Are Shorter Sales Cycles a Wake-up Call for Marketers?

Andrew Rudin

You can't measure change when everything's changing

I can't take credit for that insight--it came from one of my science professors in college. But it stuck with me, and it relates to sales cycles. I always ask, "compared to what?" The vendor's own definition of a sales cycle sometimes changes so frequently, it's hard to discover trends. That said, I emphatically agree with what you have recommended in your last paragraph.

If the sales cycle is measured from 'lead inquiry to purchase,' it assumes those are events relatively static, or they are easy-to-determine milestones. But with outsourced lead generation, user communities, online forums, etc., what, exactly, constitutes 'lead inquiry'? It can take so many forms today, that I'm not sure if the benchmarking considers or examines all the channels where 'lead inquiry' is performed--if it's performed at all, in the traditional sense.

To me, traditional lead inquiry occurs when the salesperson's phone rings, or when he or she receives an email message from a buyer specifically asking for a follow-on step in the buying process. That happens, but it doesn't happen that way all the time. And that doesn't mean that inquiry isn't occurring. It is, but there are so many channels for it, that measuring a milestone event for 'inquiry' today seems a tall order. So by inferring that sales cycles are getting shorter, we might be drawing conclusions that aren't in fact accurate.

The same for 'purchase.' While it seems somewhat easier to measure and control for that event, how do you account for opt-in/opt-out situations that occur in e-commerce and trial uses of software? ("Well, you didn't say you were not going to buy our product!"), or transaction reporting inaccuracies if purchases were made predominantly through indirect or reseller channels?

These situations create measurement vagaries that lead me to question the answers.