Sales are what drive the success of any business. So naturally, anything that gets in the way of closing deals in a timely manner is cause for concern. But speed is something that nearly every B2B business struggles with.
With so many tools and stakeholders involved, the sales process often takes weeks, if not months. In fact, Databox analysis across 300+ companies shows a median cycle of 2.1 months (~63 days) from initial contact to closed deal.
Since a company’s success is often determined by its ability to meet strict sales and revenue targets, most companies monitor and aim to minimize the length of their sales cycle. Of course, many factors, such as product type, complexity, cost, and competitors, play a role in determining sales cycle length. However, there are also several avoidable obstacles that unnecessarily slow it down.
Achieving shorter B2B sales cycles will enable you to achieve faster time to revenue and facilitate a greater number of deals in your sales pipeline, so eliminating those challenges should be a priority.
Below, you’ll find ten of the most common obstacles slowing down the sales process, followed by some suggestions to overcome them.
1. Configuring price quotes
When you’re up against the competition, being able to send quotes quickly to prospective customers is crucial. How important? Roughly half of all sales go to the vendor who responds first.
The problem is that sales reps typically build price quotes manually for each customer. Not only does this require a significant amount of time, but it also leads to pricing errors and inaccuracies. Furthermore, the more products or greater product complexity you have, the more problematic this manual process becomes.
The solution is to implement a CPQ solution. Compared to manual quoting solutions, CPQ users cut customer quote request response times by 60-85% and generate quotes up to 80% faster.
2. Building, sending, and tracking sales proposals
Sales collateral may also not be branded consistently or follow certain guidelines, meaning potential customers are exposed to materials that reflect a lack of professionalism or fail to deliver a consistent branded experience through their buying journey.
B2B sales teams often handle the manual preparation of sales proposals. This lack of standardization leads to inconsistencies from customer to customer, and from rep to rep. As a result, they may offer different prices and discounts for each deal, rather than as a result of any particular strategy.
3. Lack of buyer insights
In June 2025, Gartner released a sales survey with a statistic that should prompt every B2B seller to pause: 61% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience. On top of that, your prospects are almost 70% of the way through their buying journey before they even talk to you.
So what’s happening in that early stage? You’re in the dark funnel, the part of the buyer journey where they’re actively researching, comparing, and shortlisting vendors without filling out a form, booking a demo, or leaving any obvious signs.
When you share your sales proposals, pricing options, and collateral through DealHub’s Digital DealRoom, it tracks everything your buyer does: what they view, how long they engage, who they forward it to, what pages they revisit, and more.
4. Inefficient contract management
Traditionally, buyers and sellers manage contracts by sending emails, PDFs and Word documents back and forth. Documents being shared this way is a lengthy and inefficient process that often leads to confusion around having multiple versions of the same document being sent to decision-makers. In addition, you can’t always be sure the right people are seeing it, potentially leading to unnecessary delays and miscommunications.
Contract management software is the main solution to these B2B selling challenges, but how you use it matters more than the software itself. Standardize your templates. Educate your reps on what’s negotiable (and what’s not). Decide who needs to see what, and in what order. Do that, and you’ll be fine.
5. Lengthy approval processes
In addition to coming at a high cost, B2B buying decisions can affect multiple departments and processes, which is why multiple stakeholders are often involved. Securing the approval and signatures from all the right people can be a difficult and time-consuming process.
This issue is exacerbated when buyers and sellers need to communicate and align on a whole host of details across different departments and different time zones, without a single up-to-date repository for all of that information.
Even if you’re using software, these problems can come up if your approval process is too bureaucratic. That’s why it’s best to pre-negotiate standard terms for common deal types. If it’s a low-risk, low(ish)-value contract, there’s no reason legal should need to review it every time.
6. More sales complexity, fewer touchpoints
We’ve established that buyers self-educate online, read reviews, compare competitors, and generally don’t talk to a rep until they’re deep into the process. As a seller, you have increasingly less control over the first half of the funnel.
Meanwhile, the complexity of B2B deals keeps growing. According to Forrester, the average deal now involves 13 decision-makers. That’s more opinions, more agendas, more chances for confusion.
The challenge lies in selling a solution while aligning sales with the way customers buy
- You need to act as a trusted advisor on a complex, high-stakes purchase.
- But you’re getting minimal face time with the people who matter most.
To win in this environment, you need to maximize every single interaction by coming with insight, not just information. Ask questions that delve deeper into the challenges they’re already researching, and then use your time to demonstrate how it aligns with their specific business context.
7. Cognitive overload on buyers
Buyers are drowning in conflicting information. Between vendor content, analyst reports, peer reviews, and AI-generated summaries that lack nuance, buyers are paralyzed by choice.
Your job as a seller is to cut through that noise. Help buyers connect the dots between what they’re reading and what actually matters to their business, and explain trade-offs in plain language so they can weigh options confidently.
8. Pressure for post-sale value realization
CSOs aren’t just measured by how many new logos they land, they’re on the hook for expansion revenue, renewals, and long-term customer success. And that changes the entire game for sales teams because low retention reflects poorly on them.
You can’t afford to chase short-term wins that fall apart after onboarding. If a user doesn’t see value fast (or doesn’t see the right value), they won’t stick around. So your sales process needs to do more than convert. It’s got to set the stage for long-term growth.
Overcoming this B2B selling challenge requires sales messaging that reflects long-term outcomes (i.e., showing prospects how the solution grows with them). As a leader, it’s also helpful to realign incentives around rewarding that behavior. If your comp plan only celebrates new ARR, you’ll breed overpromising and churn.
9. Overreliance on automation
AI has made outreach faster, easier, and more scalable. That’s why 81% of sales teams are either experimenting with or fully using it. But it’s also made it blander, less authentic, and easier to ignore.
When you rely too heavily on tools to do the talking, you strip away the very thing that builds credibility in B2B sales: human connection. To stand out now, you need to create a “human premium”: authenticity, insight, and creativity that no sequence tool can replicate.
Often, the fix is simple: AI can do the legwork of segmentation, basic qualification, and can even generate sales collateral. The seller comes in when the real conversations happen and context is needed.
10. Fragmented decision-makers
It’s no longer just a CMO or CTO pulling the trigger; buying committees are decentralized, and often at least partially invisible until late in the game. The prevalence of inside sales, hybrid models, omnichannel outreach, and account-based strategies (such as nearbound and ABS) requires new skills for navigating this.
Persona-based selling just doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to map stakeholders dynamically based on their actual involvement, influence, and behavior, track engagement across the full committee, and enable collaboration at every step.
That’s where collaborative deal environments make a huge difference. When everyone can review, comment on, and align around a central source (like a shared proposal or contract) you eliminate every silo. No more disconnected threads or repeated explanations. Everyone stays on the same page.
The solution: one fluid sales motion
With DealHub’s leading CPQ and CLM software, you can streamline your sales process and achieve one fluid sales motion. Let’s explore what that means.
Connect each stage of the B2B sales process
Rather than relying on many separate sales tools, consolidate a variety of them into one coherent stack for managing the entire quote-to-cash process. What does this look like? Connected sales proposals, document generation, CPQ, CLM, subscriptions, and eSign, all on one uniform platform.
The benefits of implementing one unified platform across the buying process include:
- No longer needing multiple tools where one would do
- Enabling your team to use and maintain just one platform instead of many
- Empowering your reps to focus on selling instead of administrative work
- Complete oversight of the entire sales process so you can minimize friction points
Guide sales motions from start to finish
With DealHub, you can create custom sales playbooks tailored to different customer segments, deal sizes, and other key differentiators. It executes your sales methodology, enforces your pricing rules, and equips your sellers with the necessary enablement materials. It’s effectively the solution to all customer-facing B2B sales challenges.
Sales Playbooks and Guided Selling Flows in DealHub
Automate and eliminate time-consuming tasks
The most manual and administrative work can and should be automated. Not just because they are prone to human error, but also because they require large amounts of time on a regular basis.
For example, by ensuring your sales tools sync automatically with your CRM, you can avoid manual data entry and ensure information is up-to-date throughout the entire sales process – and beyond. This allows your sales reps to focus on selling, and frees up your operations folk to focus on more impactful activities.
In addition, parallel approval workflows can dramatically streamline and accelerate the deal-approval process by automatically sending documents for approval in a sequential manner, and triggering re-approvals when changes are made or suggested by certain stakeholders.
Gain real-time buyer insights
Real-time buyer insights provide you with information on where your buyers stand in the process, such as who has viewed your proposal, who it’s been shared with, who has or hasn’t opened it, and what content they’ve been interacting with.
This real-time engagement data gives you actionable insights that let you…
- Spot buying intent early
- Personalize your follow-ups based on interest
- See who the real decision-makers are
And it’s just the tip of the iceberg of valuable insights that your sales team can leverage in order to follow up more strategically, loop in additional stakeholders when necessary, and accelerate the deal-closing process.
What’s next?
There are many friction points in the B2B sales process that can slow down your sales cycle or even bring it to a screeching halt. And as we’ve attempted to demonstrate here, relying on a series of manual and outdated practices opens the door to inefficiencies, inaccuracies and costly setbacks.
Your solution is to leverage a unified revenue hub that speeds up and streamlines your entire quote-to-close process.
With one fluid sales motion, you can:
- Adapt your selling process to today’s digital realities
- Connect the different stages of your B2B sales process
- Automate and eliminate time-consuming and error-prone tasks
- Gain real-time insights that help you move sales forward quickly
Want to see how you can deliver a unified sales motion for your business?
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