Why are B2B sales cycles getting longer?

Buying committees have grown to roughly 6 to 10 stakeholders, finance now gates more purchases, and buyers complete four to five pieces of independent research before contacting a supplier. Benchmarks show cycles lengthening 20 to 30% since 2021, with most of the added time spent stalled in evaluation.

How do I tell a stalled deal from an active one?

Track days since the buyer last initiated contact, not days since you last made contact. A deal where every recent touch came from your side is stalled regardless of how it is staged in your CRM. Set the threshold per stage, since a two-week deal and a four-month deal age differently.

Does faster lead response still matter?

Yes, and it remains one of the cheapest fixes available. It is simply no longer where most cycle time is lost. If your first response is already quick, the next gain is in the evaluation stage rather than in responding faster still.

What should I send a buyer who has gone quiet?

Something they can forward. Your contact is likely presenting internally to people you have never spoken to, so a one-page summary covering cost, expected payback, risks and why now is more useful than asking whether they have questions. Assume the real decision happens in a meeting you are not in.

Your Pipeline Is Not Leaking. It Is Stuck

If your win rate is holding but your pipeline keeps ageing, you do not have a lead problem. B2B sales cycles have lengthened 20 to 30% since 2021. Mid-market deals that closed in 45 to 90 days now routinely take 60 to 120. The extra weeks are spent stalled in evaluation, waiting on stakeholders, data and internal approvals.

Speed of first response is a solved problem and a well-documented one. What happens in weeks three to ten is where the money now sits, and almost nobody instruments it.

Why deals stall now when they did not before

Four things compound:

Buying committees have grown to somewhere between 6 and 10 people on a typical deal. Every additional stakeholder is another calendar to align and another objection you never hear directly.
Finance gates more deals. Spending that a department head used to approve now goes past a CFO, and the CFO was not in any of your conversations.
Buyers self-serve first. Most complete four to five pieces of independent research before contacting a supplier at all, so by the time you speak they have formed a view you had no part in shaping.
The volume of available information has become a problem in itself. 77% of buyers describe their most recent purchase as very complex or difficult, and complexity produces delay rather than a decision.

Those benchmarks come from global and largely US B2B datasets, so treat the exact figures as directional. The UK conditions this month point the same way: job vacancies have fallen to 707,000, the lowest in five years, employer recruitment intentions have hit a record low, and only 57% of employers plan to hire in the next three months. Cautious businesses take longer to sign things.

The two places cycle time is actually lost

Analyses of long cycles keep landing on the same two:

Lead to first touch. Well covered, cheap to fix, and most businesses reading this have already fixed it.
Stalled in evaluation, waiting on a stakeholder, a piece of data, or an internal approval. This is the expensive one and it is nearly always invisible, because a stalled deal looks identical to an active deal in most CRMs.

The failure mode is specific. Your champion wants to buy. They cannot get twenty minutes with the finance director. Your follow-up asks them whether they have any questions. They do not. They have a scheduling problem and a business case they have not written.

What to automate after first contact

Not more chasing. Chasing a stalled deal produces the same non-answer faster.

Detect the stall. Flag any opportunity with no inbound activity from the buyer for a set period, by stage. The threshold differs for a two-week deal and a four-month one, so set it per stage rather than globally. This is the single highest-return change and most CRMs will do it with a saved view and a scheduled alert.
Send material designed to be forwarded, not read. Your champion is presenting internally whether you help or not. A one-page summary with the numbers, the risks and the answer to "why now" is worth more than another check-in email, because it travels into rooms you cannot enter.
Write the business case for them. Pricing, expected payback, what happens if nothing changes. If a CFO is gating the decision, the deal is decided in a document you did not write unless you supply one.
Map the committee explicitly. Record who else is involved and what each of them cares about. A deal with one named contact after three weeks is not a deal, it is a conversation.
Sequence by stage, not by time. A nurture that fires every seven days regardless of what stage the deal is in trains the buyer to ignore you.

What this changes about reporting

Two numbers are worth adding, and both are cheap:

Metric	What it tells you
Days since last buyer-initiated contact	Whether a deal is alive, as distinct from open
Stage-by-stage ageing against your own median	Which stage is doing the damage

Total pipeline value tells you almost nothing when cycles are stretching, because it grows precisely when deals stop closing. A pipeline that is getting bigger and older at the same time is a warning, not a result.

The honest caveat

Some of this is not fixable by you. A buyer waiting on their own board is waiting regardless of how good your follow-up is, and a proportion of stalled deals were never real. The purpose of instrumenting the stall is not to rescue every one. It is to stop forecasting on deals that stopped moving six weeks ago, and to spend your follow-up effort on the ones where a business case is the actual blocker.