What Is the Average Sales Cycle Length? + How to Calculate It

What is average sales cycle length? Average sales cycle length is the average length of time it takes for someone to progress through your sales pipeline and become a customer.

Your sales cycle is one of the most critical elements of your business. It’s how you turn people from leads into customers and generate revenue for your business. You might be looking to measure how long that cycle usually lasts for you — that’s where average sales cycle length comes in.

But what is average sales cycle length? Well, that’s the question we’re here to answer. In this blog post, we’ll explore the following:

• What is average sales cycle length?
• How do you calculate average sales cycle length?
• Why does sales cycle duration matter?
• What is the average sales cycle length for businesses?
• How to improve your sales cycle duration

Keep reading to learn more, then subscribe to Revenue Weekly — our email newsletter — for more helpful digital marketing info!

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What is average sales cycle length?

Average sales cycle length is the amount of time it takes the average customer to move through your sales pipeline and convert.

How do you calculate average sales cycle length?

To calculate average sales cycle length, simply add up the sales cycle length of all your customers and then divide by the total number of customers. As a formula, it looks like this:

average sales cycle length = sum of all sales cycle lengths / total number of customers

Why does sales cycle duration matter?

Sales cycle matters because a couple different problems can arise when you take too long to convert someone.

First, the longer they stay in the sales cycle, the greater the chance that they’ll end up leaving before you have the chance to convert them. Secondly, even for those that make it to the end, a slow sales cycle means your revenue will come as a trickle rather than a steady stream.

Basically, a slow sales cycle means fewer sales and less revenue for your business overall. In contrast, a short sales cycle can help you earn more revenue in less time. For that reason, it’s helpful to speed up your sales cycle and drive users to conversion more quickly.

What is the average sales cycle length for businesses?

The average sales cycle length across all businesses is approximately 6–12 months. That said, sales cycle duration varies significantly across different industries.

For example, retail companies — which frequently see people walk into a store and buy something by the time they leave — commonly experience sales cycles that last minutes or hours. Many B2B companies, on the other hand, can expect to spend months or more pursuing a single prospect.

So, be aware that your own company’s average sales cycle might be quite different from what you see at some other companies.

How to improve your sales cycle duration

As we’ve established, it’s usually good to speed up your sales process. But how do you do that?

There are several ways to improve your average sales close times, and we’ll go over four of them below:

1. Hone your audience targeting
2. Reoptimize your campaigns based on data
3. Address prospects’ pain points
4. Automate day-to-day tasks

Read on to learn more!

1. Hone your audience targeting

The first way to shorten your sales cycle is to improve your audience targeting. One possible reason your sales cycle is taking so long is that you’re not targeting the right people. Marketing to people who don’t need your products or services won’t help you.

The best approach is to closely analyze data on your existing customers to see what traits they all have in common. Then you can reoptimize your marketing and sales efforts to target people who match those traits.

If you target businesses, you can apply the same process to your existing clients. Then you can create ideal customer profiles (ICPs), where you list out all the traits your customers commonly share. By targeting businesses that match your ICPs, you can more easily reach the right audience, helping you achieve short sales cycles.

2. Reoptimize your campaigns based on data

Another way to improve your average sales close times is to use data to upgrade your campaigns. If this step isn’t something you’re already doing, you should start! Analytics is the key to improving your marketing and sales over time.

By analyzing data about how your campaigns are performing, as well as looking at data on customer behavior, you can figure out which marketing and sales tactics are most effective. You can then reoptimize your campaigns based on those insights.

With more effective campaigns, you’ll be able to drive conversions faster, shortening your sales cycle.

3. Address prospects’ pain points

If you’re struggling to persuade your prospects to convert, one of the best things you can do is address their pain points. 

Every potential customer has pain points — problems they want fixed, concerns about pricing, uncertainty about your business, and more. By addressing these head-on, you can put your prospects’ minds at ease and make them more confident that your business is the right choice for them. 

So, if you sell ecommerce software and know that a prospect has concerns about user privacy, make sure you take the time to discuss your software’s security features.

4. Automate day-to-day tasks

Finally, you can streamline your sales cycle quite a bit by automating repetitive tasks. 

Think about how many small, mundane tasks — like sending out marketing emails — you perform each day. How much of your time do those tasks eat up? What about for everyone on your team? Odds are, you’d be far more efficient if you didn’t have to spend so much time on those things.

That’s where automation software comes in. With a marketing or sales automation tool, you can let the software handle basic, repetitive tasks while you work on other things. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Nutshell often come with sales automation features.

Meet MarketingCloudFX:

One platform tracking countless metrics and driving stellar results.

Learn More About Our Proprietary Software

Optimize your sales cycle with MarketingCloudFX and Nutshell

If you want help improving your marketing, look no further than WebFX. We’ve been in the digital marketing industry for over 28 years, so we know our craft. Plus, partnering with us can get you access to MarketingCloudFX (MCFX), our proprietary marketing platform.

And it gets better! MCFX comes with free seats in Nutshell, one of the best CRMs on the market. Nutshell can help you view data on your campaigns and customers, plus it comes with sales automation features. In other words, it’s the perfect tool for improving your average sales close times.

Interested in partnering with WebFX and Nutshell? Just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!