Market entry
How foreign B2B companies open the German market in the first ninety days, without an office, an entity or a local sales hire.
You can sell into Germany without opening an office, hiring a country manager or relocating anyone. What does not work is running your home playbook in English and expecting German buyers to respond to it. Entering the market without a local team succeeds when someone speaks to your target accounts in native German, and when the first round of conversations is treated as market research rather than as a volume exercise.
This page is about the path, not the product. It describes what actually happens in the first three months, which decisions have to be made before the first call, and where foreign companies most often stall. If you are looking for the service description instead, that lives on our market entry sales support page.
Germany is not a closed market. In 2023 exactly 40,151 foreign-controlled enterprises were operating in Germany, employing around 4.7 million people, and 29,819 of them had a parent company elsewhere in Europe, according to the Federal Statistical Office. Foreign companies do get in. The ones that stall rarely stall on product fit. They stall at first contact.
01
It means separating two things that most companies bundle together: presence and access. Presence is a legal entity, an address, an office, a payroll. Access is a German speaking voice that can reach the right person inside a target account, hold a credible conversation about your product and find out whether there is a real reason to talk further. You need access from day one. You may never need presence at all, or you may need it only once the first customers justify it.
Most companies get this the wrong way round. They set up the entity first, hire one salesperson to justify it, and then discover that a single new hire in an unfamiliar market takes months to produce a pipeline. By the time the first quarter of results arrives, the budget conversation has already turned defensive.
The order that works better is the reverse. Start conversations, learn what the market actually says back, and let that evidence decide whether and where you build. That is the whole argument for entering without a local team: it is not cheaper theatre, it is a way to buy information before you buy infrastructure.
02
The pattern is consistent enough that it is worth writing down. Almost every foreign company entering Germany goes through the same five steps, and the same three of them are where things go wrong.
Weeks one and two, defining who you are actually after.This is where most of the value sits and where most teams spend the least time. Company size, sector, region, the role that owns the problem, the situation that makes your product relevant right now. Vague targeting produces vague conversations, and vague conversations produce no data at all.
Weeks two and three, agreeing what a qualified conversation looks like.Before anyone picks up a phone, you and your partner need the same definition of a lead worth passing on. Without that, month three ends in an argument about quality instead of a decision about the market. Our lead qualification page sets out the criteria we normally work with.
Weeks three to six, the first hundred conversations.This is the phase people want to skip. It is also the only phase that tells you something true. Whether the problem you solve is recognised, which role reacts, what the objection is, and how far the conversation gets before someone asks for a reference.
Weeks six to ten, adjusting the angle.Almost nobody gets the positioning right on the first attempt in a new market. The product does not change; the reason you give for the call does. Companies that treat the first weeks as a test and rewrite the approach usually see a different result in the second half.
Weeks ten to twelve, the honest read.By this point you can say whether there is demand, which segment shows it, and what the sales cycle is likely to look like. That is the output of a market entry programme. Signed contracts in the first quarter are welcome, but they are not the deliverable, and any partner who promises them in advance is guessing.
03
German B2B buyers are not harder to reach than buyers elsewhere. They apply a different filter. Three differences account for most of the friction foreign teams run into.
The first is preparation. A German buyer expects the person calling to already know what the company does, why the call is relevant to them specifically, and what happens next if they say yes. A generic opening that would earn a polite hearing in London or Boston reads as unprepared in Stuttgart, and the conversation ends there.
The second is pace. The decision usually involves more people than the first call suggests, and it moves in steps rather than in a single meeting. A follow up that feels attentive in your home market can read as pressure here. Patience is not passivity; it is the correct reading of how the decision is actually made.
The third is language. Plenty of German managers speak excellent English and will hold the meeting in English without complaint. That is not the same as choosing to take a cold approach in a second language from a company they have never heard of. The first contact is exactly the moment where the effort of speaking German is noticed, which is why our teams work in native German, Dutch and British English. We wrote about this pattern in more detail in why foreign companies stall in Germany.
04
There is no universally correct route. There is a route that matches how much certainty you already have. The table compares the three that companies actually choose.
| Route | Time to the first real conversations | What you keep control of | Main risk | When it fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Build a local team | Longest. Recruiting, onboarding and ramp up all come before the first call | Everything, including product knowledge and messaging | You commit before you know whether the market responds. A single wrong hire costs a year | You already have German customers and proven demand |
| Work with an external partner | Shortest. Conversations can start once targeting and qualification criteria are agreed | Targeting, criteria, messaging and the decision on every lead passed to you | A partner who does not understand your product produces conversations you cannot use | You want evidence before you commit headcount |
| Send your existing team | Short on paper, slow in practice | Everything | Language and cultural distance at exactly the point where they matter most | Your buyers are international by nature and already expect English |
Many companies end up combining the second and the third: an external team opens the conversations and books the meetings, your own people run the meetings. That split works because the hard part in a new market is the first contact, not the demonstration.
05
We handle the early stage of the sales process so your team meets companies that are worth meeting. In practice that covers four things.
We agree the criteria with you before anything starts: sector, size, region, the role that owns the problem and the situation that makes your offer relevant. The criteria are yours, and they get revised as the first conversations teach us something.
Native German speakers hold the first conversation, in the buyer’s language and at the buyer’s pace. This is professional outbound, not a script read at volume, and we are not a call centre.
Interest is checked against the criteria you set, so what reaches your calendar is a conversation with a reason behind it. See appointment setting for how meetings are booked and confirmed.
You receive the contact, the notes from the conversation and the agreed next step, in a form your team can act on immediately. We work in our own system and hand over to yours.
The full sequence, week by week, is described on our process page, and the market itself on the Germany page. Which sectors we know best is set out under industries.
06
The obstacles are not the same for everyone. What an American software company gets wrong about Germany is different from what a British or a Dutch company gets wrong. We are building a page for each of these starting points, and this section will grow as they are published.
The most common surprise is how much of the German decision happens before price is ever discussed, and how little a fast, energetic follow up helps once it has stalled.
Geographically close and commercially further away than most British teams expect. Since the UK left the European Union, entering Germany has become a deliberate decision rather than a default one.
Proximity misleads. Dutch directness reads as honesty at home and can read as unprepared across the border, and the formality gap is wider than the distance suggests.
Small home markets push Nordic technology companies outward early. The flat, informal style that works in Stockholm or Copenhagen tends to slow things down in a German buying group.
If your starting point is not on the list yet, that is not a problem. The structure of the first ninety days is the same; the emphasis changes. Tell us where you are based and we will describe what usually happens from there.
07
There are situations where we would tell you to wait, and it is more useful to say so now than in month two.
Germany rewards companies that arrive prepared and punishes companies that arrive early. If any of the points above describe your situation, the honest sequence is to fix it first and start the conversations afterwards.
08
The questions companies actually ask us before they start, answered without the sales gloss.
Not for the first conversations. Companies routinely test German demand before they set anything up locally, and many settle the structure only once the first customers make the choice obvious. What your particular situation calls for is a question for your own advisers rather than for us. For the first ninety days, what decides the outcome is targeting and language.
Usually within the first few weeks of calling, once targeting and qualification criteria are agreed. The more useful question is when you will have enough conversations to draw a conclusion, and that is around the ten to twelve week mark. Anyone quoting you a meeting count before understanding your target group is guessing.
You can run the meetings in English. The first contact is a different matter. Cold outreach in a second language from an unknown company gives the buyer an easy reason to end the call, and that is precisely the moment you cannot afford to lose. We open in native German and switch to English whenever the buyer prefers it.
The contact, the notes from the conversation and the agreed next step, handed over in a structured form your team can act on straight away. We work in our own system, so nothing needs to be installed or connected on your side.
B2B offers with a defined buyer and a real reason for the call: manufacturing, software, IT services and professional services are the ones we work in most. German industry is overwhelmingly made up of small and medium sized companies, 99.3 percent of the 3.2 million enterprises counted by the Federal Statistical Office in 2024, which is why an enterprise only strategy misses most of the market.
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Tell us about your target market and offer. We will show you how a structured outbound campaign could work for your business - in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK or wider Europe.