Your 90-Day Sales Cycle Isn't a Feature, It's a Warning Sign
ANZ B2B sales teams are treating long cycles like weather, not like the revenue problem they actually are.
Every second sales leader in ANZ will tell you their average deal takes 90+ days to close. They say it like it's a fact of nature. "Enterprise sales, mate. That's just how it works."
No. That's how your process works. There's a difference.
The ANZ B2B market has convinced itself that long cycles are normal because buying committees are complex and procurement is slow. Both true. Neither is an excuse for a three-month pipeline that bleeds qualified leads at every stage.
Here's what's actually happening: Your discovery is generic. Your demo is a feature tour. Your proposal sits in someone's inbox for six weeks because you haven't created urgency. You're not managing a sales cycle, you're hoping the deal closes itself.
The data backs this up. B2B e-commerce is growing in ANZ specifically because buyers are tired of slow, painful sales processes. They'd rather configure and purchase online than sit through another "let's circle back" meeting. When your sales cycle is so bloated that a website with a pricing calculator becomes the competition, you've lost the plot.
And before you blame procurement: The deals that close fast have the same procurement teams. The difference is the AE knew how to navigate them instead of treating them like a black box.
This matters for your career because companies are starting to notice. The "we need patient AEs for long cycles" narrative is shifting to "why can't we close enterprise deals in 45 days like the US team?" When leadership starts asking that question, the answer isn't more patient AEs. It's fewer AEs.
If your current role treats 90-day cycles as a badge of honor instead of a problem to solve, start looking. The teams figuring out how to compress timelines without discounting will be the ones hiring in 2026. The ones still blaming "complex buying committees" will be restructuring.
Your sales cycle isn't enterprise sales. It's a symptom of bad process dressed up as strategy. Fix it or watch someone else get hired to do it for you.