Sales cycle

The term covers two related things. First, the sequence of steps a sale goes through: prospecting, first contact, discovery, proposal, negotiation, signature. Second, the length of that sequence, usually counted in days between first contact and signature.

In B2C a cycle can last minutes. In B2B it stretches because several people decide, amounts are larger and the purchase has to fit a budget. An agency selling a 2,000 euro service to a small business owner sometimes signs within a week. A vendor selling software to a 5,000-person company may wait nine months.

Knowing your cycle means knowing when a deal is running late, and how long it takes for prospecting effort to show up in revenue.

A common template has seven stages: identify prospects, make first contact, qualify the need, run the discovery call, present a proposal, handle objections and negotiate, sign. After the signature come onboarding and account management, which prepare the renewal.

Not every sale goes through every stage. A small engagement can merge discovery and proposal into a single call. A complex sale adds stages: technical validation, procurement, a pilot project.

What matters is that the stages in your CRM match your real cycle. Stages copied from a generic template produce durations that mean nothing.

Take the deals signed over a period, for instance the last six months. For each one, count the days between first contact and signature, then average them. Look at the median too: a few very long deals are enough to pull the average up.

Then measure the length of each stage. That is where the real lessons are. If proposals wait three weeks on average for an answer, the problem is not prospecting, it is the decision on the client's side.

Finally, split cycles by deal size and by source. A referred client does not follow the same path as one from cold outreach, and mixing them produces an average that describes neither.

The number of decision makers is the most frequent cause. Every person added to the decision brings meetings, questions and delays. Identifying early who really decides saves you from discovering the CFO at signing time.

Lack of urgency comes next. A prospect with no reason to act now postpones. The job of discovery is precisely to make the cost of the status quo visible.

Then come pointless back and forths: a proposal emailed without a call to walk through it, follow-ups with nothing new to say, a generic demo. Each one adds days without moving the decision.

A long cycle is not always a problem to fix. A sale to a large account will always take longer than a sale to a freelancer. What matters is the gap between your usual cycle and a specific deal: a deal running twice as slow as normal deserves a direct question to the prospect about what is blocking.

Prospecting mostly acts on the start of the cycle: the time between first contact and first meeting. On LinkedIn that stretch has two speeds. Invitations play out fast: in MimikFlow's 2026 LinkedIn Prospecting Observatory (published in French), 64% of acceptances arrived the same day. Replies are slower: 15.2% arrived after the first week and 6.6% after two weeks.

Two levers shorten that start. Reply quickly when a prospect writes, because interest fades within hours. And offer a specific slot as soon as a need is stated, instead of stretching the exchange.

MimikFlow works on both. The AI that answers prospects handles replies as they arrive, within the hours you set, and offers real slots from your calendar as soon as the prospect confirms a need. People who ask to be contacted later get a follow-up on the date they gave, so long cycles are not lost along the way.