Let’s be honest—long B2B sales cycles can be a headache.
Every extra day a deal stays in the pipeline means potential lost revenue.
But what if you could speed things up? With AI and intelligent sales automation, you can shorten your sales cycles and fix other issues in your sales workflows.
The thing is, most sales leaders don’t know where to start. That’s why we’ve put together this handy guide, packed with actionable strategies to help you accelerate your sales cycle for faster revenue generation and more efficient resource allocation.
Let’s start with a few basics.
B2B Sales Cycle: What Is It?
The sales cycle is the process businesses go through to convert a prospect into a customer. Unlike B2C sales, B2B sales cycles are often longer and more complex due to the involvement of multiple decision-makers and higher-value transactions.
Typical stages of a B2B sales cycle include:
- Lead generation
- Lead qualification
- Demo
- Proposal
- Negotiation
- Closing
- Nurturing new customers.
Why B2B Sales Cycles Are So Long?
Several factors are in play, resulting in extended sales cycles.
One of the most significant is the need to achieve consensus among multiple stakeholders. In B2B transactions, decisions often require input from various departments, which can slow down the process considerably.
HubSpot’s study revealed that, on average, sales reps must engage with five decision-makers for a single purchase. And it’s this multi-stakeholder involvement that 28% of sales reps believe causes many deals to fall through.
Additionally, complex buyer journeys mean prospects require more time to research and understand the product, especially for high-value or technical offerings. According to Gartner, at the evaluation stage, B2B buyers tend to shortlist and assess at least five vendors before making their final choice, which is a lengthy process in itself.
Source: Gartner
Internal bureaucracy within the buyer’s organization, such as lengthy approval processes and budget reviews, further drags out the timeline.
As outlined in the CSO Insights report, about 74% of B2B sales to new customers take at least four months to close, with nearly half (46%) taking seven months or more.
🤖 The Role of Intelligent Automation in B2B Sales
In B2B sales, time is money, and long sales cycles can drain both.
This is where intelligent automation steps in, offering a way to streamline and accelerate the sales process. By leveraging AI, you can automate repetitive tasks like lead scoring and follow-ups, but more importantly, you can tap into a wealth of insights from current and past sales conversations.
As I’ve said before, Most companies are sitting on a goldmine of insights and don’t even know it.
Intelligent automation and AI help you uncover patterns from those countless hours of calls and meetings, allowing you to:
- Predict customer behavior with more accuracy
- Refine your sales approach
- Make your team more efficient
- Cut down the time it takes to close deals.
The upside of it all? When you can anticipate what drives your customers and tailor your strategies accordingly, the entire sales cycle shortens naturally.
So, what intelligent sales automation tools should you employ to close deals faster and waste fewer resources on bad-fit leads? We discuss this in the next section.
Four Strategies for Using Intelligent Automation to Shorten Your B2B Sales Cycles
1. Automate Lead Scoring and Prioritization
One of the biggest challenges in sales is figuring out which leads are worth your time. You might spend hours trying to close a deal with someone who isn’t ready for your product, wasting valuable resources on a dead end.
With intelligent automation, you can streamline this process by automatically scoring and prioritizing leads based on key data points like engagement level, company size, and past interactions.
AI-driven tools analyze this information in real-time, so your sales team can zero in on the leads most likely to convert. The quicker you qualify your leads, the faster you can move them through the sales cycle.
2. Personalize Communications at Scale
Follow-ups in sales are everything, but they’re also time-consuming—especially when they need to be personalized.
But here’s the kicker: companies that grow faster pull in 40% more of their revenue through personalization compared to those that grow more slowly. That said, asking your reps to personalize hundreds of emails is a big ask, right? With intelligent automation, this becomes a non-issue.
For example, tools like Momentum can automatically send personalized follow-up emails based on what your rep and lead discussed during a sales call. It also auto-populates the lead’s details from your sales calls, saving your reps the hassle of manual entry. These same personalized follow-up emails are opened directly in Gmail, making it even easier to stay connected with your leads.
When your follow-ups are automated to this level, your sales teams can move on to the next opportunity more quickly.
3. Integrate CRM with AI Tools for Seamless Data Flow
Is your data working for you, or are you still trying to piece together the puzzle manually? Data silos can slow down your sales cycles, too.
As it currently stands, just over a third of executives believe their CRM currently offers a complete single source of truth about their customers, yet 90% see the value in having this capability.
The solution? Intelligent sales automation tools (like Momentum) that support CRM backfills and data hygiene capabilities, ensuring all your customer-related data ends up in Salesforce or any other CRM system you use.
4. Enhance Decision-Making with AI-Driven Insights
The final strategy revolves around data insights, both quantitative and qualitative. As you may know, in B2B sales, decision-making is frequently delayed by the necessity of data analysis and achieving consensus among stakeholders.
AI can speed this up by providing instant sales insights into customer behavior, deal progress, and potential risks such as customer churn.
Momentum's AI signals, for instance, pull out key insights from customer interactions automatically, delivering them directly to your team’s Slack channels. This means no more digging through endless reports—just the info you need, right when you need it. Plus, with tools like deal rooms, all your essential deal details are centralized, keeping everyone aligned and moving forward together.
⚡ Other Tips and Tricks to Help You Close B2B Sales Deals Faster
Although smart automation can greatly speed up your sales process, there are other tactics you can use to maintain a steady momentum.
A few of them are:
- Align Sales and Marketing — In 2023, for 15% of sales professionals, the lack of sales and marketing alignment was their main challenge. Hold weekly sync meetings between sales and marketing to discuss lead quality, campaign effectiveness, and any adjustments needed to combat this. It will also help if you set shared KPIs to ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Engage Multiple Stakeholders Early — Deals often fall through when too many stakeholders get involved late in the process. To prevent this, identify and engage key stakeholders early in the sales cycle so you can address their concerns before they become dealbreakers. A simple way to do this is to ask your main contact during your initial meeting to introduce you to other buyers involved in the process.
- Simplify Your Sales Process — When did you last look at your sales process? Maybe it’s not your leads that are hard to sell to. Maybe it’s your sales process that slows things down. Streamlining your process—reducing unnecessary steps, simplifying contracts, and making it easier for prospects to say “yes”—can lead to faster deals.
❓FAQs
Is intelligent sales automation only for large companies?
Not at all. Intelligent sales automation can benefit businesses of all sizes. Many tools are scalable, allowing small and mid-sized companies to start with basic automation and expand as they grow.
How do I measure the success of intelligent automation in my sales process?
Track sales metrics like lead conversion rates, sales cycle length, and customer satisfaction. Compare these metrics before and after implementing automation to gauge its impact.
Can intelligent automation help with post-sale processes?
Absolutely. Automation can manage post-sale tasks like customer onboarding, follow-ups, and even upsell opportunities, ensuring a smooth transition from sales to long-term customer relationships.
Closing Thoughts
The length of your B2B sales cycle can vary based on several factors—some you can control and others you can’t. The key is to focus on what you can influence.
Take the first step by trying out a strategy or two, and keep refining your approach as you go. Stay proactive in managing your sales process and always be on the lookout for ways to make it more efficient. And don’t worry, you don’t have to do it all alone—Momentum can handle the heavy lifting.
Chat with our team today to see how Momentum can help you shorten your sales cycles.