Why is our sales cycle getting longer? Buyers are slower, and your number is probably wrong

The board slide says the average sales cycle went from 84 days to 112. Somebody asks why. The VP of Sales says buyers are cautious, budgets are under the microscope, and procurement has gotten aggressive. Everyone nods, and the CEO moves to the next slide.

The VP is right about the buyers.

Buyers are slowing down. Budgets are tighter, so every financial decision gets a level of scrutiny it did not get even two or three years ago. Sales has gotten harder than ever, and the reps still winning are the ones who know exactly what to do at every step of the process and execute on it. If your system is still set up for what worked four or five years ago, nobody should be surprised when the cycle slows way, way down.

That is half the answer. The other half lives in your CRM.

Almost every CRO or founder I work with can look me in the eye and tell me their sales cycle. Then we peel back the layers of the CRM and calculate it at its current pace, and it is often far longer than the number they gave me. Meanwhile, they have already built the year’s forecast on that number and presented it to the board.

Oops.

So when a CEO asks “why is our sales cycle getting longer,” the answer sits in four places. Buyer behavior is one of them. The other three are how you measured it, what kind of deals you sold and what your reps do with the deal record. You can check all four in an afternoon, in the CRM you already have, before you rebuild a forecast or a sales process around the wrong number.

Are sales cycles getting longer for everyone?

Not in a way an average can show you, and that is the problem with averages. An industry average blends the fast teams with the slow ones, so it says little about where your team sits. The teams that adapted to tougher buyers move faster. Everyone else sits in the slow end of the distribution, and the blended number hides them.

The strain shows up in quota. Ebsta’s data shows the share of reps missing quota climbed from 69% in 2024 to 78% in 2025, according to its 2025 GTM Benchmarks (April 2025), built on $48 billion in pipeline data.

So the industry average will not tell you whether your cycle is getting longer, or why. Your CRM will, if you measure it the right way.

Step 1: How to calculate sales cycle length correctly

Most cycle numbers in board decks are an average of days from create date to close date, across every deal that closed this quarter. That number mixes three problems together. First, it uses the mean. One enterprise deal that sat in the pipeline for 400 days drags the whole quarter up. Use the median.

Second, it groups by close quarter. A quarter where reps finally closed out a pile of old deals will show a “longer cycle,” even if every new deal is moving faster than ever. Group deals by the quarter they were created instead, so you compare cohorts that started under the same conditions.

Third, it blends outcomes. Won deals, lost deals and deals that died of no decision move at different speeds for different reasons. Measure won deals on their own. Track how long lost and no-decision deals sit open as a separate number, because that one tells you about qualification, not about buyers.

Rerun the number this way before you do anything else, and before the board sees another forecast built on it.

Step 2: Did the mix of deals change?

A cycle can get longer with no change in buyer behavior at all, because you sold different deals. Sales cycles scale with deal size. A bigger contract usually brings more approvers, and an expansion deal with an existing customer usually skips steps a new logo has to go through.

So check four shifts between the two cohorts you are comparing:

• Deal size. Did the average contract get bigger? A team that moved upmarket on purpose should expect a longer cycle and celebrate it, not panic about it.
• New versus expansion. If last year’s bookings leaned on expansion and this year leans on new logos, the blended cycle goes up.
• Segment. A new vertical or a new region usually brings new buying committees and new procurement steps.
• Source. Referral and inbound deals tend to move faster than cold outbound. If outbound grew as a share of pipeline, the blended cycle grows with it.

Compare the medians inside each slice. If the cycle held steady for each deal type and only the mix changed, you do not have a sales process problem. You have a forecasting assumption to update.

Step 3: Is the CRM recording when deals start and stop?

This part rarely makes the board slide. The cycle length in your CRM is two timestamps that people type, and people change how they type them. Four habits move those timestamps without any change in the buyer: late deal creation, pushed close dates, reopened deals and batch updates.

Late deal creation. Plenty of reps open the deal record at the proposal stage, after weeks of calls that never touched the CRM. Their cycles look short. When a new sales leader enforces “create the deal at the first qualified meeting,” the cycle jumps by a month overnight. The buyers did not change. The stopwatch started earlier.

Close dates that get pushed. Ebsta and Pavilion’s 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarks, an analysis of 4.2 million opportunities across 530 companies, found deal slippage rose to 44% in 2023, and that deals with close dates moved more than three times saw win rates drop 77%. A team that pushes close dates a quarter at a time, instead of closing dead deals out as lost, produces won deals with long, ugly histories and a pipeline full of deals that died months ago.

Reopened and recycled deals. A lost deal that gets reopened six months later often keeps its original create date. One of those can add half a year to a small cohort’s average.

Batch updates. Stages that get moved in bulk the night before pipeline review make every stage-level number meaningless, because the dates show when someone tidied up, not when the buyer moved.

Pull every won deal from both cohorts and look at three things: the first activity logged against the account versus the deal create date, the number of close date changes per deal, and how many deals moved through two or more stages on the same day. If those patterns changed between cohorts, part of your longer cycle lives in the data.

Step 4: Which stage got longer?

Once the measurement holds up, find the stage that moved. A longer cycle is often one or two stages stretching, not every stage growing a little. Pull the median days spent in each stage, for won deals, for each creation cohort.

• In HubSpot, every deal pipeline stage has a “Date entered [stage]” property, which gives you a timestamp per stage per deal. Subtract consecutive stages in an export, or build a custom report on those properties.
• In Salesforce, the Opportunity History report type includes stage duration, so you can see how long each opportunity sat in each stage.

Then line the cohorts up side by side. These are example numbers to show the shape of the analysis, not client data:

In this example, the team does not have a “longer sales cycle.” It has a procurement stage that nearly tripled. Better discovery calls and a new sequencing tool would not move it at all.

What does each stage tell you?

The stage that stretched points at the work that needs doing. Longer early stages point at qualification, longer middle stages at a bigger buying group, and longer late stages at requirements raised too late. A total that grew with no single stage moving points back at the data.

Early stages getting longer (discovery, qualification) usually means the team is spending time on deals that should not be in the pipeline, or nobody agrees on what qualifies a deal. Check how many of the deals in that cohort eventually closed lost, and whether the exit criteria for discovery are written down anywhere.

Middle stages getting longer (demo, evaluation, proposal) usually means the buying group grew and the rep is still selling to one person. Check how many contacts with a real role are attached to won deals in each cohort.

Late stages getting longer (security, legal, procurement) usually means the team meets those people for the first time at the end. The move is to surface security, legal and procurement requirements in discovery, not to push harder at the end.

No single stage moved, but the total did usually points back to Step 3. Gaps between stages, or time before the first stage, is where late deal creation and batch updates hide.

When is a longer sales cycle fine?

When you chose it. A team that moved upmarket, added a larger product tier or started selling to regulated industries should see a longer cycle, and the right response is to update the forecast model and the pipeline coverage target to match. Plan for the cycle you picked instead of fighting it.

The cycle that deserves alarm is the one nobody can explain stage by stage, because the team will try to shorten it with activity, and more activity aimed at the wrong stage only adds volume to the slow part.

Where should you start?

Start with Step 1 this week. Re-cut the number by creation cohort, using medians, won deals only. It takes an hour and it decides whether the rest of this is worth doing. If the re-cut cycle held steady, you have a measurement problem, not a buyer problem. If it grew, Steps 2 to 4 show you where.

If you want an outside read on what your CRM can and cannot tell you about your pipeline, take our free CRM diagnostic. For the related problem of individual deals that have stopped moving, see Why is my HubSpot forecast always wrong?, and for the broader data behind forecast accuracy, see The State of B2B Revenue 2026.

You can walk into the next board meeting with “buyers are cautious,” or with the one stage that moved and what you are doing about it. Only one of those survives a follow-up question.