How to find B2B clients in Poland

A row in a purchased database tells you a company exists, has an address, an activity code and some headcount band. All of that is true, and none of it gives you an opening line, because it was equally true last year and will be true next year. Call those companies and you are calling firms where nothing has happened — which they will tell you within ten seconds.

The second problem is quieter. You filter a database by the fields it happens to have: industry, size, region. Your offer almost never divides the market along those lines. If you sell warehouse software, your real criterion is not “manufacturing, Lower Silesia”, it is “a company that has just taken a second site and cannot reconcile stock across the two”. No database has that column.

A bought list is not worthless. It is a denominator: how many companies in Poland could ever be in scope. The numerator — who has something happening right now that turns a possibility into a need — is not in the file and never will be, because it changes weekly and has to be read from sources that change with it.

• Company websites. The best source for what a company thinks matters about itself: what it sells, where its sites are, a news section, an announcement about a new plant or certification. You can read what the company does today, at what scale, and what it last announced. You cannot tell whether an announcement is a week or three years old when it carries no date — and without a date it is trivia, not a reason to call. You can also read nothing at all when the site is a single image or blocks readers, in which case the company drops off the list rather than getting an invented description.
• Job boards. The most literal source available. A job ad has to name the tools, the systems, the processes and the gaps, or nobody good applies. You can read what the company is missing, in which department, and since when. You cannot read whether a budget for fixing it exists, or whether the role is simply a backfill after one person left. Note the shelf life: ads come down, so this source is read today, not from an archive.
• Trade and local press. This is where the things a company does not put on its own site get reported: an investment, an acquisition, a subsidy, a site opening, a change in a decision-making role. You can read a dated event with a page it was published on, which is exactly what a first sentence needs. You cannot read the financial reality behind it — an announced investment is an announcement, not a signed contract. Treat it as a reason to ask, never as a fact about somebody's budget.
• The REGON register — with the KRS number and legal form. Poland's public register of business entities, and the hardest layer of the whole list. You can read whether a company genuinely exists under that name, its legal form, the activity (PKD) codes it declared, where it is registered, and its KRS number, which closes the loop in the court register. This is what filters out shells and separates a limited company from a sole trader. You cannot read movement: the register describes a state, not an event. And leave sole-trader entries alone — those are personal data under a different legal regime from company data, which is why a serious list stays at the company level.
• Public procurement notices. The only source where a company writes down what it needs, at what scale and by when. It works in both directions: the buyer is looking for a supplier, and the firms bidding are looking for subcontractors and tools to meet the conditions. You can read the subject of the contract, the deadlines and the procedure page. You cannot read who will win, or whether you are already too late — and with tenders, too late is measured in days.

Ask the two questions in order. First: could this company buy what you sell at all — the right scale, the right legal form, the right kind of activity, and not in a group you deliberately exclude. Second: is something happening there now that turns that possibility into a need.

The order is not cosmetic. Start from signals and you get a list of companies where something is happening, most of which have no use for you. There is movement everywhere; your offer fits a narrow slice. A profile filter applied first leaves you less work and better conversations.

But where fit is comparable, timing wins, and not by a little. A company that matches your profile perfectly and where nothing has changed in a year is a worse call than a decent-fit company that announced the acquisition of a smaller competitor last month. The first has no reason to talk this week. The second has a problem it created for itself a fortnight ago and is looking for an answer whether or not you call.

A signal is a dated event you can put in one sentence and point at under a specific address. “They have been advertising for a warehouse manager for a new site for three weeks, and the ad carries a date” is a signal. “They look like they are outgrowing their setup” is not — it is an impression, and an impression cannot be put to a stranger in a first sentence.

The rule that saves the most time is this: a claim with no source URL is a guess. Not “probably right” — a guess. So record the same three things for every event: what happened, when, and the page you read it on. Apply the same test to any list somebody sells you. If any one of the three questions cannot be closed in a sentence, what you are holding is a description that sounds credible right up until you try to cite it.

The rule costs you rows, and that is the point. Some sites do not respond, some cannot be read, some events carry no date. Then the company drops out instead of receiving a plausible-sounding reason invented from nothing. A shorter list where every row can be defended is worth more than a long one where you have to guess which parts are true.

1. 11Grounded searches
2. 111Candidates found
3. 80Kept by the cheap filter
4. 59Websites read and researched
5. 40Scored and ranked

Pursiva does the work described above, faster and without skipping the dull steps. You paste your website address, it reads your offer and shows you the ideal customer profile it derived — conditions, exclusions, legal forms — which you can correct before anything runs. Then it searches the same public Polish sources and returns up to 40 companies with a score, a why-fit sentence and a why-now sentence, each one carrying the link to the page it came from. If you do not read Polish, that matters more than it sounds: the reasoning arrives in your language with the Polish source attached, so you can still check it.

What it does not do: it returns no contact data. No e-mail addresses, no phone numbers, nobody named — you get a company, a reason and a source, and who to approach inside that company is your decision and your craft. It also sends nothing on your behalf: there are no sequences, no campaigns, no sending mailbox here. This is a tool for choosing who to talk to, not for talking instead of you.

One note on how it arrives: the run delivers itself. When it finishes, the result lands in your inbox as a link, within an hour — nobody stands between you and the list. If you want to see what the signals themselves look like and how long each stays fresh, start with the buying-signals guide; if you are starting from nothing, start with the ICP guide; and if the register question is the one holding you up, there is a separate piece on where company data ends and personal data begins.

Frequently asked questions

Where do I start if my offer is good and my Polish list is empty?

With your own offer, not with a database. Write down the conditions a company has to meet before a conversation makes any sense: type of activity, scale, legal form, exclusions. Then take those conditions to the sources — company sites, job boards, trade press, the REGON register and procurement notices — and look for dated events. A list built without conditions grows forever and leads to no conversation.

Do I need to speak Polish to prospect in Poland?

To read the sources, no: machine translation handles company sites, job ads and press well enough to spot an event and its date. The register is the exception worth care, because what matters there is the fields — legal form, activity codes, the KRS number — rather than prose. The part where Polish genuinely helps is the conversation afterwards, which is not the part a list can do for you.

Is it legal to use Polish public registers for sales?

Company data and personal data are two different things, and the line runs through legal form. A limited company's register entry is company information; a sole trader's entry is an individual's personal data and carries a different regime. That is why a defensible list stays at company level, describes people by role rather than by name, and holds no contact details at all.

Read next

• Buying signals
• Paste your website address
• A public register is not a contact database
• A run published whole, with the rows that did not work
• Start a run