How MALL Partner Tripled Acquisitions with BizMachine

Mall Partner is a marketplace — an e-commerce platform that enables e-shops to sell their products on Mall.cz. Similar models exist worldwide with Amazon and Alibaba. These marketplaces globally account for up to 60% of all online product sales. In our region, however, they’re still essentially in their infancy. And that’s precisely why Mall Partner devotes significant time and energy to developing its marketplace. Their plans are ambitious. Within three years, they want the marketplace to contribute up to half of Mall Group’s total revenue.

Such an ambitious goal requires the Mall Partner division’s salespeople to precisely select companies to approach and onboard into the partner program, with the aim of generating the highest possible revenue for each seller. Until spring, salespeople themselves were trying to find the most suitable e-shops with the widest selection and best prices in their assigned segment. The success of new partner acquisitions was therefore heavily dependent on the individual salesperson’s market knowledge. Managing the speed and efficiency of the acquisition process without comprehensive market understanding is impossible. That’s exactly where the BizMachine team helped the Mall Partner division.

Jakub Vraspír asked about what the four-month collaboration brought and what results Mall Partner has already observed. He spoke with Jakub Hostačný, who leads the BI department and technical partner integration, and Kateřina Peštutková, who oversees marketplace business development. Mall Partner program head Jakub Kováč also added his insights.

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I was really looking forward to our conversation because I consider you great professionals. What would you say about yourselves — how would you introduce yourselves in connection with the largest Czech marketplace?

Kateřina: I’m proud to be part of developing the largest Czech marketplace. I have corporate experience behind me, but the speed at which not only e-commerce but also our division evolves never ceases to amaze and excite me. You’re building something different that’s constantly growing under your hands, even doubling in a short period. It creates room to experiment, move forward quickly and agilely, and somewhat disrupt the established ways the company operates as a whole. I like having the opportunity to seek improvements and the trust that we’ll achieve ambitious goals. Growing by 150% is no small challenge. But our shareholders have given us everything we need to succeed, and we’ve earned their trust through hard work.

Jakub H.: I’m also grateful that the Mall Partner division has startup dynamics. I’ve been through several startups and I need an environment where you’re not just optimizing existing things and processes, but building something new and big from scratch. We’re working on something here that very few people in our region do. The uniqueness of the project we’re building together is further underscored by the dynamic environment and rapid growth. I’ve been here two and a half years and in that time we’ve tripled in size. Plus we have a very similar mindset — speed and agility play the main role. We’re a team that clicks both professionally and personally.

Jakub K.: For me, scaling and scalability are essential. Even though the team was already here when I arrived, I was able to grow it and see what results we could achieve together. We’re not far from classic zero-to-hundred growth. In the last three years, our revenue has grown more than eightfold. I believe that the marketplace truly adds value for customers. I enjoy contributing to the fact that they can get almost everything they need in one place, at better prices. E-commerce is a complex business and I enjoy constantly learning new things in it.

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Where you’ve taken the marketplace in such a short time sounds great. Do you still remember what your work looked like before you started collaborating with BizMachine?

Kateřina: By nature, connecting the right partners — or sellers — to the marketplace is essential for its commercial success. They create the variety that attracts customers, who in turn bring money. So for our sales team, approaching the right partners is crucial — those with the greatest potential. When we started, we selected sellers for the marketplace manually. In practice, this meant everything was on our salespeople. They had assigned segments and searched for business opportunities within them. So, for example, the colleague responsible for the DIY segment tried to find the most suitable e-shops with the widest selection and best prices. It’s clear how subjective such selection was and how difficult it was to manage from a leadership perspective. I had nothing to help me select the right sellers from the pipeline for priority outreach.

Jakub K.: We only had basic, publicly available information about e-shops — like their company ID. Our salespeople had to find everything else on the internet themselves. We had no tool to help them estimate whether an e-shop would be successful or who to prioritize. Whether a salesperson made the right choice and onboarded a good company only became apparent about three months after the e-shop joined the marketplace — once we collected and evaluated data on their product sales with us. Our salespeople’s work was more administration and searching than actual selling and winning companies over to the idea of selling on the marketplace.

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Before joining Mall Group in 2018, Jakub built the LetGo service from scratch — not just for the Czech market, but for the entire CEE region. He previously worked in consulting agencies — first at Deloitte for a year, then over 5 years at McKinsey. He lived in Geneva for over a year. He studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University and the University of Economics in Prague.

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So what used to fall on your salespeople’s shoulders?

Kateřina: Business developers did everything. From the mentioned e-shop searching through validation to closing partnership agreements. It was on them to prepare the e-shop for onboarding to our platform. Then came the launch, which we tried to prioritize, but we didn’t have very solid foundations for such decisions, so speed often depended on the partner’s technical integration readiness. After connecting a company to our platform, it was handed to the retention team, which helps them maximize marketplace sales.

So what was the brief for BizMachine in this situation?

Kateřina: We mainly needed to improve and speed up the acquisition process for new sellers. We knew we had to better differentiate whom to prioritize and how to find sellers with high marketplace potential. We were missing some higher intelligence over our work that would help us make better business predictions. From a department manager’s perspective, I also wanted better visibility and control over which opportunities salespeople were pursuing and how much time they were spending on them.

What did you consider the essential first step of the collaboration?

Jakub H.: We needed a better overview of the market. After all, there are tens of thousands of e-shops here, and we wanted relevant data and information about them. The second step was building a company scoring model to help manage the acquisition process — to speed it up and, above all, onboard e-shops with the greatest potential. Together with BizMachine, we evaluated which e-shop data to use for scoring. We also supplied our own data to BizMachine. Initially, we exchanged Excel spreadsheets. Now the “automated pipeline” from BizMachine contains only genuinely new business opportunities.

There’s an enormous amount of data in e-commerce. Thanks to BizMachine, we have a tool that allows us to think about it. And that gives us a competitive advantage.

What did the detailed e-shop attractiveness scoring actually help with? Beyond prioritizing new business opportunities, which was its primary purpose.

Jakub H.: A large part of our salespeople’s agenda has been automated. We can assign them the right opportunities to pursue. And we get more detailed and accurate information about individual e-shops. We’re speeding up the addition of new partners and can improve the performance of our existing partners. The nature of work has also changed significantly for me and my team. We had to focus on many technical things — like automating data flows. There’s an enormous amount of data in e-commerce. Thanks to BizMachine, we have a tool that allows us to think about it. And that gives us a competitive advantage. It’s like shooting at a target. Whereas before we were shooting fairly blindly and were happy when we hit the target at all, today we can aim to hit the nine and the bullseye.

Kateřina: Our collaboration wasn’t just about data. The BizMachine team also acted as consultants in adjusting our sales process. They brought us experience from their own practice and from other projects, and we were able to make changes very quickly that help us achieve much better business results. I must say we significantly relieved our salespeople.

As Head of Sales at MALL, she oversees the development of the MALL Partner marketplace, which includes acquiring new interesting partners. She joined MALL Group from the Seznam.cz sales team, where she managed industry services for Zboží.cz, Sreality.cz, and Sauto.cz. Before her role at Seznam, she also worked at the consulting and development agency Lundegaard and as Director of the Private Labels division at Energizer/Edgewell, where she managed an international team for expansion in Central and Eastern Europe.

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So the scoring model helps with both acquisition and retention...

Jakub H.: Thanks to BizMachine, we know how much business potential a newly added company has, and therefore which sales team to assign it to. We can then compare scoring expectations with actual performance. When expectations and reality diverge, it’s easy to check what’s happening or happened in that case. This also helps us optimize the performance of our existing portfolio.

That sounds like a major benefit...

Kateřina: Two years ago, the marketplace was something of an unwanted child in Mall Group. But we’ve managed to grow several times over since then. And we don’t want to stop here. We want to contribute up to half of Mall.cz’s revenue. Who else but us, who also know our market well, should be able to do that? Plus, I don’t just want to talk about the Czech and Slovak markets — I want to scale the solution to other countries where we operate. And yes, we’re helped by the fact that we’ve improved and cut the acquisition process by up to half. We can connect small e-shops within 14 days. For larger players, it always depends on their readiness, but even there we’re significantly faster — up to three times.

How did you actually come to collaborate with BizMachine?

Jakub H.: Our management and shareholders demanded incredibly ambitious goals. While large established corporations plan growth of 10 to 15% annually at most, our marketplace was tasked with growing 150% this year. To grow that fast, we had to think very much outside the box.

Kateřina: Our investors believe in the marketplace project just as we do. You just have to look at the great numbers and experiences from abroad. The potential is truly huge. Somewhat paradoxically, COVID also helped us — it started making sense for e-shops to have a platform that would help them gain visibility, and they began reaching out to us on their own. A brutal surge followed in the first half-year, and we showed we could deliver. We worked 14-hour days and it was crazy. But we proved to the company that we could fulfill the potential — we just needed the tools. We were given the target of growing 150%, but also the ability to say what we needed for that growth. Good market knowledge, prediction support, and models were simply part of that.

Jakub Hostačný

Head of Insights & Analytics and Partner Integration at Mall Partner and Sales

He oversees data analytics, partner performance optimization, and their technical integration. He joined Mall from the position of CFO & Head of BI at the logistics startup Shipvio. He previously worked at the consulting firm McKinsey and in banking. He studied at the Institute of Economic Studies at Charles University.

Thanks to BizMachine, we know how much business potential a newly added company has, and therefore which sales team to assign it to. We can then compare scoring expectations with actual performance. When expectations and reality diverge, it’s easy to check what’s happening or happened in that case.

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But BizMachine probably wasn’t the only company you had in mind for this purpose. What convinced you to choose us?

Jakub H.: We really did approach multiple companies. And it’s true that ultimately a more subjective perception also played a role. I felt that if I had a problem, BizMachine would be closer to me than other companies. And that proved true. The team wasn’t afraid to roll up their sleeves. They were able to help us with executing specific steps, went into detail, and for example in sales they could advise us on what tools and activities to use for better results. They were purely practical. Together we worked on things like setting up cold email campaigns, team processes, salesperson compensation, and choosing and configuring LeadOps tools. When there was a problem, we called and they always picked up the phone and resolved everything immediately.

Kateřina: Even on weekends (laughs). They also helped us set up data flows in CRM. If we had done it ourselves, we would have gotten stuck on several things. Plus I knew I didn’t need additional internal people for these activities, that someone was watching over them and handling them, so I could let go and focus on something else — like better team management based on data and KPIs.

Did your collaboration with BizMachine end with setting up these process and execution changes in your sales process?

Jakub H.: Not at all. Collaborating with BizMachine means we can think about where to push things further. The current question we’re working on is that while we’re onboarding 3x more companies monthly than before, we need to look at the data to see if that also means 3x higher revenue from those e-shops. And potentially adjust our scoring model further. I see our collaboration as a continuous process. We come up with ideas about what could be improved, and BizMachine proactively brings ideas too — what could be changed, what to add for better acquisition and retention flow, how to adjust reports, what data to add. Other times they reach out saying they’ve acquired new tools in the meantime that could help us. It’s a mutual process and we’re trying to improve the resulting product together.

Kateřina: As long as we have room to grow, an external partner with business experience will always be useful to us.

Through BizMachine’s Eyes

“What I find interesting about the collaboration with the Mall Partner division is also the timeframe within which all the changes happened. We did the first analysis during April 2021. We went through initial meetings, tried to orient ourselves in the needs, current sales process settings, and compare them with the targets the marketplace team received. Four months have passed since then. The marketplace has established a new call center, built a back-office team, is arranging different types of faster collaboration with other departments involved in onboarding new partners onto the platform, and is starting B2B email campaigns. In short, in 4 months, data became the foundation and engine of a sales team transformation that leads not only to higher performance but also to a greater appetite for continuously improving processes.”

Describes the collaboration Jakub Vraspír from BizMachine’s Project team

MALL Partner

Mall Partner is an e-commerce platform that enables third-party goods to be sold on Mall.cz. Individual sellers in the marketplace use the Mall.cz e-shop and its infrastructure and logistics processes. Mall.cz provides support by handling traffic, marketing, technical development, and after-sales service. By listing their goods on Mall.cz, merchants can reach many times more customers who then shop at their e-shop. Simply put, it’s an online marketplace. Mall Partner operates not only in the Czech Republic but also in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

More at: https://partners.mallgroup.com/cs/

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