Which European companies are expanding their sales teams right now

How this was counted

One source, one pull date. Every figure on this page comes from the Adzuna job-search API, queried on 9 September 2026 across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Nothing else is blended in.

Five queries ran in every country: sales development representative, SDR, business development representative, account executive and inside sales. Local-language queries ran on top of those. Germany, Austria and Switzerland added Vertriebsmitarbeiter Neukundengewinnung, Sales Manager Neukunden and Business Development Manager. Poland added przedstawiciel handlowy B2B, specjalista ds. sprzedaży B2B and business development manager. France added business developer and commercial B2B, the Netherlands accountmanager new business, and Italy and Spain business developer. The United Kingdom and Belgium ran the five English queries only.

That pulled 18,252 rows. Four cleaning passes cut it to 12,090:

Deduplication runs twice: first on the Adzuna posting id, then on the combination of company, title and location, which catches a company relisting the same role. A paraphrased repost survives both passes, so the posting count sits above the true count of distinct open seats by some unknown margin.

The relevance filter matters more than it sounds. Adzuna's phrase search is loose, so the broad queries drag in roles that have nothing to do with sales. Every kept title has to match a multilingual sales stem (sale, vertrieb, verkoop, commerc, sprzeda, handlow, account executive, key account, business develop, neukunden, new business and others). Two false positives it caught are worth naming. The acronym SDR also means Software-Defined Radio, and GMV in Spain returned RF and FPGA hardware-engineer postings under it. ThermoFisher's hits on inside sales and account executive were mostly Clinical Research Associate roles.

Three groups of employers are excluded. Staffing and recruitment agencies, because an agency advertising six account executive roles is selling placements to a client. Sales-placement academies and outsourced SDR firms, which post large volumes of near-identical ads under their own brand on behalf of an unnamed client, confirmed by reading each one's own posting text. And contact-centre operators such as Concentrix, Teleperformance and TTEC, who hire agents to run other companies' campaigns. Those exclusions removed 435 employers and 2,057 postings from the expanding set. Job boards and public employment portals whose listed employer is the board itself are dropped outright.

An employer counts once per unique kept posting. An employer with three or more distinct open sales roles at the pull moment is what this page calls expanding. The same legal entity hiring in two countries appears as two rows, because the market, the hiring manager and the language are different in each.

Two limits to hold onto. Adzuna caps any single query at 1,000 returned rows regardless of the total it reports, so the high-volume queries in Germany, Spain, France and the United Kingdom are undercounted: the German account executive query reported 2,203 results and returned 1,000. And Adzuna does not index every board in every country, so a company advertising only on a national-only board or on its own careers page with no syndication is invisible here. Read every number below as a floor.

Sales-role postings by country, 9 September 2026

Germany carries more than a quarter of the European total on its own. Read the last column first: it is the count of non-staffing employers with three or more open sales roles, which is the set this page is about.

Spain and Poland stand out on the staffing column. Almost a third of Spanish sales postings and a quarter of Polish ones come from an agency, an academy or a contact-centre operator rather than from the company that will employ the seller. Switzerland sits at the other end with 7.7 percent. If you buy a sales-hiring list that has not backed those employers out, roughly one name in six across Europe, and one in three in Spain, is an agency you cannot sell an outbound service to.

The employer column does not add up across borders. A group hiring in Germany and in France is counted in both rows, so 6,058 is the sum of ten national employer counts and not a count of 6,058 distinct legal entities.

The 15 employers with the most open sales roles

All 759 expanding employers pooled across the ten countries and sorted by open sales roles on the pull date. This is a snapshot, so a company that filled its roles on 10 September is still on the list.

Sample titles are shown as posted, shortened where a title carried a trailing qualifier. The full titles sit in the CSV.

Download all 759 employers as CSV. Five columns: employer, country, city, open sales roles, sample title. It is the same set the tables above are cut from, so the country counts and the top 15 both reconcile against it. Reuse it with attribution to Ripe Leads and to Adzuna.

The distribution is thinner than the top of the table suggests. 482 of the 759, near two thirds, carry three or four open roles. 213 carry five to nine, 54 carry ten to nineteen, and only 10 employers across all ten countries carry twenty or more. The long tail is where the useful conversations are, because a company with three open sales seats and no in-house recruiter feels the gap as sharply as one with thirty.

What sector the 759 sit in

Read this table with the caveat first, not after. Sector here comes from a keyword match against the employer's display name and nothing else. No register lookup, no website check, no industry code.

92.4 percent of the set matched no keyword, which is the honest finding here. A software company called Perk or Factorial carries nothing in its name to classify it on, so it lands in the unmatched bucket alongside a Polish energy reseller. The three matched categories are a floor and nothing more: at least 27 of the 759 are software or SaaS firms, at least 22 are industrial. Do not read the shares as a market structure.

Sector is the wrong axis for this dataset anyway. What the CSV gives you is a company name, a country, a city and a role count. Enriching those 759 names against a register or a website is a separate job, and it is the job that decides whether a name is worth writing to.

What an expanding sales team is a buying signal for

A company adding sellers has decided to spend more on getting revenue in. That decision has already cleared budget, which is what separates it from most triggers. Five kinds of supplier get a real opening from it.

Sales tools. Dialers, sequencers, call recording, conversation intelligence, e-signature. Seat count is about to rise and someone has to license the new people.

Data and contact vendors. New sellers arrive with empty lists. The company either buys more credits or discovers its current provider does not cover the market it just hired into.

Outbound agencies. A team hiring three SDRs has admitted it needs more pipeline than it currently generates. Hiring takes a quarter to land and another to ramp; an agency starts in a fortnight. The two are complements more often than they are rivals.

Sales training and enablement. Three new hires at once means onboarding that nobody has written yet, and a manager who is about to spend their quarter on ramp instead of on deals.

CRM consultancies. A pipeline built for four sellers breaks at eight. Territory rules, routing, forecasting and reporting all get looked at again when headcount steps up.

The signal is also a bet on the market that company sells into. When 242 German employers all add sellers in the same week, some of that is one sector deciding its buyers are back. The dataset does not tell you which sector, and the section above explains why.

What it is not a signal for

Four things this data does not tell you, and it is worth saying them out loud before anyone builds a campaign on it.

It is no proof of budget for outsourcing. A company spending on salaries has chosen to build in-house. Some of them will also buy an agency retainer; others have just spent the money they would have spent on you. The posting tells you they want more pipeline. It does not tell you how they intend to pay for it.

A cluster of roles can be churn. Sales has the highest turnover of any commercial function. Six open seats at a company with forty sellers is a replacement cycle, not growth. Volume alone cannot tell the two apart, which is the point the hiring burst piece makes: the signal is the ratio to that company's own normal pattern, and a single snapshot has no baseline to compare against.

Perennial advertisers never drop off. Some companies keep sales ads live permanently to build a pipeline of candidates. Their count stays high in every pull and means nothing about this month.

The count is a floor, not a total. The 1,000-row query ceiling and Adzuna's board coverage both bite hardest in the largest markets. A German company with two open sales roles that only advertises on its own careers page is expanding and is not in this file.

The fix for the first three is history. Pull the same queries again next quarter and compare each employer against itself. That is what turns a snapshot into a signal, and it is why this dataset is published on a schedule rather than once.

How to use the list in outreach

Timing first. A sales req has a life of roughly four to eight weeks before it is filled or quietly pulled, so a list pulled on 9 September is worth working in September. By November it is a list of companies that already solved the problem, and writing to them then reads as inattention.

Then pick the reader. For a tool, a data feed or a CRM change, write to the VP Sales or the Head of Revenue Operations, because they own the budget line and the systems the new hires will use. For an agency or a training offer, the hiring manager named on the req is usually better: they carry the number the new heads were approved against, and they are the one who has to hit it whether or not the seats fill on time. Writing to HR gets you routed to a recruitment pitch you are not making.

Reference the specific roles. Naming the three open SDR seats and the market they cover proves you looked, and it is the difference between a relevant first line and a mail-merge. One caution: say what you saw, not what you inferred about their strategy. Everything else on this page explains why the inference would be guesswork.

For where sales-team expansion sits among the other triggers worth watching, and for the honest version of what intent data can and cannot do, see buying signals and intent data.

Published by Ripe Leads on 9 September 2026, from an Adzuna API pull taken the same day. The next pull is planned for December 2026.