Cut the Fat, How Tech Sales Teams Can Shorten Their Sales Cycles

Long sales cycles are the silent killer of revenue velocity. They drain cash, deflate teams, and derail forecasts. But here’s the challenge, most of the friction comes from inside the business, not from the buyer.

If your deals are dragging, it’s probably not because your prospects are being difficult. It’s because your internal processes are.

The Sacred Sales Process

Tech companies love process. We build detailed stage definitions. We have CRM fields for every micro-step. We talk endlessly about MEDDIC, SPIN, and qualification frameworks. But in the rush to systematise, we often forget something crucial, buyers don’t care about your process. They care about progress.

Too many sales stages are designed for forecasting, not selling. They’re linear, inflexible, and mapped around your internal needs, not the buyer’s actual journey.

According to Gartner, the modern B2B buyer journey is non-linear and often chaotic. Buyers revisit decisions, loop in new stakeholders, and change scope mid-cycle.

And yet we still expect reps to march neatly from sales stage to sales stage.  Your sales process should serve the buyer, not an internal dashboard.

Handoffs or Drop-offs?

Sales in tech is a relay race. SDRs pass to AEs. AEs bring in Solutions Engineers. Then Legal, Procurement, and Finance all get a go. The buyer, meanwhile, is trying to get a job done, sometimes with increasing frustration.

Every handoff is a chance to drop the baton - and most companies are dropping it more than they realise.

What if you stopped thinking of your team as a relay team and started treating it like a deal squad?  Buyers don’t want to be re-sold the same thing by several different people. They want a seamless, consistent conversation. That only happens when ownership is clear, and handoffs are frictionless.

Internal Latency

Let’s talk about the real bottlenecks: Legal. Procurement. Proposals. Redlines. Approval chains longer than your arm. It’s where deals go to die, or at least go dark for weeks.

You can have the best discovery process in the world, but if your deal gets stuck waiting for someone to review a redline or approve a discount, the whole machine grinds to a halt.

So what’s the fix? It’s not better negotiation training. It’s simply fewer things to negotiate.

Top-performing companies are building “Fast Lane” processes which are pre-approved commercial terms, modular contract templates, and tiered legal review rules based on deal size and risk. Tools like Ironclad and Juro are automating contract workflows. And surprise, surprise deals are closing faster. Docusign have made a good business out of showing that automated agreement processes reduce cycle time by up to 30%.

Simply put, reducing internal latency means not treating every SaaS deal like a billion-dollar acquisition.

Time to Flip Sales Enablement

Sales enablement done well can be game-changing. But today, most of it is still inward-facing, training reps, updating playbooks, pushing new content. That’s useful. But here’s a more radical thought.  Sales Enablement should enable your buyer.

Why should your champion have to create their own internal deck to secure budget? Why not give them a nicely packaged one-pager they can forward straight to their CFO? Why not co-build a mutual action plan?

According to Gartner, buyer enablement assets cut buying group confusion by half and increase deal velocity. This is important based on information in the same study reveals 36% believe confusing information material is the biggest deal breaker. 

And yet most companies still focus solely on rep readiness while leaving the buyer to figure it out on their own.

The new enablement playbook? Think beyond the rep. Think through the buyer’s friction.

Change The Conversation - From Sales Cycle, to Time-to-Yes

Let’s be honest “sales cycle length” is a lagging indicator. It tells you how long it took, but not why. The smarter metric? Time-to-Yes.

How long does it take from demo to verbal commit? From proposal to procurement approval? From contract sent to signature?

Those are the choke points that matter. Heatmap your funnel. Track the dead zones. Measure where deals stall, not just where they sit.

And then do the unthinkable (and what is often easier said than done!), remove internal requirements that don’t serve those moments. Kill the extra approvals. Challenge the stage gates. Trust your team to move faster.

Speed is a Trust Signal

In deal cycles moving fast means respecting your buyer’s time.  Speed shows confidence. Speed shows clarity. Speed shows you’re easy to do business with.

So if your sales cycles are too long, stop blaming your buyers and start looking at your own processes. Ask: is this designed for revenue - or for reporting?

You don’t need more rigor. You need less red tape.

You don’t need more stages.

You need fewer stalls.

You don’t need to fix the funnel.

You need to cut the fat.