Glossary
What is sales cycle?
A sales cycle is the repeatable set of steps a deal goes through from first contact to signature, and the time that whole journey takes.
Measure it from first contact, not from the good bit
Teams routinely report a cycle length that starts at the demo. That is the comfortable half. The honest measurement starts at first meaningful contact and ends at signature, and it is usually a great deal longer than anyone quotes in a board meeting.
Measure the median rather than the mean. One eleven-month enterprise deal drags an average badly, and the average is then used to plan hiring, which is how a team ends up with a pipeline target built on a number that describes no real deal.
What actually makes a cycle long
The cycle length is mostly the buyer, not the seller. The number of people who have to agree is the single biggest driver: each additional decision-maker adds delay that no amount of follow-up removes. Contract value is second, because bigger numbers attract more approvals.
The parts you control are narrower than the advice usually implies. Response time between steps, whether the right people were in the room early, and how long a proposal sits before someone asks about it. Those are worth attacking. Trying to compress a legal review is not.
In service businesses there is a third factor: the work has to start. A signed deal that cannot begin until January will not sign in October, whatever anyone says on the call.
B2B cycle lengths, roughly
A small professional services engagement typically runs three to eight weeks. A mid-market software purchase with three or four stakeholders runs two to four months. Anything involving procurement, security review, or a board is six months and up.
Those are shapes, not benchmarks. The useful number is your own median by deal size, tracked over a year, because that is the one that predicts anything.
How sales cycle works in a CRM
- A first-contact timestamp that is not the record creation date. Records get created late. If the CRM measures from creation, every cycle looks shorter than it is.
- Time in stage, per stage. Total length tells you there is a problem. Time per stage tells you where it is.
- Median by segment. One number across all deal sizes describes none of them. Split by value band at minimum.
- A stall threshold. Twice the normal time in a stage should raise something, not wait for a monthly review.
How we do it in Lumenbase
Lumenbase timestamps first contact from captured email and meetings rather than from when someone got round to creating the record, so cycle length is measured from the real start. Stage age sits on the deal, and Lumo flags a deal that has been in one stage for twice its usual time.