Blog
When one deal passes through four people
A quotation goes out in March. In September a purchase order arrives against it. In between, the deal was touched by five people, three of whom no longer remember the details, and the price was based on a site visit nobody wrote up.
That’s an ordinary deal in project work, installation, or factory supply. It is not a slow version of short-cycle selling. It’s a different problem, and almost everything written about “sales process” is solving the other one.
Why long cycles break in a different place
In a short cycle the deal is quoted today and decided this week. One person holds the whole deal in their head, and that works, because nothing has time to be forgotten. What kills those deals is speed. Reply late, lose.
Stretch the same deal to six months and speed stops being the constraint. Long-cycle deals die of silence and drift instead:
- The follow-up in week nine that nobody scheduled, because the last conversation ended with “we’ll be in touch after the holidays.”
- The quotation still technically valid, priced off a site condition that changed in month four.
- The contact who approved the budget in March and moved to another company in July.
- The deal handed to engineering that never came back. Nobody noticed for six weeks, because no date was attached to the handover.
None of these is losing to a competitor. These are deals that stop without anyone deciding to stop them. So a long-cycle system carries one job a short-cycle system never needs: keep the deal remembered, and owned, across months and across people.
Who one deal actually passes through
Ask an owner who handles a deal and the answer is “the salesperson.” Trace a won deal backwards and it’s four or five hands:
- Whoever caught the inquiry. A call, a booth, a chat message to the owner’s own phone.
- The salesperson. Visits, relationship, expectations, promises.
- Whoever scopes and prices it. Engineer, technician, or the owner. This is where the number comes from, and the assumptions under it.
- Whoever delivers or installs. They find out what was promised back in month two.
- Admin. PO, invoice, acceptance.
The customer’s side has the same shape: the person with the problem, the engineer who checks the spec, procurement, and someone who signs. A six-month deal is four of your people talking to four of theirs across twenty to forty exchanges.
Every arrow between two of those boxes is a place where information leaves the deal. Deals go quiet on the arrows, not in the meetings. What each handover has to carry, we covered separately: four things that must live with the company, not on a personal phone.
What a long cycle needs written down that a short one doesn’t
Short-cycle selling needs three things per deal: who, next step, stage. Keep those. A long cycle needs four more, and that gap is the entire difference:
- One named owner, right now. Not a department. When a deal moves to engineering for pricing, it goes with a person and a return date. A deal owned by “the team” is owned by nobody.
- The basis of the price, not just the price. What the quote assumed: site conditions, spec version, lead time, exchange rate. In month one that’s obvious to everyone. In month six, when the customer finally says yes, it’s the difference between a profitable job and one you’re stuck with.
- The customer’s map. Who uses it, who checks the spec, who signs, who can quietly kill it. Over six months these people change jobs. If only your salesperson holds the map, the deal restarts when they leave.
- A waiting sentence. One line: what we’re waiting for, from whom, by when. “Waiting for their engineer to confirm panel size. Khun A, 12 Aug.” Not “following up.”
The fourth one does the most work and costs one line per deal.
Is the deal stalled, or just long?
This is where short-cycle rules give the wrong answer. “No contact in 30 days = dead” is fine when deals close in three weeks. In project work a live deal can legitimately sleep for two months waiting on the customer’s budget cycle. Kill those and you throw away revenue; keep everything and your pipeline becomes a storage unit.
Use two clocks, not one:
- Total deal age is not a health signal. Long is normal here.
- Time in the current stage, measured against your own median for that stage, is.
Then one test that beats both: can anyone write the waiting sentence right now? If yes, with a date in the future that the customer gave you, it’s a long deal. If nobody can name what is being waited for, it’s stalled, even if a rep called last week. Friendly monthly check-ins are the most common way a dead deal keeps looking alive.
When the stage clock runs out, the deal gets one of three outcomes, not a shrug: re-dated with a reason the customer gave, moved back a stage, or closed as no-decision. Stage-exit criteria and stage age limits are the mechanics for that.
Where to start
Not with software, and not with your whole history. Three working sessions, about a week, done with the people who actually sell:
- List every open deal, one line each, with its waiting sentence. Twenty to sixty lines in a company of 20–200 people. The lines nobody can fill in are your pipeline problem, named exactly, on day one.
- Draw the real path of three deals. Two you won, one that went quiet. Mark every handover. The same gaps repeat, and that repetition is your pattern.
- Write the exit criteria for one stage. Evidence, not feeling. Then run next Monday’s review off it.
That’s a written sales operation, on paper, before any tool question. The software decision gets much smaller afterwards, and much harder to get wrong. Choosing the tool first is why CRM projects die in 60 days.
If your deals run for months and pass through several hands, book a 45-minute call. We’ll map one live deal end to end and mark where it loses information. You keep that map whether or not we work together. That’s the shape of a BUILD 30 install from B2B Sales System, a ZestMate Solution program: we design the pattern, your team installs it over 30 days, and day 30 is measured against three criteria written on day one.