What is “Business-to-Business” (B2B)?
Business-to-Business (B2B) describes companies that sell products or services to other organisations — as opposed to B2C companies selling to individual consumers. B2B spans enterprise SaaS, professional services, manufacturing supplies, payment processing, infrastructure, and any input that organisations buy to run their business. The buyer is an organisation, often with a multi-person decision-making committee.
B2B characteristics
- Longer sales cycles: 3-12 months for mid-market, 6-18+ months for enterprise.
- Larger transaction values: ARR can range from $100/month (SMB) to $10M+/year (enterprise).
- Multi-stakeholder decisions: economic buyer, technical buyer, end users, IT, security, procurement.
- Sales-led GTM (typically): direct sales, SDR/AE structure, pre-sales engineering for enterprise.
- Rational + emotional drivers: ROI matters but champion alignment, vendor risk, brand all influence.
- High retention if onboarding works: switching costs are real once integrated.
B2B sub-categories
- SMB: <100 employees; self-serve or low-touch sales; fast cycles.
- Mid-market: 100-1000 employees; inside sales + pre-sales; moderate cycles.
- Enterprise: 1000+ employees; field sales + customer success; long cycles.
What changes when both sides are merchants
B2B contracting runs on freedom of contract — between merchants, Turkish law presumes professional competence (the prudent-merchant standard, TTK basiretli tacir), and consumer protections largely fall away. That freedom is what makes drafting decisive: liability caps and exclusions, warranty scopes, SLAs and termination rights will generally be enforced as written, so the contract is the risk allocation. The remaining guardrails matter at the edges — general transaction conditions doctrine (TBK genel işlem koşulları) can strike surprising clauses even between businesses, competition law polices exclusivity and resale restrictions, and late-payment interest between merchants follows commercial rules. The B2B legal craft is less about protection from the counterparty and more about precision toward it.