The Reason Sales Cycles Are Getting Longer

This is the second in a series of blog posts on our latest research: Creating Customer Consensus . To read more, click here.

Over the past 8 months, the CEB Sales Leadership Council has been researching the answers to the most pressing challenge faced by sales organizations today: influencing the purchasing decisions of the increasing number of diverse stakeholders involved in B2B sales deliberations today. When we asked 80 of the world’s prominent sales leaders, as part of research interviews conducted with CEB Sales member organizations, to describe the biggest challenge facing their function today, the overwhelming response was to point to two forces that are dramatically reducing the influence of sales teams today:

Customers armed with more information are delaying supplier involvement, and
The growing number of very diverse stakeholders weighing on purchasing decisions that is significantly increasing the requirements for building consensus.

So what strategies are sales teams around the world employing in order to sell to diverse stakeholders and build consensus? It turns out that selling to groups of stakeholders mostly requires a lot of hard work. Essentially, the traditional approach can be boiled down to two things:

Gaining Access to Individuals—the first challenge most sellers encounter is identifying who is even part of the buying group and finding a way to get in front of each and every one of those individuals.
Closing Individuals—in order to win over all individual stakeholders, sellers need to identify individuals’ needs and ensure that their messaging and offering are positioned to strongly resonate with each individual part of the buying group.

However, what our research revealed is that those individual conversations with stakeholders are becoming harder as decision making groups become more diverse. For one thing, most core sellers are ill equipped to call on CFOs. But more troubling is the fact that tracking down more stakeholders and personalizing our offering to meet their needs simply takes longer. In fact, our data analyses showed that on average stakeholder diversity accounts for a full 20% increase in sales cycle time.

Ultimately however, the real pain of consensus selling is not only that deals take longer but also that it is costing a lot of money. Sales leaders report that even when their sellers do manage to gain access and position their offering to meet stakeholder needs, they are winning smaller deals at compressed margins. Why? Well that is precisely the question that CEB Sales set out to answer with this year’s research: how do diverse customer groups buy, and how do they reach consensus?

Want to learn what CEB Sales learned? Stay tuned for our next post on this series.

CEB Sales members, register to attend one of our upcoming Annual Executive Retreats near you to learn more about the results of our study: Creating Customer Consensus. Also, listen to Brent Adamson discuss the main findings from our research in this webinar.

Please share with us below how consensus requirements are impacting your business.