This is one a series of posts trying to explain marketing jargon to my engineer friends. I will explain as many terms as possible without the marketing jargon so its easy to understand.
Not just buzzwords, these are actual business models
B2B (Business-to-Business) means your company sells to other companies. Think Salesforce selling CRM software to enterprise HR teams, or AWS selling cloud infrastructure to startups. The “customer” is a company, and the buying decision usually involves multiple stakeholders, procurement teams, legal reviews, and months-long sales cycles.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer) means your company sells directly to individual people. Think Netflix, Spotify, or Amazon. The buyer is a single person making a quick, often emotional, decision — sometimes in under 60 seconds.
The B2B vs. B2C distinction fundamentally changes everything about how a product is built and marketed. Where you work, and how your work gets visibility depends entirely on how the marketing of the product goes, and how healthy the growth is.
B2B
The B2B has a longer sales cycle. Your product may need to survive a 6-month procurement review, and then a Privacy approval. Features like SSO, audit logs, compliance certifications, and admin dashboards are table stakes. Look for something like solution engineers, who may have to build custom plugins or solutions to make the sale.
Because the sales cycle is longer, the PO size is also usually bigger, in order to pay for everything around the entire sale process.
The lead pipeline has to be healthy, and therefore your engineering solutions will need to make sure no lead is getting left behind.
And renewals are their own motion. One dissatisfied VP can kill the $1M renewal contract. Reliability and support SLAs are mission critical.
The features that you’re building are sometimes more reactionary as in customers asking for something.
B2C
Consumer products are built for a shorter attention span, and the onboarding flow needs to be as frictionless as possible. Speed, UX polish, and zero friction matter enormously. And virality. One viral post can 5x sometimes 10x your signups overnight. Your conversion motion is very different, and therefore the features that make it sticky are also different. The feature list is also very pre-emptive, rather than reactionary.
A couple of other nuances
There’s also B2B2C (Business-to-Business-to-Consumer) — where you sell to a business, but the end user is a consumer. For example, Stripe: Stripe sells to developers/companies (B2B), but those companies use Stripe to charge their own customers (the C). This is important because you now have two sets of users to design for, and their needs often conflict.
And then there’s PLG (Product-Led Growth) which we’ll cover in its own article which kind of flips the B2B model on its head by letting the product sell itself. Think of it like B2C2B. You sell to individuals who love it so much that they want their IT to license it. Think Figma, Slack, Dropbox, Canva and so on.
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