Ask B2B sales leaders how long their sales cycle is, and you’ll get a reasonably specific answer – something like “90 to 120 days”. But ask buyers how long their buying process is, and you’ll hear something very different.
Our Buyer Experience Study shows that buyers say the process takes about 12 months, while Outreach.io reports the average sales cycle is just 117 days.
This finding aligns perfectly with the fact that buyers tell us that they typically engage about two-thirds of the way through their process — roughly the last three to four months of that 12-month process.
And, on average, the buying group has reached consensus on a favorite vendor by the time they reach that 70% mark.
In other words, by the time sellers are brought in, the choice has largely been made. What follows during the final third of a buying process isn’t a selection process — it’s a validation process dressed up as a sales cycle.
It’s buying journey theater, with sales playing the part of supporting player rather than protagonist.
Buyers Choose Before Sales Begins – About 80% of the Time
We now have solid data showing that the decision is often made before a seller ever enters the conversation:
- 81% of buyers say they choose a favorite before speaking to a sales rep.
- Buyers report engaging sellers at around the 70% mark in their journey. When buyers engage is not influenced by whether or not sellers are reaching out to them.
Which means that by the time a seller gets involved, the buyer has already formed a preference and is engaging in order to confirm it.
Sales as Compliance Theater
So why do buyers engage in elaborate sales processes — RFIs, RFPs, vendor evaluations, procurement meetings — if they’ve already made up their minds?
Because buying in the enterprise is rarely a simple matter of preference. It’s a system with rules, processes, and internal politics. For large deals, the buying organization needs a paper trail:
- To show Finance and Procurement that due diligence was done
- To justify the decision to a broader group of stakeholders
- To defend against scrutiny if the decision is later questioned.
The result is a structured sales process that looks like a decision-making activity but often functions as post-decision justification. Buying groups may even convince themselves that the conclusion is not pre-determined (see my article on Motivated Reasoning), but in most cases, it simply is, and the purpose is to make it look like a real competition.
The Real Sales Process – in Five Acts
In this model, the sales process is really much longer and much less direct than we have thought of it. We can think of it as a play in five acts that align more closely with the real structure of the buyer journey:
Act I: The Day-One Shortlist
- Buyers start their journey with a strong sense of who the top vendors are.
- Our research shows they place 4 of the 5 vendors on their shortlist immediately, based on brand familiarity, peer input, and prior exposure.
Act II: Expanding the List
- Buyers add one more vendor to the mix as they explore further — usually based on a specific capability, a strong referral, or a late discovery.
- Non-primary buyer personas are formative in shaping the parameters of a potential purchase through budgetary, IT fit and security, and requirements for vendor viability.
Act III: The Long Internal Debate
- The majority of the journey is spent evaluating, debating, and aligning internally on which vendor will ultimately win.
- This stage is filled with stakeholder alignment, establishing requirements, backchanneling to social networks, engaging with consultants and analysts.
- Off stage, the main action of the play is concluded and its resolution is determined as buying groups reach consensus on a favorite vendor. This process often fails, resulting in no purchase/ maintenance of status quo.
Act IV: Engagement with Sales
- Sellers are brought in to validate assumptions, run demos, and answer outstanding questions.
- This engagement is often more about reassurance than persuasion.
- All five vendors that make the shortlist end up playing a role in this Act. Each will enter the buying account in their pipeline hopes. But the truth is, the hero in this story was chosen long ago.
Act V: Crowning the Winner
- One vendor is selected — usually the one favored since early in the journey.
- The remaining steps are compliance rituals: negotiations, procurement, and contract approval.
Sales Still Has a Critical – and Familiar – Job
In 80% of buying processes in B2B, the above is the plot of the story – sellers are not the protagonists in these stories — they’re the supporting cast. And they’re usually brought in after the most pivotal scenes have already played out – offstage.
However, that leaves a critical 20% who engage with sellers before deciding. In large-account scenarios, where sellers are able to engage accounts and develop relations even when there is no current buying process, sellers can have extraordinary influence.
For some organizations, these large-account scenarios represent most or all of a company’s revenue opportunities. If that is the case for you, the old rules of relationship building and selling still apply. Where sellers become trusted resources – either from working with buyers immediately prior to the start of a buying process, or through relationships developed in prior buying processes – they are able to engage and influence the buyer throughout the entire journey. Often, sellers may provide the ultimate spark that sets the buying process in motion.
Such sellers give their organizations a tremendous competitive advantage.
The more sellers in these scenarios can develop relationships that allow them to increase the odds of engaging prior to the buyer deciding, the more effective the sellers will be. Such sellers reduce sales process theater and increase their influence and likelihood of winning.
This is the crux of the challenge: the earlier sellers can build meaningful relationships, the more they can shift the odds in their favor – and avoid being reduced to actors in someone else’s script.
Recasting the Roles of the Revenue Team
Understanding that the decision is often made before sales begins changes how we think about growth. It shifts the focus upstream:
- For Marketing: Success means influencing the 70% of the journey that’s invisible – and even the segment of accounts that are not yet in market. This means building brand gravity through meaningful content and experiences – fostering affinity by being present and relevant before and during buying journeys.
- For Sales: The paths to success include pre-journey relationship building, and in-journey informal influence — through networking, peer relationships, and industry presence. Being the vendor and the seller that buyers already trust increases the odds of participating in the part of the buying journey where consensus is formed. Where sellers are responding to buyers who reach out, begin by establishing whether they are on the top of the short list or somewhere else.
The Danger of Mistaking Theater for Reality
Treating the sales cycle as the full buying journey is not just inaccurate – it’s dangerous. It causes:
- Misplaced budget priorities: Overinvesting in sales enablement and late-stage assets that are unlikely to influence buyer choices
- Miscalculated attribution: Giving credit to the final act rather than the ensemble
- Buyer fatigue: Bombarding buyers with outreach and process that adds no value
- Mis-forecasting: All competitors on the final shortlist will believe they are in with a chance, when the reality is very different. At first live contact, sellers should work to understand their position on the shortlist.
So What Should We Do Instead?
To adapt, B2B revenue teams need to treat the entire journey – not just the sales cycle – as their the selling cycle.
Build Brand Gravity
- Awareness, Affinity, and mental Availability matter more than ever (citation)
- Buyers prefer to choose vendors they already trust — not just the ones who respond fastest.
Instrument the 70%
- Use behavioral data (intent signals/ dark-funnel insights) to see every relevant buying journey and to respond immediately and effectively to buyers entering the market
- Produce and make value content and experiences available to key buyer personas, reducing friction and reasons for non-primary buyers to be skeptical.
Reframe Sales Enablement
- Enable sellers not just to close deals, but to build relationships outside of buying journeys
- And to deliver value (content and experiences) to in-market buyers outside of live conversations.
Play the Long Game
- Deals can’t be won on day one of a buying journey, but they are lost on day one all the time. Be there to prevent day one losses.
- Participate genuinely in the community of practitioners your solutions serve.
In today’s complex buying landscape, trust, value, and strategic engagement are the cornerstones of success. By building brand gravity, leveraging behavioral data to interpret buyer interest, and committing to the long-term relationships that foster trust, organizations can position themselves as indispensable partners rather than mere vendors.
Reasonable Skepticism and You
I recognize that what I am laying out above is a radical departure from how B2B buying and selling are commonly conceived. And I know that many readers will be saying to themselves, “That’s just not how it works in our business.”
To you I would say, perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps you do a better job than most of developing relationships in advance. Maybe you really are effective at engaging early-stage buyers.
But before dismissing what has been laid out here, I would ask you to talk to your buyers. And not just the ones you’ve known across your last three roles, but the ones who came in as a ‘blue bird’ last quarter, and the ones who you found through MQLs. Ask them when their buying journeys started. Ask them if they’d evaluated you before. I think what you’ll find will match what you have just read.
