SmartLunch in Czechia: B2B outbound on a market labelled 'closed'

We started by mapping Czech business communication culture in detail. The reasons were concrete - earlier attempts had ignored this dimension, and the Czech cold-email market itself, partly due to legal restrictions and partly due to negative recipient sentiment, was widely considered closed. Even local agencies declined to run campaigns there.

Our approach rests on a simple belief - regardless of where in the world a campaign runs and what regulations apply there, on the other side of every message is a person. If we can understand their situation, their attitude toward unknown senders, and the overall business culture they operate in - we can reach them. That's what we did on the Czech market.

Analysis of the Czech business context surfaced a few important differences relative to the communication style we use in Poland:

• The weight of academic and professional titles - addressing a recipient as 'Pan Inženýr', 'Pan Doktor' or 'Pan Magistr' is, in Czech business correspondence, a sign of respect, not formality
• Higher correspondence standards - 'Dear Mr. [Surname]' instead of first-name addressing signals professionalism and a higher contact register
• Calm, elegant tone - Czech business communication favours a measured, refined language, far from urgency or pushiness

Every message also carried an opt-out clause in the postscript - a note that a one-line reply was enough to immediately stop the contact. Anyone who used that option landed automatically on a suppression list. An operational mechanism, but also an explicit signal that respect for the recipient is the default, not an exception.

Phase one of the campaign delivered an encouraging signal - a reply rate of 10-15%, with a significant share of replies, despite not being interested, kept in a polite and friendly tone. For a market widely thought of as unresponsive to cold email, this was a result that validated the chosen communication approach.

The dominant objection in the replies pointed however to a content barrier - companies were saying they had their own cafeteria and didn't see a reason to change. SmartLunch was being read as just another meal vendor, not as an alternative to the existing setup. The whole sales narrative had to be reframed.

The new approach started from the reality of the recipient: instead of presenting an offer, the messaging focused on the costs and limitations of running an in-house cafeteria - the floor space it occupies, the need to employ staff, restricted operating hours, and the lack of flexibility for night shifts. SmartLunch was positioned as a more modern, cheaper-to-run, and more adaptable solution. The change of perspective produced a noticeable lift in campaign performance.

Initial assumptions about the decision-making persona pointed at HR - the standard starting point on other markets too. Analysis of the conversations we were running surfaced a different pattern - the highest engagement and the shortest path to a real implementation conversation lived with plant directors, warehouse floor managers, and distribution centre managers - the people running the entire facility on a day-to-day basis.

For this cohort, employee catering was an operations question, not an administrative one - tied directly to cost, efficiency, and the logistics of work on the floor. Expanding the targeting to those personas, informed by our running observation of campaign results, turned out to be one of the biggest single conversion levers we pulled.