Business-to-Business (B2B) describes a type of commercial transaction that exists between companies, rather than between a company and individual consumers.
The B2B model stands in contrast to 📝Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and 📝Business-to-Government (B2G), with each segment shaped by distinct buyer behaviors, sales cycle lengths, and purchase committee dynamics. B2B transactions typically involve longer evaluation periods, multi-stakeholder decision processes, formal contracting, and higher average deal sizes than consumer-facing commerce.
B2B spans every category where companies sell to other companies — enterprise software, manufacturing inputs, professional services, wholesale distribution, marketing platforms, accounting and finance tools, infrastructure providers — and is often subdivided further by deal size (SMB vs. mid-market vs. enterprise), buyer persona (operator vs. executive vs. technical), or sales motion (product-led vs. sales-led vs. marketing-led). Modern B2B has been reshaped by self-serve software trials, product-led growth, and intent-driven outbound that uses signals — job changes, hiring patterns, technographic installs — to compress what was once a months-long discovery cycle into a same-week conversation.