Business Development Manager in Germany

What a Business Development Manager does

A Business Development Manager finds new business for a company and prepares it until a customer or partner signs. The ads I read on September 24, 2026 add the business case: the manager works out whether an opportunity pays and takes it to the product team.

The ad of Mesago, a trade fair organizer of the Messe Frankfurt group, asks for new target groups in B2B and product concepts with business cases. A digital bank in Frankfurt wants partnerships with IT and data providers. Hays calls the position no entry-level job and asks for experience in development, marketing or sales.

For a smaller company or a Mittelstand firm, the manager level means work on the opportunities themselves: the first talk, the case, the contract draft and the onboarding. I have done that part of business development myself, in finance, insurance and online retail.

Business Development Manager, Sales Manager and Head of Business Development

The three titles overlap in many ads. They differ in what each one owns. The table sets them side by side, from job profiles and ads I read on September 24, 2026.

	Business Development Manager	Sales Manager	Head of Business Development
Owns	Business the company does not have yet: a new customer group, a partner, a market	The sales of the current offer	The business development pipeline and the team that works it
Tasks named in ads	Market chances and target groups, business cases, partnerships with IT and data providers, work with the product team	Sales talks, customer relationships, acquisition, the sales strategy	A pipeline across inbound, outbound and strategic partnerships, high-value deals led in person, coaching a small team
Sources	Hays job profile, ads by Mesago and C24 Bank	Hays job profile	Ad by Finmo

My work fits the first column. I wrote the concept and the business documents of a product, spoke with decision-makers and onboarded customers with their partners. As CIO I also coordinated a sales team, which belongs to the third column.

My business development work by industry, newest first

My evidence lies in three industries: finance, insurance and online retail. The finance rows cover my positions at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital.

Period and position	Industry	Customers and partners	My part
January 2023 to October 2024: Chief Information Officer, with procuration from May 2023	Finance, digital assets	Banks, stock exchanges, an oracle network, a crypto exchange, referral partners	In 2023 the terms and conditions, the service and price definitions, the legal framework of the partner program and the agreements with these partners; growth and marketing were part of the role
2022: Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations	Finance, digital assets	Decision-makers at stock exchanges and banks; institutional and professional customers and their cooperation partners	Concept, product marketing and rollout of a real-time market data product; the talks with decision-makers; the onboarding of customers
2016 to December 2021: Project Manager and Web Developer at Policen Direkt	Insurance, the German secondary market for life insurance	Customers of the group’s web portals	Planning and building the portals and their conversion optimization; for a contract management portal, the interfaces and the connection to an existing CRM system
2011 to 2016: Project Lead and Developer at Valentins (Burda Digital)	Online retail	Shops for Lidl and REWE with millions of transactions; PayPal, WorldPay and Amazon Pay	Order funnels, payment connections and conversion optimization; changes to the funnels raised the sales of a top e-commerce brand by up to 22 percent on mobile devices

Details: Career stages.

Profile at a glance

Role	Business Development Manager (BDM), partnerships, business cases
Engagement	Permanent, remote for the most part, on-site days in Frankfurt Rhine-Main; freelance; interim
Location	Frankfurt, Germany
Industries	Finance and digital assets, insurance, online retail
Counterparts	Stock exchanges, banks, institutional customers, payment providers, technology providers
Network	Finance Loop: more than 4,000 members, more than 16 events in 2025
Languages	German, English

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke. I have worked in IT and media for more than twenty years, and I came to business development from the product side. Before I presented a market data product to banks, I had written its concept and coordinated the teams that built it. At Valentins I was the IT link between management and marketing, and as CIO part of my job was to describe technically complex matters in simple words. I am also interested in open-source AI models that a company runs on its own servers.

In Frankfurt I meet people from fintech and banking at the events of Finance Loop, the community that grew out of the Frankfurt Blockchain Meetup. Details: Growth and business development advisory.