Here's a pattern I see constantly: a company's sales cycle has grown from 45 days to 65 days over the past two years. Leadership assumes it's a market problem. Buyers are more cautious, committees are bigger, budgets are tighter. And some of that is true. Forrester research has documented that B2B buying groups now average 10 or more stakeholders, up from 6-7 just a few years ago.
But when I actually map out where the time goes in these elongated sales cycles, a different picture emerges. The buyer-facing selling time (discovery, demos, negotiation) hasn't changed much. What's expanded is everything around it: the internal processes, the handoffs between teams, the approvals, the quoting, the contracting. The stuff that happens between your own walls.
In other words, your sales cycle isn't longer because buyers are slower. It's longer because you are slower.
Where the Time Actually Goes
Let me walk through a typical mid-market B2B deal and show you where the hidden time sinks live. These numbers are composites from clients I've worked with, but they're representative.
Lead Response Time: 2-24 Hours Wasted
Harvard Business Review research found that companies that responded to leads within an hour were seven times more likely to qualify them than those that waited even two hours. The median response time in their study? 42 hours.
Most companies I work with have improved from that baseline, but "improved" is relative. If your inbound lead hits a marketing automation platform, gets scored, routes to an SDR queue, and then waits for someone to pick it up during business hours, you're easily burning 4-12 hours. If the routing logic is broken (and it usually is for edge cases like enterprise leads hitting an SMB queue, or leads from acquired product lines that haven't been re-mapped), you can lose days.
Benchmark: Best-in-class inbound response time is under 5 minutes during business hours. If you're above 30 minutes, you're leaking pipeline.
Qualification Handoffs: 1-3 Days Lost
The SDR qualifies a lead and needs to hand it to an AE. Sounds simple. In practice:
- The SDR marks the lead as qualified but doesn't convert it to an opportunity for another day because they're batching their admin work.
- The AE gets the notification but is in back-to-back calls and doesn't review the notes until the next morning.
- The AE has questions about the qualification and messages the SDR on Slack. The SDR responds two hours later.
- The AE finally reaches out to the prospect 2-3 days after the original qualification.
That's 2-3 days of cycle time that delivered zero value to the buyer. They filled out a form, had a good conversation with someone, and then heard nothing for 72 hours.
Benchmark: Qualification-to-first-AE-contact should be under 4 hours. Every day of delay after qualification reduces conversion rates by approximately 10-15%.
Discovery to Proposal: 3-7 Days of Internal Friction
The AE completes discovery and needs to build a proposal. Here's where it gets ugly:
- The AE needs pricing for a non-standard configuration. They Slack the deal desk or their manager. Response time: 4-24 hours.
- The proposal requires a custom SOW section. The AE writes a draft, sends it to their manager for review, waits for feedback, revises. Elapsed time: 2-3 days.
- The AE needs a customer reference or case study for the prospect's industry. They ask marketing. Marketing says they'll "look into it." The AE follows up two days later.
- The proposal tool requires manual data entry because it's not integrated with the CRM. The AE spends an hour copying and pasting account details, contact information, and product configurations.
Meanwhile, the buyer is out there evaluating your competitors, who might be faster.
Benchmark: Discovery-to-proposal delivery should be 24-48 hours for standard deals, 3-5 days for complex or custom configurations.
Pricing Approvals: 1-5 Days of Queue Time
This is the single biggest internal bottleneck I see in mid-market and enterprise sales cycles. A rep needs a discount approved. The approval workflow looks like this:
- Discounts under 10%: manager approval (usually fast, 2-4 hours)
- Discounts 10-20%: VP approval (often 1-2 days because VPs are in meetings all day)
- Discounts 20%+: C-suite approval (2-5 days, often requiring a Slack thread, an email, a brief meeting, and a follow-up)
- Non-standard terms: legal review plus finance review plus VP approval (a week or more)
The problem isn't that approvals exist. It's that the approval workflow is manual, sequential, and opaque. The rep submits a request and then waits, checking Slack every few hours for a response. There's no SLA, no escalation path, and no visibility into where the request is in the queue.
Benchmark: Standard discount approvals should complete within 4 hours during business hours. Non-standard terms should have a 48-hour SLA with defined escalation.
Legal and Contract Review: 3-14 Days (Sometimes More)
Contract review is where deals go to die slowly. The typical flow:
- Sales sends the order form to the buyer.
- The buyer sends it to their legal team.
- Their legal redlines it and sends it back (3-5 days on their side, and you can't control this).
- Your sales team receives the redlines and forwards them to your legal team.
- Your legal reviews and responds (2-5 days, and you can control this).
- Two more rounds of back-and-forth. Each round adds 3-5 days.
Total elapsed time: 2-4 weeks for a deal that both parties have already agreed to in principle.
The solution isn't to eliminate legal review. It's to pre-approve standard terms, create a library of pre-negotiated fallback positions, and establish an SLA for legal turnaround. One client reduced their average contract review cycle from 18 days to 6 by pre-approving their 20 most commonly redlined clauses and giving sales reps authority to accept those changes without legal involvement.
Benchmark: Contract execution should add no more than 5-7 business days for standard terms, 10-15 for heavily negotiated enterprise agreements.
Contract Execution: 1-3 Days of Unnecessary Delay
The contract is agreed. Now someone needs to sign it. In 2025, this should take minutes. And yet:
- The signer is traveling and doesn't check their DocuSign queue for two days.
- The contract was sent to the wrong signer (the economic buyer, not the legal signatory).
- The PO process on the buyer's side requires a separate approval chain that nobody mentioned until now.
- Someone needs to countersign internally and they're on PTO.
Benchmark: Once terms are agreed, execution should complete within 24 hours. If it's regularly taking longer, your process has gaps.
Adding It Up
When you total these internal friction points, you're looking at 10-25 days of cycle time that have nothing to do with the buyer's evaluation process. For a company with a 60-day average sales cycle, that means 15-40% of the cycle is pure internal waste.
Now multiply that across your entire pipeline. If you have 200 active opportunities at any given time and you could reduce your cycle by even 10 days, you're accelerating revenue recognition by thousands of deal-days per quarter. For a company doing $20M in ARR with a 60-day cycle, compressing that to 50 days represents roughly $3.3M in accelerated revenue over the course of a year.
That's not theoretical. That's math.
The Quote-to-Cash Connection
Most of these friction points live in the quote-to-cash process, the sequence that starts when a rep is ready to propose a deal and ends when the contract is signed and the customer is provisioned. It's the most operationally complex part of the sales cycle, and it's where process complexity tends to accumulate unchecked.
The root cause is usually the same: a Q2C process that was designed when the company was doing $5M in revenue with one product and a simple pricing model. Now the company does $30M across three products with usage-based pricing, channel partnerships, and multi-year contracts. The process didn't scale. It just got more manual.
Fixing it requires a systematic approach:
Map the current state end-to-end. Document every step from "AE decides to propose" to "customer is live." Include every handoff, every approval, every system interaction. Time each step. You'll be surprised at what you find.
Identify the bottlenecks. Usually it's 2-3 specific points that account for 70%+ of the delay. Focus there first.
Automate approvals with guardrails. Define clear approval matrices based on deal size, discount level, and term complexity. Auto-approve anything within standard parameters. Route exceptions immediately to the right approver with all context attached.
Integrate the toolchain. Your CRM, CPQ, contract management, and billing systems should pass data seamlessly. Every manual data transfer is a delay and an error risk.
Set and enforce SLAs. Every internal handoff should have a defined turnaround time and an escalation path when it's missed.
This is exactly the work we do in our Quote-to-Cash Optimization engagements. The typical result is a 20-35% reduction in sales cycle length, driven almost entirely by removing internal friction rather than changing the buyer experience.
Making the Case Internally
If you're a RevOps leader reading this and nodding along, the challenge isn't diagnosing the problem. It's getting the organization to prioritize fixing it. Here's what works:
Attach a dollar figure. "Our Q2C process is inefficient" gets a shrug. "Our Q2C process is adding 15 days to every deal, which represents $2.8M in delayed revenue recognition annually" gets attention. Do the math for your specific business.
Start with one deal stage. You don't need to rebuild the entire Q2C process at once. Pick the biggest bottleneck (usually pricing approvals or contract review) and fix that first. Show the impact. Then expand.
Get sales leadership on board. Reps feel this pain every day. If you can show the sales VP that their team is losing deals (not just slowing them down, but actually losing them) because of internal process delays, you'll have a powerful ally.
This kind of operational improvement is also a natural part of annual planning. If you're heading into a new fiscal year, building Q2C optimization into your operating plan gives it structure, accountability, and budget.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Your buyers aren't asking you to be slower. Your competitors aren't waiting while you route approvals through three levels of management. The market rewards speed, not recklessness, but well-governed velocity.
Every day of unnecessary cycle time is a day your competitor can use to advance their deal. Every broken handoff is a moment where the buyer's enthusiasm cools. Every manual approval queue is a bet that the deal will still be there when someone gets around to reviewing it.
The companies that win aren't necessarily the ones with the best product. They're the ones that make it easiest to buy. And that starts with fixing the internal friction that's silently stretching every deal past the point where it should have closed.