Sales Cycle
Sales Cycle
What Is a Sales Cycle?
- Stages and time from first contact to contract
- B2B is long, with many stakeholders
- Fixing bottlenecks drives growth
Once you start managing the sales cycle in stages, the conversation in the weekly sales meeting changes. A report like "That deal is going well" becomes "It's been stuck in proposal review for two weeks and we haven't met the finance reviewer yet." Once stages are defined, progress is a record, not an opinion, and managers allocate support staff and time based on stage-movement history rather than a rep's confidence. Where vague optimism used to be, the 'next action' takes its place.
Stages work only when defined by what the customer actually does, not what we did. 'We sent the proposal' is our activity, but 'the customer scheduled an internal review' is the customer's progress. When measuring length, the median is more honest than the average, because one or two 14-month large deals pull the whole average up. Treat new customers and repeat orders from existing customers as entirely separate cycles. Seven months for the former and six weeks for the latter is common.
A sales cycle is not the same thing as a sales process. The process is the set of behavioral rules we design; the cycle is the time actually taken and the record of stages passed. It doesn't overlap with the customer's buying journey either: customers arrive having already done about half their research before meeting us. With a quarterly target of KRW 1 billion (≈ US$748,200) and a 20% close rate, you need KRW 5 billion (≈ US$3,740,800) in the pipeline now, and that volume should have been built five months ago. That is how the math works out.
Problems usually start when 'shortening the cycle' becomes a goal in itself. Reps push deals into the negotiation stage before they even know the decision-making structure, then force them through with discounts, and stage movement becomes a number for reports rather than real progress. Deals that closed six months ago lingering in the pipeline and inflating the forecast have the same root cause. Without a rule that automatically puts any deal untouched for 90+ days on hold, the CRM becomes a wish list, not a management tool.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jaehyuk ParkHands-on instructor in B2B technical sales and AI-driven sales strategyAs sales process management and CRM matured, it took hold as a way to manage deal progress by breaking it into stages.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A provides corporate training services, with 34 employees and KRW 7.8 billion (≈ US$5,835,700) in annual revenue. It kept missing its quarterly target just as it was about to hit it, and for three quarters running, the deals four salespeople had called "90% certain" slipped into the next quarter. When the CEO asked, "What is our average cycle, in months?" no one could answer.
- The VP of Sales pulled the first-meeting and contract dates for the last two years' 47 closed deals into Excel. The median was 5.4 months, but a few outliers, the longest at 14 months, pushed the average up to 6.8.
- They rebuilt the stages as 'training manager interview done → pilot session held → executive briefing done → approval request submitted → contract,' and blocked any deal from advancing without evidence that the customer had taken that action.
- After three months of data, it turned out that 62% of deals were stalled between 'pilot session' and 'executive briefing,' and the consultant in charge admitted, "We had never given the training manager anything to take to the executives."
- So after every pilot session, they now always hand over a one-page executive summary (participant reactions, expected impact if adopted, budget proposal), and once a date is set, a consultant attends the briefing.
- After 12 deals with no movement for 90 days were moved to on-hold, the pipeline shrank from KRW 3.1 billion (≈ US$2,319,300) to KRW 1.9 billion (≈ US$1,421,500). But next-quarter forecast error narrowed from ±38% to ±9%, and the median cycle dropped from 5.4 to 4.1 months.