A common mistake when selling to German manufacturers is to find one good contact and put all effort into that person. In a Mittelstand company, a purchase of a machine, a system or production software is rarely decided by one person. When a deal stalls without a clear reason, the cause is often someone who was never part of the conversation.
The usual people around the table
The exact roles change by company size and product, but these people show up again and again:
- Geschäftsführer (managing director). Signs off larger investments, asks about payback and risk to the company.
- Produktionsleiter (head of production). Owns output and uptime. Cares whether the line runs better and whether the change disturbs production.
- Instandhaltung (maintenance). Has to keep your machine running. Asks about service, spare parts, and how it behaves in their real plant conditions.
- Einkauf (purchasing). Compares offers, checks the supplier, negotiates terms. Often joins late and can still stop everything.
- Depending on the product: quality management, process engineering, or IT for anything that connects to the network.
One of them owns the problem
Not everyone matters at the same time. Usually one person feels the problem every day: the maintenance lead who keeps repairing an old line, the production manager who misses output targets. That person is the natural first contact. The others need to understand, early, why this topic matters to the company.
Why this changes the outreach
When you work with a short list of target companies, you can plan for each company which people you address and in what order:
- Start with the person who owns the problem, with a message about his daily reality.
- Reach the managing director with the business view: payback, risk, timing.
- Give maintenance what they need to trust you: reference plants, service answers, German-speaking support.
- Prepare purchasing before they receive the offer: who you are, where you deliver from, what happens if something goes wrong.
Email, LinkedIn and phone each have a role here. LinkedIn ads make your name known to the whole group before anyone gets a message. Emails carry detail. A phone call answers the questions no one would put in writing.
Why one good contact is not enough
A friendly production manager can tell you the project is interesting and still lose the internal discussion to a colleague who was never convinced. In German companies decisions are often made by agreement, and people who were not asked tend to say no.
If you know all the people who decide at each of your target companies, you know where a deal can stall before it stalls. That is the practical value of ABM in German manufacturing.
Knowing who decides is one half. The other half is when to contact them. Want to talk about the people who decide at the companies on your list? Book a call.