Total Click Solutions

Tag: sales strategy

  • Why Your B2B Sales Cycle Is Getting Longer

    Why Your B2B Sales Cycle Is Getting Longer

    B2B sales cycles have been getting longer, and the uncomfortable part is that most teams haven’t noticed. A longer cycle doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as a forecast miss, a deal that was “almost there” for three months, or a pipeline that looks healthy until you look at the dates.

    Across a study of 939 companies, sales cycles have lengthened 22 percent since 2022. A team whose process hasn’t changed at all is closing later than it did three years ago, and that registers as a forecasting problem rather than a cycle problem, because nothing in the pipeline report says the clock moved. It’s a quietly expensive situation to be in.

    Where the time actually goes

    Much of a long cycle is time wasted on deals that should have been disqualified early. Tightening qualification does two things: it shortens the average by removing dead weight, and it speeds up the real deals because you understand what they need to say yes. Most pipelines are full of what you might call optimistic passengers, opportunities that were allowed in before there was enough evidence they belonged there.

    Bad qualification isn’t just failing to ask whether the buyer has budget. It’s failing to establish fit, urgency, authority, decision process, impact, timing, feasibility and risk. A long sales cycle often means the opportunity entered the pipeline too early, before anyone had done the work to treat it as real.

    The second culprit is stakeholder sprawl. Complex B2B buying groups routinely include up to ten decision-makers, which means a single champion is rarely enough to get a deal across the line. And yet plenty of reps spend weeks building a relationship with one enthusiastic contact who turns out not to hold the budget, the authority, or both. The most common source of late-stage delay is discovering in week eight that the person you’ve been selling to can’t actually approve the purchase. By that point you’ve both invested significant time, and backing up is awkward for everyone.

    The structural fixes that actually move the dial

    Map the buying committee early. Engaging all decision-makers simultaneously, a practice known as multithreading, keeps the process moving and prevents roadblocks later. This feels presumptuous to some reps, but buyers who are genuinely serious don’t tend to object. The ones who do are often the ones who were never going to close anyway.

    Be honest about pricing earlier than feels comfortable. Saving it for the proposal stage usually extends the cycle, because prospects who can’t afford your solution will say so quickly when pricing comes up early, whilst prospects who can afford it appreciate the transparency and stay engaged.

    And then there’s what happens after meetings. Delayed follow-up kills momentum and signals operational weakness. If a buyer asks for information and waits days for a response, you’re teaching them what it might be like to work with you. That’s not a minor inconvenience; it actively erodes confidence at exactly the point where confidence is being formed.

    Urgency you don’t have to manufacture

    One of the stranger habits in B2B sales is the artificial deadline: the invented discount that expires on Friday, the quota-driven push that the buyer can see straight through.

    Real urgency is considerably more useful and considerably more honest. It comes from tying your solution to something the buyer already cares about: a contract renewal, a compliance date, a growth target, a problem that gets more expensive every month it goes unsolved. Quantify the cost of waiting, and the timeline tends to take care of itself.

    None of this requires a new CRM, a new methodology, or a company-wide transformation programme. Adding more pipeline to a broken process scales the problem faster, not the revenue. The far more useful question is where your specific cycle actually stalls, and why. Fix that one thing, and the average moves.

  • Stop Relying on One Champion to Close the Deal

    Stop Relying on One Champion to Close the Deal

    The champion is not enough. They might be enthusiastic, politically savvy, and completely sold on what you’re offering, and the deal can still go cold the moment someone from finance asks a question they can’t answer. Every experienced seller has felt this, usually right before a deal slips into next quarter.

    Buying committees have been growing for years and haven’t stopped. Forrester’s 2024 research puts the median at eleven or more stakeholders, up from eight in 2018, and InfoSec, data-privacy, and vendor-risk reviews now routinely add weeks to enterprise deals even at mid-market accounts. The person who invited you into the process almost certainly doesn’t control all of those conversations.

    The logical instinct when you get a warm intro is to nurture that one relationship carefully before expanding. Establish trust first, then broaden out. It sounds sensible, and it’s exactly how deals stall, because while you’re spending six weeks deepening one relationship, the rest of the buying committee is forming opinions about your product from your website, your competitors’ outreach, and whatever your champion happens to mention in passing.

    Why single-threaded deals collapse

    The failure mode is predictable. Your champion goes quiet because they’re busy, pulled onto something else, or managing internal politics you can’t see, and suddenly there’s no momentum. Or they leave the company entirely, which, given how frequently people change jobs, is hardly an edge case. A multi-threaded deal survives that because several other people already understand the value you’re offering. A single-threaded one doesn’t.

    There’s also a subtler problem: the business case your champion builds will naturally cover their area of pain. Finance, IT, legal, and operations all have different concerns, and none of them are going to rubber-stamp a recommendation that doesn’t address theirs. The enemy usually isn’t a rival vendor. It’s internal friction you were never part of resolving.

    What multi-threading actually means in practice

    Multi-threading means building active relationships across the buying committee rather than relying on one person to carry the deal internally. The goal isn’t to flood an account with messages, which irritates everyone, but to make sure each relevant stakeholder hears something tailored to their specific concern, ideally before the formal evaluation stage, when opinions are still forming.

    Sequencing matters. Build a genuine champion first, then use that relationship to map the rest of the committee and get introductions rather than going around your contact cold. By the third or fourth touchpoint you should have names and roles for the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, and whoever is going to run procurement. These are not the same person, and they almost never want the same thing from a conversation with you.

    A practical way to think about it: your champion needs confidence to sell internally; your economic buyer needs a number that justifies the spend; your technical contact needs to know it won’t create new problems; procurement needs to know you’re not a compliance headache. A business case built across five stakeholders quantifies the cost of inaction in multiple functions, which is a considerably more compelling document than one person’s departmental pain.

    The CRM problem nobody talks about

    Despite all the evidence that multi-threaded deals close at materially higher rates, roughly 70% of B2B opportunities still have only one point of contact logged in the CRM. That’s not a coincidence. Single-threading is the path of least resistance: one relationship to manage, one inbox to track, one person to update. Expanding the contact map takes deliberate effort and a willingness to ask your champion to make introductions, which feels uncomfortable when the deal is still fragile.

    But the discomfort of asking for those introductions is considerably less than the discomfort of explaining in Q4 why a deal you had forecast as certain has gone dark because your contact moved to a different company.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    When should I start multi-threading, after the first meeting or later?

    As early as the second or third touchpoint, once you have a genuine champion. The common mistake is waiting until the deal feels advanced, by which point the rest of the committee has already formed views without your input. Use your champion to make warm introductions rather than reaching out cold.

    What if my champion doesn’t want me talking to other stakeholders?

    That’s worth paying attention to. A champion who actively blocks broader access is often signalling that the deal doesn’t have the internal support they’ve implied. It’s not always a red flag, but it’s worth a direct conversation about why, framed around making it easier for them to build the internal case.