095 | MARTIN HURYCH | HOW TO FIND YOUR OWN POSITION IN YOUR MARKET

You're confusing us. We wanted to make it clear to you. To our potential customers and the entire B2B marketplace. So we decided to show you. Together, in our podcasts. Last time Martin Bednář was with me in Zážeh, this time I visited him.

What did Martin ask me? And what did he manage to get out of me? Like...

🔸 What are the most interesting projects I've had recently?

🔸 How to reposition the sales team using its strengths?

🔸 Why do I like the blue ocean strategy?

🔸 What should I do if I want to change segment or focus?

🔸 What has gone wrong and what am I already looking out for?

TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW

Martin Bednář

Good day, dear viewers, good day, dear listeners. I have a distinguished guest here today, Martin Hurych. Hello, Martin.

Martin Hurych

Hi, Martin.

Introducing

Martin Bednář

The reason why I invited Martin today is because Martin and I have been registering on the B2B market for some time and even thought we were competitors for some time. But now we are actually finding more and more that we are not competitors at all and I think we each have our place in the market. We each have our own podcast, which is quite interesting, so Martin and I have agreed to invite each other to the podcast. We've even found that people confuse us and that's why we decided to make it a little bit clearer by doing a joint interview. If I had to introduce Martin, he has an activity called business accelerator, which means he works with owners of mainly technology companies. He helps them to set strategy in mainly three areas, business, innovation and people, and helps to put it together in a way that works. So if I had to say what the difference between us is, Martin is a general who is in the staff room drawing on a map how the troops should advance. I'm more of a sergeant, or maybe a lieutenant, who flies around the battlefield with these troops, with a flintlock, teaching them how to shoot, how to crawl, and how to take cover from a grenade. Martin, you're laughing at that, what's on your mind?

Martin Hurych

First of all, I feel like I need to say a heartfelt thank you for inviting me to your podcast, because that doesn't normally happen to me, so I'm happy to exchange views on B2B with you here. I'm laughing because you described it as one is more than the other. I don't see it that way at all, because a bunch of things can seem simple in the general room and the moment you walk out into that field in those muddy boots, everything is different. So I see us as a great synergy if someone needs help with their business from the muck to shinier places.

What are the most interesting projects I've had recently?

Martin Bednář

I don't think strategy alone has ever saved anyone unless the soldiers were there who could then carry out the battle, so we are in complete agreement on that. Martin, I have a first question. If you were to look at the last year, two years, what are the most interesting projects you've worked on?

Martin Hurych

I'm relatively broad, so you'll find projects ranging from digging up a business project from scratch for a small company to consolidating sales teams at the holding company level. If I had to pick one, I'd probably say realigning the sales team so that the new structure supports cross-sell and upsell.

What do I mean by realigning the sales team?

Martin Bednář

When you say realigning the sales team, what do you mean?

Martin Hurych

I often see teams where for some historical reasons the salespeople have some profiling, which may not be immediately a priori wrong, but for equally historical reasons those salespeople have no functional specialization other than product specialization. They drag that business case from customer prospecting to farming, and it turns out to be a cruelly unproductive structure for those larger firms. If you've got a sales team, lower tens, higher units of people who are closed in silos, you want them to refer business cases to each other or refer business cases to contacts they've already acquired. That's just the kind of thing that looks great on paper, but in practice, under the weight of the day-to-day tasks and priorities of that one sales person, it's not so easy. If you are responsible for a turnover in your division and you have to help a colleague, it eats into your time and often you will avoid it and just go after your division's products. At this point, your personal interest as a salesperson starts to diverge from the company's interest. In this particular project, the challenge was to figure out the structure so that the guys would actually start to help each other and be rewarded and motivated for it. At the same time, the goal was to get the whole company to mine that pool of companies where it wanted to get its products more efficiently and faster.

How do you reshuffle a team using strengths and what does the final state look like?

Martin Bednář

How did you go about it?

Martin Hurych

By breaking the process down to the first principles, where it was clearly stated what the company was delivering, what the master product was and what they would like to deliver as a solution to their ideal customer. As we talked about in that previous piece, to follow up, we were trying to understand what's happening on the buy side, what we can actually exchange and how we can stay in that business. We went through that team a little bit, who's strong on what, and put it back together completely.

Martin Bednář

Can you talk about what that final state looked like and what was the magic of that solution to get those individual marketers to actually start working together and if there was actually a way to motivate them to do that in a different way?

Martin Hurych

The first thing that was very tangible was that in the original scheme of things, you were also the manager of the business opportunity and you were bringing in potential partners to help you with the upsell and cross-sell. But at the same time, you were responsible for some of your product side there. What we did is we completely separated those two responsibilities from each other. That means that nowadays there is an acquisition rep who is completely in charge of the acquisition part from a to z and the product side is left to the product specialists, some people call them presales. They don't really take care of anything else other than finding the right solution for the counterparty, preparing the documents internally to create the proposal, but again that's the responsibility of the salesperson. He's there all the time maintaining the relationship with that company, he knows the island map, he knows the backstage, he knows the politics, and he keeps the whole deal to himself. I don't want to make it sound bad, but the other colleagues who are involved actually support him until he closes and negotiates the deal.

Martin Bednář

What I see in large companies is that there is normally one person who is in charge of the relationship, and then there are several product specialists who are in charge of selling a certain product line. When they sell something, it goes into the budget, that particular product also goes into the relationship person's budget, so they're not competing with each other there. The biggest danger with those big clients is that when one person leaves, they take that client with them and then it's very hard to re-establish that relationship. But on the seller's side, there is a whole team selling, maybe 3 or 4 people who already have a contact not only in a buyer, but again in technical specialists. So there's a group formed, maybe 4 people on one side, 4 people on the other side and when one of them leaves, it doesn't change that much for the business, the business goes on.

Martin Hurych

It's like you say. I also say the more people you get involved in the other side's business, the better. There's another big benefit, in most of these cases, the specialists are talking to completely different people than the person maintaining the relationship. This gives you a chance to learn what the counterparty wants faster, you have a chance to learn the language of your tribe faster and fit into the structure faster. Even if you're in business, you're not actually selling because the counterparty doesn't even consider it a sale, they consider it a pure technical solution or some kind of technical support. I often say that if that's what it takes, the accountant should talk to the accountant, the boss to the boss, the CFO to the CFO, because at that level, a lot of times it doesn't really look like a sale. It's a friendly chat, it tightens up those relationships and it unpacks the sal map within the organisation that you're trying to sell into much quicker and in my experience it shortens the sales cycle significantly.

Which project did I learn the most on?

Martin Bednář

I would agree with that. Martin, which of your projects have you learned the most from?

Martin Hurych

That's a good question. I don't know if it taught, but I had a great epiphany because most of my clients are squinting abroad. Relatively recently, I closed a project of over two years where the owner's wish was to stay where he is and build a strong regional business and not get out of that region. He wanted to be a strong name within the community where he grew up and where he wanted to stay. I translated that for myself as a typical German family business where a lot of second-, third-generation owners have that mindset. The epiphany was that you don't actually have to necessarily chase international sales. I'm seeing very positively how, for example, a younger generation than me no longer perceives borders and naturally tends towards international sales. However, I was thinking that you can build a very nice healthy big company in a very different way than is generally recommended in the ether. What I enjoyed about it, I'm very much concerned with how to get companies out of the mud of that competition and find some competitive advantage for them, some special position in their own market. What I've actually realised here is that even within a regional company, where for a lot of people you don't have a big business, you don't have big ambitions, you're not going anywhere, you can still find your floor. There you absolutely separate yourself from what's around you and you start playing your own game and it doesn't matter if you're in Michle or if you're dealing with Central Europe.

Why do I like the blue ocean strategy?

Martin Bednář

That basically gets us to your favorite blue ocean theory. Is that right?

Martin Hurych

Yes. Because I think that if you put together your competitive advantages and what you want to do, how you want to do the business and who you are, you can carve out a privileged position within where you want to be. I was just discussing a case with a bunch of people yesterday, IT service. That's such a very unattractive part of the business, where you'd say you open up an old laptop, replace something in there, take a lux, vacuum something, blow something out, close it up again and sell it to someone for a few hundred. That can't satisfy anyone in the long run. But after a short discussion, we came to the conclusion that even within these businesses, if you reframe it so that it's not service, but that it's customer satisfaction work, you can be a very significant business even within a small town. You can have a big footprint behind you and you don't have to have a global business.

What did it look like in one particular case?

Martin Bednář

Now that we're talking about a specific case where you helped find a blue ocean for a man who said he didn't want to be within the Central European region, can we go into even more detail?

Martin Hurych

I'm sure we can. We are talking about the former East Bohemia Region and even within the East Bohemia Region you have some competition that you are fighting with, here it was specifically about the construction industry. You do a competitor analysis, what are the competitors stronger, weaker, what are they better at, what are they worse at. What you definitely can't leave out is how your clients and potential clients perceive it, because I think that's much more important than how you see them. Your client doesn't care about that. Then you should think about what the battlefield looks like, where they want to go, where you want to go, and where there is potentially a vacancy within that battlefield. You can't be too specific here because it's different for every company. When we're talking about the construction industry, somebody might specialize in the type of construction, somebody might specialize in the size of the construction, somebody might specialize in the technology of the construction. But I'm absolutely sure that if you take the time, stop for a couple of afternoons and map out that market, it's surprisingly easy to find where you could head. The other belief I have is that if you start talking about it, that you're heading where you're headed and that you're a specialist in it, then suddenly you start attracting people who are attracted to it. Naturally your business, your clients will start to change because the fly always flies to the lamp that it likes best.

What if I want to change the segment or focus?

Martin Bednář

So basically, it's not a big deal. It's about going around to the current satisfied clients and asking them why they are satisfied, what they appreciate most about the company, finding some intersection and then building further development into that intersection, marketing activities, sales activities, technology development and so on. Do I understand that right?

Martin Hurych

Partly because the danger here is that you stay where you are. That's not enough when you want to step out of your own bubble and move somewhere else. I've experienced this relatively recently, started with small companies and as a long-term sales director at a global level I've always been attracted to working with bigger teams and bigger strategies. At the point where my existing bubble is very happy owners of smaller companies or startups and I want to go somewhere else, bypassing my existing clientele puts me in that stream where there are copies of those people. At the point where I need to strategically get out of that stream and go somewhere else, I think I need to have the balls to go after the potential clients I want to have in a year, two years, three years. Then I can map out what that market values about those individual players and what those competitors potentially specialize in. As part of that, I'll find that white spot that I'll try to tap into with some planned events. If you create a persona just on the people you want to reach, you're very successfully there, but if you want out, you need to map out what you can give those companies. You have to start reaching out to bigger companies, start planning events for bigger companies, talk about bigger companies, and tailor your communications to the problems of the other side.

How to get the necessary information and what is a focus group?

Martin Bednář

I understand that it's not just about reaching out to the current satisfied customers, but to start reaching out to the target customers that we want to reach. If we're talking about a business that's not small, how did you find and then motivate those decision makers or those key people in those key companies and how did you get them to spend half an hour in conversation with you?

Martin Hurych

That is a very good question. There's a ton of open sources before you get into it. You've got some network, if you've been in the business for decades, you've got someone to ask and you know something about the business. So I recommend that before I go out and start asking questions, I find out something about the industry I'm going into, learn something about it so that I can be a relevant partner in those discussions. We both know that when you go somewhere and you just find out and you don't give anything, very often it's not taken in a completely positive way. The second method is that there are specialists on the market who set up focus groups or targeted interviews that you don't conduct, but a partner conducts them for you. We have used this and I have used it myself. It is a service that is very affordable and I would recommend it to almost any entrepreneur who is planning such a move. It's people who do focus groups where you get either existing clients or ideally a mix of existing clients, prospective clients and someone who is against you for an afternoon. We've had great success with that within corporate. The way the groupa is run is that it's not about your firm, it's about trends, it's about how they see their market, where that market is moving, what they need and that's maybe the first thing where you find out what the potential motivations of the counterparty are. Part of what you can unravel is the political map of influence, not at the level of a particular firm, but it seems to me that a lot of these markets behave very similarly. So at the level of that market, you figure out what personas are out there and what they might want. At that point, I think it's a good idea to call a few smaller companies and admit that I'm trying to get somewhere in business and that I'm interested in their opinion. Because nobody wants to burn their most important contracts. I think people are naturally nice, they want to help each other and there is no reason not to give yourself that half-hour, one-hour call. I profess that on these calls you're not just giving information, you're networking and you never know when it might come back to you in a positive way. Once I have all this collected, which is a matter of six months at most, I think I can have very good data on how this potential new bubble is behaving. So at that point I can start designing my new strategy.

What went wrong and what am I looking out for?

Martin Bednář

I asked you which of your projects taught you the most, and you put it in positive terms, which is great, because it shows that you have a positive attitude. But I'd be interested in a fuck-up, a project that you've done where you've learned the wrong way or what risks to watch out for. How did you come to that and how did you learn from it?

Martin Hurych

It was right at the beginning, when I was making the transition from corporatist to entrepreneur. The moment all your resources dry up and you have to, you jump on a lot of things that you wouldn't take on from today's perspective. I'm sure almost every entrepreneur finds themselves in that situation at some point in their career and sometimes repeatedly. You have to take things that you're not entirely comfortable with. It happened to me as well, I joined a sales team where for a very long time things looked positive, we were doing business strategy, we were working with people, but in the end it ended up that I was just an alibi for the management. There were such things that I couldn't do anything with them either, that it wasn't easy and that they were different. In retrospect, I consider it my fuck-up and I try to avoid these things like the devil and ask much more what the intentions are and what the goals are. I never want to be someone's alibi anymore because it doesn't make an impression afterwards. You can invoice very nicely, but you don't put a potential negative reference, even if it didn't happen here, behind your hat.

Martin Bednář

This brings us to a careful qualification right at the beginning of what project or contract I will or will not take on.

Martin Hurych

I want to be really honest here, because we all talk about qualifications as necessary, however, there are in life stage, where secure cash flow is far more than careful qualification.

Martin Bednář

It's true that we've all been through it. I'm glad we're not in that situation anymore and we can choose our contracts based on who we're going to work with, or at least if we see that it makes sense.

Martin Hurych

On a positive note, it's worth trying to accelerate those business activities right from the start of the business, or from the start of a potential crisis that I see, in order to shorten that potential trouble to as short a time as possible. What I don't like to see is that a lot of those people in the marketplace, by being assured of cash flow, get complacent, say that somehow it worked out and now it's going to be better. It's not going to get better unless you start working conceptually on what you want it to look like in 3, 6, 12, 18 months. Otherwise, it's not going to change and you're still going to have that dilemma of whether to qualify or let it in so you have something to bill.

How to get out of your own crisis?

Martin Bednář

This brings us to another interesting question, and that is overcoming the crisis. As entrepreneurs, we have probably both been through a few of these situations where a person's cash flow dries up, or even dries up. Covid has been very difficult for both of us and I'd be interested to know what those steps were that you took. How did you get out of that situation?

Martin Hurych

I'm probably not the representative type in this case, because every crisis kicks me and I start looking for a way out at that moment. I admit I'm a workaholic, so in those moments I don't look at work-life balance and I'll shut myself away for 14, 16 hours a day and figure out a way out. So for me, the way to go in the short term is to admit that you're in the bag and that you need to start changing something, that's the first step to success. It is also important to multiply activities, to make yourself known. I often call this phase the swirling of the dust, because many of us, especially the smaller ones, but unfortunately I also see it in the larger companies, are permanently riding on a sine wave, business success, not enough supply, business failure, spare capacity in production. I have it exactly the same way, I have it, the right hand sells, the left hand does delivery, but I can't do both at the same time. I have to figure out what stage I'm in, what needs to be done, what the priorities are and I always jump into activities and start swirling dust. It's been proven to me, both with myself and with clients, that simply swirling the dust brings in first orders very quickly. What I see very often is paralysis from analysis, long waits, throwing people out that are not always necessary. I tend to be a proactive person and I admit that I often annoy a lot of people with that when I see that the proactivity is not what I think it could be.

Martin Bednář

I think we're similar on this one. I remember when we mentioned Covid, the orders were cancelled, the pipeline suddenly dried up as well and when you looked into the future, there was nothing there. At that point I thought I'd probably go behind the till at Lidl because I didn't know what I was going to do with it. But I started doing a lot of work on LinkedIn and I was really working 16 hours a day and within three months I jumped back into that business, which I don't think is too bad within Covid.

Martin Hurych

Especially in our business, it is necessary to be aware and a little bit anticipate what can happen and it is good to be a few steps ahead of potential clients in your business. We probably couldn't have known there was going to be a war or Covid, that's for sure, but while it's here, analyze what the situation is and don't just cry over spilt milk. I have to realise the effect that the situation, which personally annoys me terribly, is having on those potential clients. There, it was immediately clear to both of us that if everything was shut down, and in my line of business, factories were packed to the rafters by then, where salesmen were not trading but just taking orders, we had to start looking for new outlets. The traders must go to the market again, even if it meant sitting in front of the cameras and leaving their octavos in the parking lot in front of the apartments and houses. If you know this and can adapt to it and offer solutions to their problems, you don't have a problem at all. There's a lag, but I'll be honest, I think Covid, paradoxically, kicked me off. I started my business about a year and a bit before Covid, I hadn't quite built a name for myself yet, and the moment you have that chance, you just have to take it.

Who inspires me the most?

Martin Bednář

Last question, which figure in business has given you the most, inspired you the most, taught you the most? It could be a boss, it could be a colleague, it could be the author of a book.

Martin Hurych

I was afraid of this question because I take individual characteristics or approaches from individual personalities in many things. But if I had to single one out, right at the beginning of my career I had a mentor, today you would say an internal mentor. So it was my boss who took me from a local a businessman here in Prague and North Bohemia into a global figure just because he trusted me. I don't think anyone will ever write a book about him, but the style he led me in at the time gave me a lot. We're talking about the late 1990s and early 2000s, when a lot of things were directive and this guy, on his own responsibility, built a team of 30-something elites in Eastern Europe who didn't really know anything and started pouring business know-how into them. So he probably had the biggest impact on me in a positive sense. I am grateful to him for that and if I had to single out just one, it would be my first corporate boss.

Martin Bednář

Martin, thank you so much for your experience.

Martin Hurych

Thank you for the invitation, it was great.

Martin Bednář

Dear viewers, dear listeners, that was Martin Hurych. Thank you for your attention.

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