Companies entering Germany often arrive with an outreach playbook built for markets where unsolicited commercial contact is treated permissively. German law takes a different starting point: unsolicited advertising is regulated as an unreasonable nuisance under §7 of the Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb (UWG), and the burden of justification sits with the sender.
The channel decides the standard
§7 UWG does not treat all channels alike. Advertising by electronic mail generally requires prior express consent. Telephone advertising towards businesses requires at least presumed consent (mutmaßliche Einwilligung) — a factual, defensible expectation that the recipient would welcome the contact, based on their role and business, not on the sender's optimism.
Postal contact and contact through professional networks are governed by the same fairness principle but are assessed differently in practice. The channel you choose therefore changes the evidence you need to hold before the first message goes out.
Why this changes programme design, not just wording
A compliant German programme is narrower and better researched by necessity. Instead of broad sequences, the work becomes account-level: establishing why this organisation and this role plausibly have an interest, documenting that reasoning, and choosing the channel that the reasoning supports.
That constraint is commercially useful. Buyers in DACH read a poorly targeted approach as evidence of how the supplier will operate later. Precision is not only the legal path; it is the credible one.
Practical guardrails
Keep a dated, per-account record of why contact was justified. Separate consent status by channel. Honour objections immediately and permanently. Keep data handling aligned with the GDPR duties that run in parallel to the UWG, including information obligations towards contacted individuals.
None of this prevents market entry. It changes the shape of it: fewer contacts, better prepared, with a written basis behind each one.