Insights · Market entry

How do you launch a US or European company in a new European market?

By Ronan Liedmeier, fractional head of growth · Published · Last updated

Pick one country and open it with the channel that is legal and native there: LinkedIn and referrals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with more room for email in the Netherlands and the UK. Run the first 90 days as a project with one owner, a short account list and a weekly review of what produced meetings.

Pick one country and open it with the channel that is legal and native there: in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that means LinkedIn and referrals, while the Netherlands and the UK give you more room for email. Then run the first 90 days as a project with one owner, a list of under 100 target accounts and a weekly review of which messages produced meetings. I base this on ten years of growth work across Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, the UK and the US, and on the outreach campaigns I run today for US companies entering Europe and for Dutch and German companies crossing into each other's market.

A market entry, as I use the term here, is the period between the decision to sell in a new country and the point where that country produces repeatable pipeline without the founder in every call. It takes longer than a quarter in every case I have seen, and the first quarter decides whether it happens at all.

Which European market should you enter first: Germany, the Netherlands or the UK?

If you sell in English and want speed, start in the Netherlands or the UK. If you want the largest budget pool and can accept a slower, more formal buying process, start in Germany.

The decision is a table, because the factors pull in different directions. English proficiency decides whether your existing collateral works. The legal regime decides which outreach channel you can use at all. Market size decides how long the account list can be. CPC level decides what a paid test costs. Time to first customer is my own observation from running entries in all three.

Factor Germany Netherlands UK
Working language for sales German expected from mid-market upward; English accepted in tech and in Berlin and Munich startups English works almost everywhere in B2B English
English proficiency (EF EPI 2025) Rank 4 of 123, score 615 Rank 1 of 123, score 624 Native
Legal regime for cold B2B email Prior express consent required (§ 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UWG); no B2B carve-out Consent required since 1 October 2009; exception only for addresses a company published for that purpose (art. 11.7 Tw) Email to corporate bodies allowed under PECR; ICO expects a do-not-email list
Primary cold channel in practice LinkedIn, referrals, phone with presumed interest LinkedIn, warm email, phone Email, LinkedIn
Market size (GDP) EUR 4,530 billion (2025) EUR 1,171 billion (2025) USD 4,003 billion (2025)
Google Ads CPC level (one 2025 compilation) EUR 0.91 EUR 0.95 EUR 1.22
Time to first customer (my observation) Longest of the three Shortest for English-speaking SaaS Between the two; most crowded inbox

Sources for the numbers: EF English Proficiency Index 2025 for proficiency, Destatis for the German and Dutch GDP, Lloyds Bank Trade for the UK, and a 2025 agency compilation for CPC. The CPC row is for sizing a test. Your own keyword set in your own vertical will land somewhere else.

Three things the table does not show.

First, your CRM already made part of this decision. If a US company has five inbound signups from Dutch companies and one from Germany, the Netherlands is the first market, whatever the GDP column says. The 75-company segment I run for San Francisco-headquartered firms entering Europe started with the countries already showing up in their signups.

Second, Austria and Switzerland behave like Germany on language and on outreach law, with their own statutes. A German entry extends to both with Sie-form collateral, a Swiss spelling pass (ss instead of ß) and a check of the rules below. Each still needs its own contact list and its own referral network.

Third, the Netherlands and Germany are neighbours and two different markets. A Dutch company going into Germany meets the formality gap and the email ban. A German company going into the Netherlands finds English works and a first meeting comes faster, with smaller deals and shorter contracts. I have run both directions and the mistake each time was assuming the home approach transfers.

Is cold email legal for B2B in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands?

No in Germany, Austria and Switzerland without prior consent, and the same answer in the Netherlands unless the company published the address for exactly that purpose. None of the four laws has a general B2B exemption. I am not a lawyer; what follows is the statute text and the official guidance I work from.

Country Statute What it says about B2B email Exception What enforcement looks like
Germany § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UWG Advertising by electronic mail without "vorherige ausdrückliche Einwilligung des Adressaten" is an unreasonable nuisance (unzumutbare Belästigung). The wording covers all addressees, companies included. § 7 Abs. 3: existing customers, own similar products, clear opt-out at collection and in every message Abmahnung (formal warning with costs) from competitors or associations, injunctions, damages claims by the recipient
Austria § 174 Abs. 3 TKG 2021 Electronic mail for direct advertising is "ohne vorherige Einwilligung des Empfängers unzulässig". The WKO states there is no difference between businesses and consumers. § 174 Abs. 4: existing customers, similar products, opt-out, recipient not on the ECG list Administrative fine; the WKO cites up to EUR 50,000
Switzerland Art. 3 Abs. 1 lit. o UWG Sending mass advertising by telecommunications without prior consent, correct sender details and a free opt-out is unfair competition Existing customers for own similar goods or services, if the opt-out was shown at purchase Civil claims by recipients and competitors; the UWG also carries penal provisions
Netherlands Art. 11.7 Telecommunicatiewet Unsolicited commercial email needs prior consent the sender can prove; the ACM extended this to businesses on 1 October 2009 Lid 3: legal persons whose contact details were made available for that purpose; existing customers for similar products ACM fines; ACM has fined senders for spam since 2004

The German text is on Gesetze im Internet, with the current wording also at dejure.org. The Austrian paragraph is on RIS, and the Austrian chamber of commerce (WKO) answers the question "may you send electronic direct advertising without consent" with "Grundsätzlich nein." The Swiss article is on lexfind.ch. For the Netherlands, ACM records the 1 October 2009 extension, CMS summarised it in English at the time, and the article itself is on wetten.overheid.nl.

Four practical points come out of that table.

The Dutch exception is narrower than it sounds. The company has to have made the address available for the purpose of receiving unsolicited commercial messages, and you have to use it in line with that purpose. An info@ or sales@ address on a contact page is no evidence of that on its own. I count an address as covered when the page says it is for supplier or partner enquiries, and I keep a screenshot.

Phone is treated differently from email in Germany. § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 UWG allows a call to a business when consent can be presumed from the business context, which German counsel describe as "permitted under the condition of presumed consent" (Marini Systems). The presumption has to be specific: a factual reason why this company, right now, would want this call. A bought list does not create it.

LinkedIn messages fall under the same rule when they advertise. German lawyers treat a promotional direct message like electronic mail, and the IT-Recht Kanzlei notes that the rule "gilt auch beim Versand an andere Mitglieder desselben Business-Netzwerks." Accepting a connection is no consent to advertising either. That shapes how the LinkedIn channel has to be run.

Where the server sits does not matter. German law looks at the market the advertising is aimed at, so a US company emailing German buyers from a US domain is advertising in Germany. The CMS note on the Dutch law points out the reverse: the Dutch act binds Dutch senders wherever the recipient sits in the EEA.

The UK is the outlier. The ICO's PECR guidance says plainly "You can email or text any corporate body" (ICO), with a do-not-email list for companies that object. That is why a US company tends to test the UK first and then finds the same sequence stops at the Channel.

Which outreach channel works instead of cold email in DACH?

LinkedIn first, referrals second, events third, and phone when there is a documented reason for the call. That is the order in which the campaigns I run produce meetings in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and the order in which the legal risk goes down.

LinkedIn is the primary channel because a connection request with a short note is a request to talk, as long as it is written as one. The rules I run on every DACH campaign:

  1. Formal Sie-form, surname, title where the person uses one. A Du opener to a Geschäftsführer in Stuttgart ends the conversation before it starts.
  2. One specific observation from the person's own profile, post or company news. If the line could be sent to anyone else by swapping the name, it does not go out.
  3. One direct question the person can answer in a sentence. No offer, no link, no pricing, no "happy to compare notes".
  4. A two-touch ceiling. One connection note, one follow-up after acceptance if there is no reply. After that the contact sits until there is a real new reason to write.
  5. A referral contact gets the referrer's name in the first sentence. That one change turns a cold note into a warm one and it is legally and socially a different message.

The split I run on the mechanics: AI sources the accounts, researches the person and drafts the note; I judge and send every message myself. HeyReach sequences the sends, Apollo enriches the account data, Notion holds the pipeline. Every draft goes through an AI-slop audit before I see it, because a note that reads machine-written in German gets ignored faster than in English.

Referrals come second because they take longer to set up. For a Dutch or German company entering the neighbouring market, the fastest referral sources are existing customers' subsidiaries across the border, investors' other portfolio companies, and the accountant's or lawyer's partner firm in the target country. For a US company it is the European alumni of its own team and the European customers of its US customers. Ask by name: "Who at your Munich office owns this problem?" beats "Do you know anyone in Germany?"

Events are third because they are expensive per meeting and you cannot run them weekly. They work in DACH because a person who has met you can be written to without the cold-contact restrictions. I plan one event per quarter in the target market, go with a list of ten people I want to meet, and treat the event as the warm-up for ten LinkedIn conversations.

Channel Legal basis in DACH What it needs to work Where it fails
LinkedIn connection note A request to talk, if there is no offer or link in it One real observation, one question, Sie-form, two-touch ceiling Templates, links, Du-form, a third touch
Referral introduction Referrer named in the first line A named contact at the referring company who agreed to be named "A mutual contact suggested" without a name
Phone Presumed consent from a specific business reason (§ 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 UWG) A documented reason per call, logged Bought lists, scripted dials
Events Met in person; follow-up is to a known contact A ten-person target list before you go Scanning badges, mass follow-up
Cold email Prior express consent Consent you can prove Everything else

Do you need a German-language website, and when do you use Sie or Du?

For mid-market and larger German buyers, yes: at minimum the pages a buyer sees between your first LinkedIn message and your proposal, in Sie form. For startups in Berlin or Munich and for most of the Netherlands, an English site holds up through the first contracts.

The reasoning is who signs. A Forsa survey for Jobware in January 2023 found that roughly a quarter to a third of German employees in qualified jobs want to be addressed as Sie at work, down from 64 percent five years earlier, and the share rises with age: 19 percent of 18 to 34 year olds, 37 percent of 50 to 60 year olds (ingenieur.de). The person who signs a B2B contract at a German Mittelstand company is in the older group far more often than the person who first replied to you. Du-form marketing reads as consumer marketing to that signer. Sie costs you nothing with the younger reader and protects you with the older one.

Audience Form of address What to localise
German Mittelstand, corporates, public sector Sie, surname, academic titles where used Homepage, product page for the use case, one case study, pricing or contact page, proposal template, contract
German and Austrian startups, tech Sie in first contact, follow the buyer if they switch to Du Homepage and one product page in German; English for the rest
Switzerland (German-speaking) Sie, ss instead of ß, CHF pricing Same pages as Germany, with a Swiss spelling pass
Netherlands English works; Dutch "je" is normal in B2B if you do go Dutch Pricing in EUR, Dutch invoicing details, a Dutch-speaking contact
UK English Spelling, GBP pricing, UK contract terms

Two things I have learned the hard way. Machine translation into Sie form works as a first draft and fails as a published page; a native reader has to go through it once, because a single wrong formal construction marks the page as foreign. And the proposal matters more than the website. A German buyer will tolerate an English site if the proposal, the contract and the invoice arrive in German and in the format they expect.

For a Dutch company going into Germany, the website is the first budget surprise. For a German company going into the Netherlands the surprise runs the other way: the Dutch buyer is fine with English and mildly amused by a formal Dutch "u" page.

How long do first customers take in a new European market?

Longer than in your home market, and the gap sits in the buying process rather than in the outreach. In the DACH campaigns I run, a specific LinkedIn note gets a reply within days when it gets one at all, and a first meeting follows within a few weeks of the connection. The contract then follows the buyer's calendar, which in Germany includes a Geschäftsführer sign-off, a procurement step, and, when the product touches employee data, a question from the works council.

I will not give you a benchmark number of days, because the ones I have come from live campaigns in specific verticals and would mislead you in yours. The direction holds: referral-sourced deals close first, LinkedIn-sourced deals second, event-sourced deals third, and the Netherlands moves faster than Germany at every step for an English-speaking vendor.

What I track instead, from week one:

  1. Reply rate on connection notes, by segment and by note version.
  2. Meetings booked per 100 contacts touched.
  3. Second-meeting rate, because a first meeting in Germany can be politeness and a second one is interest.
  4. Days from first reply to proposal sent, which is the part you control.
  5. Named objections, written down verbatim, because the first ten objections in a new market are the positioning brief for the next ten notes.

If the reply rate is fine and the second-meeting rate is low, the problem is the offer or the proof. If the reply rate is low across every note version, the list is wrong. That diagnosis is faster and more useful than guessing a sales cycle.

What does a fractional head of growth do in the first 90 days of a market entry?

Sets the target list and the positioning in the first two weeks, runs the first channel personally for the next six, then hands over a working system to whoever owns the market next. The person running the outreach has to be senior enough to change the positioning when the first ten objections come in, and cheap enough that the company is not hiring a country manager before it has a country.

The 90-day plan I run, with the decision that closes each block:

Weeks Focus Output Decision at the end
1 to 2 Market choice, account list, legal check, collateral gap One country, under 100 accounts with two or three named contacts each, channel rules written down, list of pages to localise Go or stop on this country; which channel leads
3 to 4 First outreach wave, run personally First notes out in Sie form, referral asks sent by name, first replies logged with objections Which segment replies; which note version to keep
5 to 6 First meetings, proposal template in local form Proposal and contract in local language and format, pricing in local currency, first objections turned into new note versions Whether the offer needs changing before volume goes up
7 to 8 Second wave with the revised message, one event Second-meeting rate measured, event target list worked, pipeline stages defined in the CRM Whether to add the neighbouring market or deepen this one
9 to 10 Paid test only if the meetings support it Small search test on the three to five terms buyers used in meetings, landing page in local language Whether paid is a channel here or a distraction
11 to 13 Handover Written system: list, segments, note versions, two-touch rule, referral sources, pipeline, what failed and why Who owns the market from day 91; what the first local hire should be

Two notes on what sits inside those rows.

The paid test in weeks nine and ten is deliberately late. In the market-entry work I have done, paid search before the first meetings produced keywords nobody searched for in the target language. After ten meetings you know the words the buyer used, and the test is small and informed.

The handover document is the deliverable. A fractional engagement that ends with a pipeline and no written system has moved the problem. The person who inherits the market is the first local seller or the existing VP Marketing, and they need the segments, the note versions and the objection list more than they need the meetings.

What are the first 10 things to do in week one?

Write the list and the rules before anyone sends anything. The order below is the order I run it.

  1. Pull everything the existing CRM and product data say about the target country: signups, trial users, inbound questions, customers with offices there. This decides the country and the first segment.
  2. Choose one country. Write the reason in one sentence and keep it visible.
  3. Write the channel rules for that country: email allowed or not, LinkedIn touch ceiling, phone conditions, referral rule. One page.
  4. Build the account list: under 100 companies, two or three named contacts each, enriched with the person's role, recent posts and company news. Apollo or a comparable tool for the data, a human for the final cut.
  5. List the referral sources by name: customers with a presence in the country, investors' portfolio companies, the accountant's and lawyer's partner firms, team alumni.
  6. Decide the form of address and the spelling variant, and list the four or five pages that need to exist in the local language before a proposal goes out.
  7. Draft three versions of the connection note, each built around a different observation type: a post the person wrote, an open job ad, a product change. Audit them for machine-written tells before they go anywhere.
  8. Set up the pipeline with the stages you will measure: contacted, replied, first meeting, second meeting, proposal, signed, lost with reason.
  9. Send the referral asks first, because they take longest to come back and close fastest.
  10. Send the first 20 connection notes yourself, read every reply, and write down every objection verbatim.

Nothing on that list needs a local entity, a local hire or a translated website. All of it needs someone senior enough to decide and close enough to the product to adjust.

I run this for US companies with European hires, customers or a funding round that named Europe, and for Dutch, German and Austrian companies entering the neighbouring market. The first step is a GTM sprint that produces the country decision, the account list and the channel rules; a fractional head of growth engagement then runs the 90 days above and hands over the system.

FAQ

Can a US company send cold emails to German companies if the emails are sent from the US?

German lawyers apply § 7 UWG to advertising aimed at the German market, so where the server sits does not change the analysis. A German competitor or a trade association can send an Abmahnung and seek an injunction, and the recipient company can claim as well. I treat cold B2B email into Germany, Austria and Switzerland as closed and use LinkedIn, referrals and phone instead.

Is the Netherlands really as strict on B2B email as Germany?

The consent requirement in article 11.7 of the Telecommunicatiewet was extended to business recipients on 1 October 2009. There is an exception for legal persons that have published an address for the purpose of receiving unsolicited commercial messages, but a generic info@ address does not prove that purpose on its own. In practice I run the Netherlands on LinkedIn and warm email, and keep cold email for addresses where the purpose is documented.

Do I need a German entity before I start selling in Germany?

Not for the first 90 days. Pipeline comes from people, and a German GmbH does not make a LinkedIn note land better. What buyers do check early is whether you can invoice in euros, sign a German-language contract or at least a bilingual one, and name a contact in their time zone. Set up the entity once the first contracts show which country the revenue will sit in.

Should the first hire in the new market be a salesperson or a marketer?

Neither, in the first quarter. Someone who already knows the product should run the first outreach personally, because the lessons about positioning and objections have to flow back into the company fast. A fractional head of growth covers that period and hands over a list, a message set and a pipeline to the first local hire, who is then usually a seller.

How many target accounts should the first list have?

Fewer than feels comfortable. For the US-to-EU segment I run, the list is 75 companies, each with two or three named contacts. A list that size lets you read every profile, write every note by hand and remember every reply, which is what makes the two-touch rule work.

Does Sie-form collateral mean translating the whole website into German?

No. Translate the pages a buyer sees between your first message and your proposal: the homepage, the product page for the use case you are selling, one case study and the pricing or contact page. Do that in Sie form, with a native speaker reading it once, and leave the rest in English until German revenue justifies more.

Sources

Related

Re-check by 2027-01-15