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Sales Cycle Length

The average number of days from opportunity creation to closed-won.

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Business Question Answered

How long does it typically take to close a deal once it enters the pipeline?

What This Tells You

The overall velocity of the sales process and where deals may be stalling.

What It Does Not Tell You

Which specific stage is the bottleneck — break down by stage-to-stage duration to localize the issue.

Formula & Example Calculation
Average(Closed-Won Date − Opportunity Created Date)

Numerator

N/A (duration metric)

Denominator

N/A (duration metric)

Example

Across 36 closed-won deals, the average time from creation to close is 68 days.

Recommended Dimensions & Segments
SegmentDeal size bandRepProduct line

Recommended visualization: Trend line by segment with stage-duration breakdown

Technical Implementation Notes

Segment by deal size before comparing — enterprise and SMB cycles differ enormously and a blended average obscures both.

Data Quality Checks
  • Exclude reopened/reinstated opportunities that would distort the creation timestamp
Common Pitfalls
  • Reporting a single blended cycle-length figure across wildly different deal-size segments
AI Explanation

Get a conversational, stakeholder-friendly explanation of this KPI, generated on demand.

Metadata
Funnel StageConversion
Owner RoleVP Sales / RevOps
CadenceMonthly
Data Sources
CRM
Tags
sales-velocitypipeline