Every sales leader I’ve worked with in the last eighteen months has told me some version of the same thing: “Our deals are taking longer to close. Buyers are stalling. The economy isn’t helping.”
The first two parts of that statement are correct. The third one is mostly an excuse.
The average B2B sales cycle is now 25% longer than it was five years ago, and 43% of sales leaders report that their cycle has lengthened just in the past twelve months. But when I sit down with leadership teams and trace what’s actually happening inside their deals, the macroeconomic narrative falls apart quickly. Buyers aren’t slower because they’re worried about a recession. They’re slower because the way B2B purchases get made has structurally changed — and almost no sales process has adapted.
What Actually Changed
There are three real drivers behind the longer cycle, and they all compound.
The buying committee has expanded. Gartner’s most recent data shows that B2B buying decisions now involve between 8 and 13 stakeholders, often spread across four or more functions. A decade ago, you were selling to a head of function and a CFO sign-off. Today, you’re selling to a head of function, two ICs who will use the product, a security team, a procurement function, a legal review, and an executive sponsor — at minimum.
Buyers do more independent research before they engage. By the time a typical buyer takes their first meeting, they’ve already formed preferences. They’ve talked to peers, read analyst reports, and shortlisted vendors. The sales process is now compressed into a smaller window — but the deal itself isn’t smaller, because the committee still has to coordinate.
Internal selling has become harder than external selling. Once your champion is convinced, they still have to go sell internally to a committee that doesn’t trust each other. According to that same Gartner research, 74% of B2B buyer teams exhibit “unhealthy conflict” during the decision process — disagreement about objectives, vendor preferences, or whether to buy at all.
“The longer cycle isn’t the buyers stalling. It’s our process leaving them alone for weeks at a time between meaningful touches — while the actual decision is being fought out in rooms we’re not in.”
— Dalton Ezri
Why Most Teams Are Diagnosing This Wrong
When a sales leader sees their cycle lengthen, the instinctive response is to push reps harder on activity. More follow-ups. More touches. Tighter forecast scrutiny. Get back in front of the buyer.
This almost never works, and often makes things worse. The problem isn’t that your reps aren’t touching deals frequently enough. The problem is that the quality of those touches isn’t matched to the structure of the buying committee on the other side.
A weekly email asking “any update?” to a single champion doesn’t move a deal forward when there are nine other stakeholders deliberating internally. It just tells the champion that you don’t understand their world.
As I tell every team I work with: the goal isn’t more touches. It’s more useful touches with more of the right people.
The Diagnostic: Where Your Cycle Is Actually Stalling
When a team comes to me convinced their cycle has gotten too long, I run them through a simple diagnostic. Pull your last twenty closed-won deals and your last twenty closed-lost or stalled deals from the past two quarters. For each, identify:
- How many distinct stakeholders we engaged with directly. Not just CC’d on emails — actually had a meeting with or a substantive conversation with.
- How long the deal sat in its longest stage. Specifically: which stage had the most days of inactivity?
- What happened in that gap. Were we waiting on the buyer? Were they waiting on us? Or were they waiting on someone internal to them that we never knew existed?
In almost every diagnostic I’ve run, the pattern is the same: the deals that closed engaged 1.5x to 2x more stakeholders than the deals that stalled. And the stalled deals almost universally lost momentum during a phase when the champion was selling internally — alone, without ammunition, against committee resistance.
You don’t have a sales cycle problem. You have a stakeholder coverage problem dressed up as a sales cycle problem.
What to Do About It
There are three structural changes that, in my experience, consistently shorten cycle time once teams commit to them.
First: design your sales process around the committee, not the champion. This means every deal in active stages has an account map — a named list of stakeholders, their function, their stance, and what they need to say yes. If your account map has one name on it, the deal isn’t qualified.
Second: arm your champion to sell internally. The single highest-leverage activity in a long-cycle deal is giving your champion the artifacts and arguments to win the room they’re going into when you’re not there. A short business case PDF, three bullet points framed for a CFO, an objection one-liner for the skeptical VP. These aren’t marketing deliverables — they’re sales weapons.
Third: make multi-thread outreach a process requirement, not a heroics activity. Most teams have a few reps who naturally multi-thread well, and the rest who don’t. Bake it into the stage gates. Stage advances should require evidence of contact with named stakeholders beyond the champion. No evidence, no advancement.
“If your account plan has one name highlighted as ‘the champion,’ you’re not running a B2B deal — you’re running a hope.”
— Dalton Ezri
The Honest Math
When teams adopt these changes, I generally see cycle time compress by 15–25% within two quarters. Not because the buyer moved faster, but because the deal spent less time stalled in the gap between meetings, where deals quietly die.
Forecastio’s benchmarking data tells a similar story: the teams with the shortest cycles in any given segment are not the ones with the most aggressive activity metrics. They’re the ones who structurally engage more of the buying committee earlier.
The macro environment will do what it does. Buyers will keep buying carefully. The committees aren’t going to shrink. But how long your deals take is, more than you’d like to admit, a function of how your process is designed — not a function of what the buyer is doing.
The teams that figure this out in the next twelve months are going to compound that advantage. The teams that keep blaming the economy are going to keep watching their cycles stretch.
Dalton Ezri partners with B2B leadership teams to redesign their sales process around the realities of modern buying committees — from stakeholder coverage requirements to champion-enablement systems that actually move stalled deals. If your cycle has stretched and you can’t pinpoint why, the answer is almost always in your account-mapping discipline.
