Sales Cycle Length measures the average amount of time it takes to convert prospective customers to won customers. Known as the sales pipeline, the journey from prospect to lead to paying customer involves four key stages: Awareness, Intent, Desire, and Action. These stages (known as the AIDA model) when successfully completed, signal the end of your sales cycle - which then moves towards post-sales and support.
Sales cycles are generally longer for complex, enterprise solutions with a higher selling price, when selling to new customers versus to existing customers, and when selling into new markets.
Given where your business sits on this spectrum, a shorter sales cycle is not necessarily better. Instead, you want to understand the various factors at play in your specific sales cycles to determine the standard range for your context. From there you can take steps to optimize each stage.
Tracking this metric is important for setting sales targets and forecasting revenue. Other benefits include having a robust picture of the time, effort, and resources required on average to win each customer.
If your Sales Cycle Length is longer than average, you may need to look into improving your sales processes. Reasons for abnormally long Sales Cycle Length include poorly qualified leads, insufficient sales training, inappropriate sales channels, insufficient sales enablement assets, or a free trial period that is too long.
