Building a B2B division from zero to €18M

Cemre Akkaya · Head of Marketing & Revenue, Desertcart (cross-border ecommerce, 60+ markets)

The situation

Desertcart served consumers across 60+ markets, but business buyers kept appearing in the order data: bulk purchases, repeat SKUs, procurement-style behaviour. Nobody owned them. There was no B2B team, no CRM, no pricing structure for volume, no account management.

What I did

I wrote the business case, got CEO sign-off, and built the division end to end: hired the first salespeople, closed the first enterprise deals personally, set volume pricing and credit terms, and designed the operating cadence.

Instead of buying a CRM, I built one. Salesforce quoted $100K and six months for what the division needed; I built a working pipeline and account-management system in a weekend, tailored to how the team actually sold. It's still the system of record today.

The result

€18M annual revenue from a standing start · ~30% month-on-month growth through the scale-up phase · 11 markets served · profitable unit economics from month one

The division now runs with its own team, its own P&L line, and commercial infrastructure that cost close to nothing to build.

Why it matters for your business

This is the shape of work I do fractionally: find the revenue hiding in your existing operation, build the case, then build the machine that captures it, with the smallest possible spend on tools and headcount.

cemreakkaya.com · linkedin.com/in/cemreakkaya