Your first qualified partner meetings in Germany in 90 days.

Close, with one difference that costs money if you miss it. A Handelsvertreter is a self-employed commercial agent who represents several manufacturers on commission and sells to a customer base they already own, much like a US independent rep. The difference is statutory. Under §89b of the German Commercial Code an agent can claim an indemnity when the relationship ends, worth up to one year of their average annual commission, and you cannot contract it away in advance. Notice periods are also fixed by law and lengthen the longer the agreement runs. We write both into the commercial terms so you price them in from the start.

You need a credible path to it, and most serious partners will ask on the first call. A distributor who takes your machine into the EU carries obligations for conformity and product liability, so an unresolved CE question is usually where the conversation ends. We flag what your category requires during research. For machinery that means Directive 2006/42/EC today, and the Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 for anything you place on the market from 20 January 2027. We don't perform conformity assessment ourselves, and we'll point you at a notified body if you need one.

Usually not to sign a commercial agent or a distributor. Both are independent businesses selling on their own account or on commission. A German entity becomes a question once you employ people locally, hold stock in Europe, or want to invoice in-country. The commercial terms deliverable flags where entity, VAT, customs and export-control questions apply to your specific case, and we refer the incorporation and tax work to specialists rather than pretending to do it.

Use them for what they're good at. A chamber will run an address search or a partner mailing at a published, subsidized rate, and for a first sweep of a market that can be money well spent. What comes back is a list and the replies it generates. What we do starts after that point: primary research on who actually carries your competitors, scoring against your product, then running the conversations in German and working each candidate through to a signature. Different deliverable, different price.

Yes, and we treat them as separate commercial questions rather than as one bloc. Austria often works as an extension of a German partner's territory. Switzerland rarely does: it sits outside the EU customs union, so imports, pricing and documentation work differently, and the buyers reward a partner who is physically present. The channel strategy makes a call on whether you need one partner or three.

Yes, written and spoken, by people who grew up with the language. This is the single biggest reason English-language partner searches in Germany fail. A Vertriebsleiter at a 40-person Fachhandel will simply not answer an English cold email, and a translated one reads as translated within a sentence.

North American industrial hardware: welding and joining, robotics and automation, machine tools, measurement and test, and adjacent categories. If it's a proven physical product sold through agents or distributors, it fits. We don't work with consumer products, pure software, or products without an established home-market customer base.

First partner meetings happen within 90 days of kickoff: roughly 4-6 weeks of research and deliverables, then outreach to your approved shortlist. From first contact to a first order typically takes 6-12 months. German partners take longer to commit than American ones and then stay far longer, which cuts both ways.

Yes. The EUR 10,000 base covers the research and the outreach work whether or not a partner commits, so only the EUR 5,000 success fee is tied to a signature. What you keep is real: the channel strategy, the scored partner list, the German line card, and the commercial terms, plus the worked pipeline. That includes every company we contacted and the record of every conversation, so you can keep working that target group after the engagement ends.

A signed, written commitment from a DACH partner to carry your line, typically an agency agreement (Handelsvertretervertrag), a distribution agreement, or a formal letter of intent. Verbal interest doesn't trigger the fee. A signature does.