Industrial buyers do not decide quickly, but they ask early. The language of the technical documentation, the format of the invoice and how data will be exchanged come up in the first meetings, and being caught unprepared stretches the cycle.
With industrial buyers the decision is usually made by the technical team rather than purchasing, and what they read is not a product page but a data sheet, a drawing and an installation document. Having those in German and consistent does more work than marketing copy. Deriving documents from product data rather than maintaining them by hand also settles version confusion up front.
With corporate and public-sector buyers the expectation of a structured invoice arrives earlier than with small customers and is usually not negotiable. That means the invoice being produced from the ERP with the correct fields and reaching accounting by the right route. If the flow is not ready it becomes apparent on the first large order, which is the worst possible timing.
Order, shipping and stock information is exchanged with large buyers through files or interfaces. Running it through email attachments is possible at low volume and unsustainable as it grows. Knowing early what your existing ERP can export lets you close the gap between that and the format the buyer will ask for in time.
Usually not. In most cases it is enough to take the data the existing ERP provides and convert it into the format the buyer expects. Replacing only comes up when the data is genuinely missing, and that is something to measure rather than assume.
It depends on your activity and is a legal question we settle with a partner law firm. What decides it on the technical side is whether the buyer can reach you in German and whether the invoice can be produced under the correct legal entity in the correct format.
Tell us which product and which type of buyer you are targeting. We will work out what is missing.