leads to an end to that improvement, to that innovation, and that is the road to hell. So what we are really seeing with those customers of ours is that they are reopening projects, they are reopening those strategies and we are talking about it again. We believe that although there is a war going on in Ukraine, which is undoubtedly having and will undoubtedly have a big impact on the European economy, those Czech companies have already understood that they have to invest in order to at least stay afloat.
How is business done in Onlio?
Martin Hurych
To use Cimrman's phrase, he who stood for a while is already standing aloof. Ignition is about innovation and business, so come tell us how you're selling. Pipedrive is for small, medium-sized businesses, although you told us that corporations can get into Pipedrive. EDoCat is more for the larger ones?
Jiří Voves
Technically, this can work even in very small companies. Our smallest customer has 5 users, however, it is a complete exception. It is an exception, the customer knows exactly what he wants, is strictly process oriented and has great ambitions for the future. Our normal customers are in the tens of users segment at the low end of the spectrum and the units of thousands of users at the high end of the spectrum. That's our position in terms of that product and we don't purposefully want to compete with the world's largest solutions in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of users over a single system. Our position is here and we believe that in the Czech Republic it is exactly the right size.
Martin Hurych
So come and tell us what the business process looks like in your Pipedrive for selling these things.
Jiří Voves
When I talked about having three streams, we do have more processes. Each of those streams is sold a little bit differently, but the business process has its own statuses. We normally work with having something like 8 to 12 steps within that business process. There are activities tied above that to make it clear what those salespeople are doing. Like I said, make sure that they have a scheduled time, because the typical mistake that happens with those customers of ours is they want to call their customer but they don't schedule it anymore. If I schedule it, I'll schedule it for next week, not Tuesday at 8:00 and put it on my calendar because I know it's gonna take me a quarter or half an hour. Then it doesn't get done, and the result is that 90% of the scheduled things should have been done a long time ago, so they're not scheduled. That's the principle that Pipedrive makes it easy to put into calendars. Appointments don't go crosswise, we need to make an appointment, so a link goes out from Pipedrive where you can choose which date is most convenient for you, it's automatically entered into my calendar and that time is already booked against other appointments. These are simple tools, simple principles that save that marketer an incredible amount of time.
Why is the worst salesman a "good guy"?
Martin Hurych
You say the worst category of salesman is a nice guy. Who's a good guy?
Jiří Voves
He's the best person to talk to. He's not a coffee drinker, because I'm a coffee drinker. I love coffee, and I have to say that my way of doing business often revolves around coffee. That's not a bad thing, it depends from business to business, it depends on the position of the seller and the buyer as to what is being discussed where. The coffee isn't bad, but what's bad is that the guy is just talking. He needs to have those specific activities, he needs to have the drive to close the deal. It's not about having a coffee and talking about what we could do in the next 10 years or so. I believe that's the way it can work in the nuclear power plant business, or rearmament of the military, but not in our business.
Martin Hurych
So if you're throwing out an ad, or if someone was listening to us right now, or looking at us and wanted to come to you, what parameters do they have to have to pass your laser gaze?
Jiří Voves
It's not about my laser vision, but it's awfully simple. From my perspective, they have to want it, they have to be hungry to succeed, and it doesn't matter if they're a programmer or a salesperson. He has to want to deliver it, he has to want the result. We're not a corporation and we're glad we're not a corporation and we firmly believe we're not going to be a corporation.
Martin Hurych
This is a substantive discussion. If you had an experienced trader in front of you and someone who was willing to learn and eager, who would you choose?
Jiří Voves
I'd talk to both of them, but a priori I'd be more inclined to the young man.
What has Jiří prepared for you as a bonus?
Martin Hurych
I'm the same way. You've got us a big luxury bonus. Come tell us what you have in store for us and for our listeners and viewers.
Jiří Voves
The bonus is again atypical, because, as was said a moment ago, we are trying to go a slightly different way. I've been looking into the Ignition and I've found that the bonus is usually some kind of ten. I believe there have been too many of those ten commandments, so from my point of view we need to come up with something different. If our listeners and viewers are convinced that they want to go further, they want to have that success, then let them think about whether that digitization of processes is the subject, the point that could move them further. We have three streams, as I talked about Atlassian, Pipedrive and the eDoCat one, and that bonus is targeted at all three of those areas. We offer a discount for those customers plus a free initial consultation. The details will be described, sign up and we strongly believe that that will help because that's the principle.
Martin Hurych
So if you need to do something with your business, or want to do something, check out my website where there will be a bonus download.
Jiří Voves
That's right. If you like to sail, you better believe that you can reach the electronic document from the yacht.
Martin Hurych
It's true. Thank you very much, fingers crossed that you will do well and make a dent in the world.
Jiří Voves
Thanks, we'll be glad to, we'll do our best. Thank you, Martin.
Martin Hurych
This was another episode of Zážeh, this time about the aforementioned digitalization and process automation. As has been mentioned here, I think the bonus this time is very deluxe, so be sure to rush over to my website, www.martinhurych.com/zazeh, where there will be a bonus download within this episode. Otherwise, of course, like, subscribe, subscribe, and tell whoever you can get your hands on about not only this episode, because my sort of little private goal is to mess with Jirko's head with so many of you who will take advantage of the bonus. I have no choice but to keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.