How long is your sales cycle, really? Measure it from your last 10 deals

How long does it take your company to turn a first conversation into a signed order? If you answered “about six months,” you’re in good company. Almost every leadership team I talk to says something like that.

Then we take out the last 10 closed deals and count. The number is almost never six months.

I spent 10 years at IMPACK, a manufacturer of packaging machines, and ran revenue there from 2017. We cut our sales cycle by about 50%. But we could only say that because we measured where we started. You can’t shorten what you haven’t measured. And measuring it takes less than an hour.

The short answer: Your real sales cycle is the average number of days from first contact to signed order across your last 10 closed deals. Look at the median too, because one long deal can pull the average up by months. Write it down together with a few other baseline numbers on the same day. That’s your before-picture for every improvement you make.

Why is “about six months” not good enough?

Because gut feel remembers the deals that went well. It forgets the 18-month project that kept slipping. It also forgets the quick repeat order that didn’t feel like “real” sales.

Your plant would never run that way. Nobody on the shop floor says “the cycle time is about six minutes, I think.” They measure it, because every improvement is judged against that number. The commercial side deserves the same discipline.

There’s a second reason. When you want to change how you sell, someone will ask “did it work?” Without a before-number, the honest answer is “we don’t know.”

How did we shorten our sales cycle at IMPACK?

At IMPACK we cut the sales cycle by about 50%. It didn’t come from one trick. It came from two separate mechanisms, and it helps to keep them apart.

The fast wins came first. We started using our articles and videos inside the sales process. Before a meeting, a buyer got one specific piece to read or watch. They arrived prepared, and deals that used this moved to a decision in about 3 to 4 months. That’s assignment selling.

The bigger wins came later. Over 18 months and more, buyers started finding us through search. Some had already gone through a lot of our content before they ever contacted us. They showed up knowing what they wanted.

We built this with coaching on the They Ask, You Answer framework. I later adapted it for industrial, long-cycle sales into the Production Visibility OS (PVOS). Measuring the cycle is the very first step of that system, in a module we call Progress Snapshot.

One more habit helped: a “How did you find us?” field on our contact form. When a buyer wrote a general search topic instead of our company name, we knew the lead came from content. If you can’t track it, ask.

How do you calculate your real sales cycle from your last 10 deals?

You need your CRM, your order book or even your email archive. Here are the steps:

1. List your last 10 closed-won deals. Most recent first. New machines only, unless spare parts are a big part of what you want to improve.
2. Find the first-contact date for each. The first logged two-way contact about that project. Pick one rule and stick to it.
3. Find the signed-order date. The date of the signed order or the down payment, not the date the quote was sent.
4. Count the days between them. A spreadsheet does it for you: order date minus first-contact date.
5. Calculate the average and the median. The average shows the total load. The median shows the typical deal.
6. Mark any outlier. One deal more than twice the median? Note it and the reason.
7. Write the result down with today’s date. This is your baseline.

Counting the days deal by deal, from first contact to signed order, turns a gut feeling into a number you can improve against. (AI-generated image)

What does a worked example look like?

Here’s a set of 10 deals for an example machine builder. The deals and dates are an illustration, not real IMPACK or client data.

What the numbers say:

• Average: 262 days, about 8.6 months.
• Median: 198 days, about 6.5 months.
• Without deal F: the average drops to 214 days, about 7.1 months.

The leadership team in this example said “about six months.” The typical deal is close to that. But the average is more than two months longer, because one 690-day project and one 389-day project pull it up.

Both numbers matter. The median tells you how a normal deal moves. The average tells you how much time your team really carries. And the outlier is worth a conversation of its own. Why did deal F take almost two years? That answer is often more useful than the average.

What else goes into a Day-1 snapshot?

While you have the CRM open, write down a few more numbers. Together they make your Day-1 snapshot: the before-picture across commercial, digital, content and sales behaviour.

Don’t polish it. Rough numbers are fine. The point is to have a date and a value, so the next measurement means something.

Your exercise this week: block one hour, fill in this table, and save it with today’s date in the file name.

When sales and production plan from the same measured numbers, hiring and capacity decisions stop being guesses. (AI-generated image)

What mistakes make the number useless?

• Using quote date instead of first contact. That hides months of early conversations, often the part you can shorten most.
• Mixing in lost deals. Measure lost deals separately.
• Changing the rule halfway. If “first contact” means the inquiry for one deal and the first visit for another, the number moves for no real reason.
• Reporting only the average. One giant project can hide the fact that most deals move well, or the reverse.
• Measuring once and never again. Re-measure every quarter with the newest 10 deals.

Who doesn’t need to do this yet?

Here’s the honest other side.

• If you have fewer than 5 closed deals in your history, the number won’t tell you much. Write down each deal’s story instead.
• If almost all your orders are repeat orders from the same few customers, your sales cycle is mostly their budgeting calendar. Measure new-customer deals separately or this number misleads you.
• If you need cash this quarter, measuring won’t fix that. It’s the first step of a longer change, not a quick fix.

So what’s the next step?

Your real sales cycle is the average and the median of your last 10 closed deals, from first contact to signed order. It takes under an hour to measure, and it’s the number every later improvement is judged against.

If you’ve been planning production around “about six months,” you may be off by months, in either direction. That gap is a big part of what makes hiring and investment decisions so stressful.

So fill in the Day-1 snapshot table this week and save it with today’s date.

At PINAVOX, measuring this baseline is Day 1 of the Production Visibility OS. Your production runs on a system, and ours is built to feed it. If you’ve measured your number and want to talk about what to fix first, book a strategy call with me.