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Sales & Retail vocabulary · Sales Process & Pipeline

B2B

Meaning in sales & retail, with examples

/ˌbiː tə ˈbiː/abbreviationCore term

In sales & retail, B2B means: Business-to-business: selling products or services to other companies rather than to individual consumers.

In Turkish: işletmeden işletmeye, kurumsal satış

How it is used

Used in job ads, company profiles and meetings: B2B sales, B2B customers, a B2B company. B2B deals usually have higher values, longer sales cycles and several people involved in the decision. Said aloud as “B to B”.

Example sentences

  1. I have six years of experience in B2B sales, mostly selling software to banks.

  2. In B2B, you rarely close a deal after the first meeting.

Common collocations

  • B2B sales
  • B2B customers
  • B2B company
  • B2B market
  • B2CBusiness-to-consumer: selling products or services directly to individual people for their own use, as shops, restaurants and online stores do.
  • sales cycleThe whole sequence of steps from the first contact with a potential customer to the signed deal, and the time this usually takes.
  • decision-makerThe person in a company who has the authority to approve a purchase and sign the contract, such as a director or the owner.
  • key accountOne of a company's most important customers, usually because of the size of its orders or its strategic value, which gets special attention and a dedicated manager.
  • RFPRequest for proposal: a formal document in which an organisation describes what it wants to buy and invites several suppliers to send proposals.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Sales Process & Pipeline

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