Entering a new market is decided by live conversations, not by data

Why analysis alone is not enough for entering a new market

Market analysis shows that an opportunity exists. It does not show whether anyone will buy from you specifically. Those are two different things, and only one of them can be established from behind a desk.

Start from a simple observation. The same report you commissioned can be commissioned by your competitor. The same databases, the same public registers, the same industry reviews, and now the same chatbot that will summarise all of it in half an hour. Market data has stopped being an advantage, because everyone holds an identical copy of it. What remains an advantage is the part that is not on the internet at all.

The typical sequence looks like this. A company commissions a report and receives market size, a competitor list, pricing and regulatory data. The board reads it, the numbers add up, the entry decision is made. Then comes a year in which nothing happens: sales do not move, partners do not reply, and the report is still correct. It was correct back then too. It simply answered a different question.

A report describes the market as a structure. B2B sales happen inside specific relationships between specific people. Until you have spoken to the ones who make purchasing decisions in your category, you are working on assumptions: that the problem is urgent, that the current solution is not good enough, that the budget sits where you think it does, that the buying cycle takes as long as you planned. Each of those assumptions can be disproved by a single conversation, and confirmed only by twenty.

That is why we treat Poland market entry as one process rather than two separate stages. Analysis generates hypotheses. Conversations test them. The decision comes after the second step.

What is not on the internet but sits in people’s heads

The things that matter most about a market are published nowhere, because nobody has an interest in publishing them. No report explains why deals fail to happen, and that is usually what blocks entering a new market. Six things below come out in conversation and appear in no source at all.

• Who actually decides. In mid-sized Polish companies the purchasing decision often sits with the owner or the operations director, not with the procurement desk you are sending your offer to.
• Why the incumbent supplier feels safe. Usually not because they are cheaper, but because when something breaks at 6pm someone picks up the phone and drives over.
• What the buying calendar looks like. In construction, energy and manufacturing, decisions cluster in cycles that annual data does not reveal.
• What disqualifies a foreign supplier. No local service, no references from Poland, no invoice in PLN, slow response times.
• What the real price is. A competitor’s price list and the transaction price are two different numbers, and only the buyer knows the gap.
• Who works with whom. The map of informal ties between companies, integrators and distributors does not exist in any database.

Entering a new market breaks on exactly these details, and nobody is deliberately hiding them. It simply never gets written down, because to people in the market it is daily obviousness rather than insight. They talk about it openly, as long as the conversation is not a sales pitch in the first sentence. The condition is that you ask in their language, from the position of someone who wants to understand rather than close.

Exactly who to talk to before entering a new market

Three groups of people who work that market every day, in a ratio of roughly 10 to 7 to 5. Each sees the market from its own side and answers a different question. Skipping any of them leaves a hole no amount of desk research will fill.

How to reach these people in Poland

Four routes work in parallel: direct LinkedIn outreach written in Polish, a referral from someone who already knows you in that market, presence at two or three sector conferences per season, and industry chambers and clusters, which in Poland are genuinely active and happy to connect companies. Cold calling works too, but second in line, after the company name has appeared somewhere first.

Formal verification of the other party happens before the meeting, not after. The KRS register shows ownership structure and legal representation, the VAT white list confirms tax status and the bank account, and the filed accounts show scale. Five minutes of work that saves a quarter.

Entering a new market: how to test assumptions in eight weeks

Conversations only pay off if you wrote down beforehand what exactly you are trying to disprove. Otherwise twenty meetings leave you with twenty opinions and zero decisions.

1. Week 0: write the assumptions down

   Four to six sentences, each of them testable. Example: “manufacturers with 50–250 employees switch component suppliers when lead time exceeds six weeks.” A sentence like “the Polish market is attractive” cannot be tested.

2. Week 1: a list of 60 names

   Names, not companies. Each one tagged as group A, B or C, with the source of the contact and the person who can introduce you. Conversion to a meeting from a well-written first message in Polish is typically 30–40 percent.

3. Weeks 2–7: the conversations

   Three to five per week, 30–45 minutes each, the same set of open questions. The conversation is research, not sales. Materials go out afterwards, never before.

4. After each one: a note within 24 hours

   Three fields: what confirms the assumption, what contradicts it, what is new. The note goes back to the other person as a short summary. That is the first proof that your company is serious.

5. Week 8: review the assumptions

   Each assumption gets a status: confirmed, disproved, unresolved. Disproved ones are the most valuable, because they save budget. Unresolved ones mean you spoke to the wrong group.

6. Week 9: decision and entry plan

   Three possible outcomes: enter as planned, enter with a changed customer profile or offer, do not enter now. The third is also a result, and it costs a fraction of a failed sales year.

Eight weeks is not an academic exercise. At the end of it you have not only answers but thirty people in the market who know who you are and what you do. That is a real asset no report provides, and the starting point for B2B sales development in Poland.

Entering a new market: how strategic partners decide to join you

A partner does not choose a product. A partner chooses a company they are confident will not disappear in six months. That confidence either forms or fails to form in the first three conversations.

In Poland’s industrial, construction and energy sectors, entering through a partner is usually faster than building your own sales function from zero. The partner already has the relationships, the references and the credibility a newcomer lacks. In return they expect something that surprises many foreign companies: not a discount, but availability.

The questions a partner asks themselves after you leave the meeting sound roughly like this. Will there be someone to speak Polish with when a customer calls with a problem. Will an email be answered within a day or within a week. Will this company still be here in two years, or is this a market test that ends in a quiet withdrawal. Will I get exclusivity, and if not, on what terms will I compete with others.

None of that can be answered in a deck. It is answered by the rhythm of contact: a specific note after the first meeting, someone coming back a month later with progress, the same person appearing next quarter rather than another new face from headquarters. That is why we start partner conversations only when a company is ready to sustain that rhythm. A partner conversation followed by silence closes the door harder than never having had it.

If you are building presence in several countries at once, it pays to run them on one logic, as described in our market expansion strategy work, rather than as three independent experiments.

Entering a new market: a local team before you open an office

A year or two usually passes between the entry decision and the office opening. It is the most fragile period, and most companies leave it empty.

The market does not pause during that time. The people you spoke to change jobs, competitors sign contracts, and the memory of a company that appeared at a trade fair in March fades around June. A local team, even one or two people, fills that gap and does four things headquarters in another country cannot.

• It understands the context. It knows how a public tender differs from a private order, what payment terms look like in the sector, and when not to call.
• It speaks the local language. This is not about translation. It is that the conversation starts with the topic instead of a polite negotiation about which language everyone will struggle in.
• It keeps contact continuous. The same person returns to the same people every few weeks with something concrete, not with “any news yet?”.
• It builds continuous presence. The company stays visible in the market without interruption: in conversations, at industry events, in referrals, before it even has an address there.

That effect produces three outcomes that translate directly into first contracts. First, credibility: market players take seriously a company they are in regular contact with, not one that shows up once a quarter. Second, proof of intent: sustained presence costs money, so the fact that you maintain it signals to a partner that the entry decision is real. Third, access to information: people share opportunities with whoever happens to be on their mind.

The order is the reverse of what many companies assume. Presence and relationships first, entity and office second. Registering a Polish company takes a few days and builds not a single relationship. Opening an office before building a network means paying rent, payroll and accounting while waiting for sales to catch up with costs.

Entering a new market: three models of presence

The choice between your own hire, an agency and a partner on the ground depends on whether your assumptions are already confirmed. Before validation, any hire is a bet on an uncertain outcome, because nobody yet knows what that person should be looking for.

How long entering a new market takes

From decision to first contract usually takes 6 to 12 months. In long-cycle sectors such as energy or infrastructure, 12 to 24. Companies that budget this as a quarter withdraw exactly when the relationships start to work.

Seven communication mistakes when entering a new market

• A sales conversation instead of a research one. The first sentence about your product closes the other person down. Ask about their process and about what last let them down in a supplier.
• Silence after the first meeting. The most common and most expensive mistake. Contact without follow-up is worse than no contact, because it confirms the fear that the company is only probing the market.
• Rotating contact people. Three different people from headquarters across three quarters tells a partner that nobody owns this market internally.
• Materials in English only. A deck will pass, but offers, terms and technical specifications in Polish cut weeks off the decision cycle.
• Talking only to customers. Skipping partners and industry observers gives you a picture of demand without a picture of how the market actually operates.
• No written record. Without notes after each conversation, eight weeks later you are left with an impression rather than material for a decision.
• Opening structure before the first customers. An entity, an office and headcount before confirmed sales means fixed costs switched on at the least certain moment.

Entering a new market in practice

Across energy and industrial projects, including work with Voltage Group on development in European Union markets, the sequence was the same every time. First, conversations with contractors, engineering firms and investors, to understand how the decision process actually works in that country and who really signs. Only then the offer and commercial terms, shaped by what we heard.

The same mechanism runs in the other direction, in business development in Poland for companies that have been here for years but are moving into a new segment. A new segment is a new market for them, with its own set of people to talk to and its own assumptions to disprove.

Entering a new market: how to measure whether communication works

Before the first sale you measure the quality of your access to the market, not revenue. These indicators show up early and tell you whether the direction is right.

Frequently asked questions about entering a new market