In a perfect world, every prospect that reached out to your business would be ready to sign a contract on the spot. But we all know that’s not reality.
Instead, sellers must navigate the sales cycle – and work to keep buyers engaged every step of the way. This can be challenging, as research tells us the average B2B sales cycle lasts six months. For some industries, it’s even longer.
The average B2B sales cycle lasts
Defining your sales cycle is like providing a map for your sellers. You’re giving sellers a proven, repeatable framework they can follow to close more deals, faster. Plus, when you have an optimized sales cycle, you can more accurately predict revenue.
But what exactly is a sales cycle – and how can you optimize yours to drive better sales outcomes? We’ll answer those questions and more in this post.
What is a sales cycle?
At this point, you may be asking yourself, “What is a sales cycle?” So, let’s start by clarifying what it is. For this blog, we’re specifically focusing on the B2B sales cycle.
A sales cycle is the series of stages the sales team goes through when closing deals. The B2B sales cycle incorporates everything from initial contact to contract signature.
Sales cycle and sales process are two phrases that are used often. However, it’s important to note that these two things aren’t the same.
The sales cycle describes the steps a seller completes to close a deal. The sales process, on the other hand, describes how those steps are completed. Said another way, the sales cycle is the “what” and the sales process is the “how.”
The length of a sales cycle varies widely based on factors including industry, product, and price point – among others. For example, a B2C sales cycle is typically much shorter than a B2B SaaS sales cycle. That’s because B2B deals are often larger and involve more stakeholders.
Sales organizations need to define the sales cycle. But why?
Defining the sales cycle stages helps ensure sellers are following a repeatable framework every time. Sellers can visualize how the process should look – and what steps they need to take when.
Identifying sales cycle stages can also help sales leaders assess the pipeline and understand where deals are getting stuck. These insights can shed light on opportunities to improve sales processes – and sales outcomes.
In addition, a well-defined sales cycle makes it easier for sales leaders to more accurately predict future sales.
B2B vs. B2C sales cycles
Sales cycles are an element of both B2B and B2C sales. However, B2B and B2C don’t look the same.
The biggest differences between B2B and B2C sales cycles lies in their length and complexity.
The B2B cycle is typically much longer than the B2C cycle. While B2C can be completed in minutes, B2B sales can take months or even years.
Unsurprisingly, the B2B cycle is longer, as B2B sales are generally more complex than B2C sales.
For starters, B2C products are sold directly to individual consumers. On the other hand, B2B products are sold to entire businesses, and many people have a say in the decision. According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution includes up to 10 decision-makers.
In addition, B2B purchases are typically much higher in value than B2C purchases. For example, purchasing an enterprise-wide software solution will be a much larger transaction than purchasing a personal computer.
What are the different sales cycle stages?
The sales cycle includes several different stages. What are they?
Cycle stages vary from company to company. However, most include the following stages.
Lead generation
Prospecting
Initial contact
Nurturing
Qualification + discovery
Demo
Objection handling
Closing
Lead generation
A lead is anyone who has taken action indicating interest in your company or your solutions. For example, they may have downloaded an eBook, signed up for your newsletter, or requested a demo on your website.
However, not all leads fit your products and services well. Sellers must determine which leads are qualified, which brings us to the next stage.
Prospecting stage
Prospecting is the sales stage focused on identifying potential customers who are a good fit for your products or services. Often, organizations develop ideal customer profiles (IRPs) to help sales teams understand which prospects may (or may not) be a good fit. That way, sellers can spend their time on prospects who are most likely to convert.
Initial contact stage
Once you’ve determined that a prospective customer is a good fit, it’s time to contact them. Common methods of contacting prospective customers include:
- Phone calls and messages
- Emails
- LinkedIn messages
The goal of the initial contact phase is to successfully connect with the prospect and schedule an appointment to explore their key challenges and how your offerings can help them overcome those challenges.
Nurturing stage
Sometimes, a prospect is willing to schedule a meeting and make a purchase quickly. But in the world of B2B sales, that’s usually not the case. Instead, prospects need more time. But that doesn’t mean sellers should simply step away and wait. Instead, they must nurture their prospects.
During the nurturing stage, sales teams must deliver content that proves their value and expertise and keeps prospects engaged. This sales stage is a collaborative effort between sales and marketing. In collaboration with sales, marketing teams must develop content that resonates with sellers. This content can then be distributed via automated drip campaigns or directly from the sales rep.
The goal of the nurturing stage is to keep prospects engaged and interested so they eventually move forward to the next step.
Qualification and discovery stage
Qualification is determining whether or not the prospect is a good fit. During this stage, you must do your homework to identify a prospect’s challenges to assess if your product or service will address these challenges. In addition, you’ll need to gauge a prospect’s interest and timeline.
Reps can uncover this information by researching, conversing with prospects, and leveraging revenue intelligence tools.
During the qualification and discovery stage, you’ll also want to ensure you’re working with the right contact at the company with decision-making power. If not, you can find out how to contact the right contact.
Demo stage
This is the stage where you pitch your product or service offerings to the customer. This might happen in person or via a video call.
A generic, one-size-fits-all pitch isn’t enough to move a deal forward. Instead, you must take the information you gathered during the earlier stages to develop a personalized pitch. That pitch must show prospects that you understand their challenges – and know your solution will solve them.
Objection handling stage
In an ideal world, you’d pitch your solution to a customer, and they’d immediately decide. But in the world of B2B sales, that’s not reality. Prospective customers typically have questions and concerns. These are raised and addressed during the objection-handling stage.
Sales organizations must ensure their sellers have the tools, information, and content necessary to effectively overcome prospects’ objections.
Closing stage
The closing stage is the final phase cycle. It’s the moment of truth, where you either win a deal or lose it.
It’s important to remember that most prospects aren’t ready to sign on the dotted line after the first meeting. This is especially true in the world of B2B sales. Instead, it typically requires several touchpoints.
How to optimize your sales cycle
As we touched on earlier, sales cycles aren’t “one-size-fits-all.” Instead, the cycle at one company may look completely different from another.
It’s important to ensure your B2B cycle is optimized for your business. After all, an optimized sales cycle means your sellers can close deals more effectively and efficiently.
In theory, optimizing sounds simple enough. But in reality, it can be challenging.
However, there are some important steps you can take to optimize your sales cycle.
Determine your average sales cycle length
Cycle lengths vary from company to company. It’s important to pinpoint yours.
To calculate your average length, divide the total number of days spent for every deal closed by your team by the total number of deals. The result is the average length for the entire sales team.
Remember: this average cycle combines data from all of your sellers. That includes your top sellers who crush quota month after month and the worst sellers who “phone it in” every month.
As such, the average length across the whole team may not accurately reflect the length it should take.
For that reason, it’s a good idea also to calculate the average cycle of your top performers. This number is a more accurate indicator of how long it should take. What’s more, it can serve as a challenging, yet achievable goal for your entire sales team to aim for.
Track conversion for every stage
Sales organizations should measure the percentage of deals that are closing. Most do this already.
However, it’s important to take things a step further.
If you’re not already, track conversion rates for every step of your cycle. In other words, determine the portion of prospects advancing to the next stage of the sales cycle – and the portion dropping off.
Once you identify where prospects are dropping off, you can determine ways to decrease drop-offs and improve outcomes.
For example, you may find that marketing-generated leads rarely advance to prospects. This is an opportunity for marketing and sales to align on what a good-fit lead looks like – and how the organization can more effectively target them via marketing channels.
Or, perhaps there you notice a big drop off at the objection handling stage of the sales cycle. This may indicate reps need more training and coaching on how to handle objections.
Adjust to the needs of your buyers
Each buyer has unique needs and challenges. It’s important to understand those needs and challenges – and adjust your sales cycle to reflect them.
In addition, be sure your sales cycle reflects any industry-specific needs. For example, imagine your company markets its products to banking and financial services professionals. This is a highly regulated industry. Any potential software products must undergo a process to ensure they are secure. This process is unavoidable for sellers and should be reflected in the sales cycle.
Automate or streamline non-selling activities
Sales reps only have so many hours in the day. Unfortunately, a small percentage of that time is actually spent selling. Research from Salesforce found that on average, reps spend a mere 28% of their week selling.
Reps spend only
When reps don’t have time to focus on selling, it slows down the sales cycle. So, look for opportunities to automate or streamline those tedious (but necessary) tasks that take up a lot of your reps’ time.
For example, your reps may spend a lot of time searching for content to use during the sales cycle. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they may even create their own content. Housing your content in a sales content management solution makes it easier and faster for reps to find what they’re looking for.
Then, your reps can focus their time and attention on accelerating deals through the sales cycle.
Streamline onboarding and ongoing training
Every sales leader wants new reps onboarded yesterday. After all, the sooner reps finish their onboarding, the sooner they can focus on moving deals through the sales cycle as efficiently as possible.
Look for opportunities to streamline your onboarding process, without compromising quality. Then, your reps will be ready to hit the ground running faster.
Remember: rep training shouldn’t end at onboarding. Rather, ongoing training is key to ensuring reps understand things like sales cycle, sales methodology, and product offerings.
Analyze your reps’ performance
It’s essential to measure sales reps’ performance on an ongoing basis. Of course, sales metrics and training completion metrics are important. But they don’t tell the whole story.
It’s imperative to ensure each of your reps has the skills and competencies they need to be effective, efficient sellers. If they don’t have what it takes, deals will get lost or stalled – and your sales cycle will be unnecessarily long.
Each sales organization must determine what skills and competencies their customer-facing roles need for success. Increasingly, organizations define these skills and competencies in an ideal rep profile (IRP).
Then, reps should be measured against this “gold standard” on an ongoing basis. That way, sales managers and sales enablement teams can identify weaknesses. Then, they can deliver training, coaching, and tools to boost lagging skills – and improve reps’ abilities to effectively and efficiently close deals.
Centralize sales engagement
The road to a closed deal has many touchpoints. All too often, this road is full of friction.
For example, there may be 20 or more email strings related to a single deal – each with a different list of recipients. It’s easy for key information and content to get lost in the mix.
This is bad news for sellers as inefficiency can slow (or even kill) deals.
Today, some revenue productivity platforms incorporate digital sales rooms. Essentially, these are collaborative portals where all members of the buyer and seller team can communicate, share content, and move deals forward. Digital sales rooms drive efficiency – and decrease the length of the sales cycle. In addition, sellers can see how buyers engage with content and other information, which can help them determine what steps to take next.
Is your sales cycle optimized for revenue growth?
Every revenue leader wants their teams to close more deals. But leaving them to reinvent the wheel each time isn’t an effective approach.
Instead, it’s essential to develop a well-defined sales cycle. It’ll serve as a roadmap, helping sellers determine what steps to take to engage buyers and close deals. Furthermore,
a well-defined sales cycle makes it easier to predict revenue and identify areas for optimization. With an optimized sales cycle, your teams can close more deals faster.
But defining your sales cycle isn’t enough to guarantee success. You must also ensure your sellers have what it takes to engage buyers throughout every step of the sales cycle. A revenue enablement platform like Mindtickle ensures sales teams have the content, training, tools, and information they need to successfully navigate every step of the sales cycle – all in one location.
Mindtickle in Action
Ready to see how Mindtickle enables sales teams to be ready for any deal at any stage of the sales cycle?
Get a DemoThis post was originally published in January 2024 and updated in November 2024.
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