Time to Close: Definition, Calculation, and How to Reduce It to Secure More Deals Faster

Quick Summary

The faster you close, the more deals you win and the more revenue you generate. In this guide, you'll learn what time to close is, how to calculate it, and proven strategies to shorten your sales cycle using tools like Proposify.

Long Sales Cycle Is Bleeding Your Revenue

Ask any sales leader what keeps them up at night, and "long sales cycles" will be near the top of the list.

The average B2B sales cycle now runs between 1 and 3 months. If you're working deals over $100,000, you're looking at 6 months or more from first contact to signature. That means revenue you thought was coming in Q2 might not land until Q3 or Q4, which makes forecasting harder and puts serious pressure on cash flow.

Sales cycles have stretched 38% longer since 2021, and the pattern is pretty consistent across industries. Sales teams tend to blame buyers for moving slowly, but a fair share of the delays come from internal bottlenecks you might not even see.

With the right approach and tools, you can identify blockers, speed up decision-making, and close deals faster without sacrificing quality or burning out your team.

Why Listen to Us?

At Proposify, we've helped thousands of sales teams send stronger proposals, track engagement in real-time, and close deals faster. Our platform has processed billions of dollars in proposal value, and we've seen firsthand what sets high-performing sales teams apart. That’s why we are qualified to break down where your process might be adding friction and how to fix it.

What Is Time to Close and Why Does It Matter

Time to close is the total number of days it takes to move a prospect from initial contact to a signed contract. It's one of the most important metrics in sales because it directly impacts revenue, cash flow, and resource allocation.

Here's what shortening your sales cycle does for your business:

1. Faster Revenue Realization

Money comes in sooner, which compounds over time. If you can close deals in 30 days instead of 90, you're essentially accelerating your entire revenue stream by 2 months. That's cash you can reinvest or use to hit growth targets faster.

2. Lower customer Acquisition Costs

The longer a deal drags on, the more it costs you. More sales calls, more emails, more demos, more follow-ups. Shortening the cycle means your reps can handle more deals with the same resources, improving efficiency and reducing CAC.

3. Better Customer Experience

Buyers are often frustrated by slow sales processes. A shorter and efficient sales cycle signals that you're easy to work with and respect their time, which builds goodwill from day one.

4. Improved Forecasting Accuracy

Shorter cycles mean less uncertainty. It's easier to predict what will close this quarter when deals move in 30 days versus 180. This helps with everything from investor updates to capacity planning.

5. Competitive Moats

In competitive deals, the vendor who can get the customer live faster often wins. Speed to value becomes part of your value proposition. Time is working against you in almost every open deal. Reducing time to close is essentially risk mitigation.

How to Calculate Time to Close

Time to close is the total number of days it takes to move a prospect from initial contact to a signed contract. Some teams start the clock when a lead enters the pipeline. Others measure from the first discovery call or the moment a proposal gets sent. What matters isn't where you start measuring, it's that you measure consistently.

Here's the formula:

Time to Close = Total Number of Days from First Contact to Close

To calculate your average time to close, track how many days it took to close each deal over a specific period (usually a quarter or a year), then divide by the number of deals.

Here's an example:

• Deal 1: 45 days
• Deal 2: 60 days
• Deal 3: 30 days
• Deal 4: 90 days
• Deal 5: 50 days

Total: 275 days

Number of deals: 5

Average time to close: 55 days

What's Slowing Down Your Time to Close

Before you can fix anything, you need to see where deals are getting stuck. Most sales teams have blind spots in their process. These are the most common ones.

1. Poor Qualification Upfront

If you're spending weeks chasing leads that were never going to buy, you're wasting time, not shortening the sales cycle. Unqualified leads slow everything down and inflate your time to close.

The fix is to get stricter about qualifications. Use frameworks like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) or MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion) to spot bad-fit prospects early and focus your time on deals that are likely to close.

2. Lack of Alignment

The average B2B deal now involves 6 to 10 stakeholders. That's 6 to 10 people who need to be convinced, aligned, and on board before anything moves forward. If you're only talking to one person, everyone else involved is left guessing. That's how deals stall.

Map out the buying group early. Know who controls the budget, who influences the decision, and who can slow things down. Bring them into the conversation early. When everyone's aligned, approvals move much faster.

3. Lack of Visibility After Sending a Proposal

When you send a proposal and have no clue if it's been opened, who's looked at it, or what's happening on the buyer's side, you're just guessing. You don't know when to follow up or what's slowing the deal down.

That's why follow-ups start to feel awkward. "Just checking in" doesn't move anything forward. It only signals to your prospect that you're waiting and hoping they'll respond.

4. Approval Processes that Take Forever

Internal approvals can slow deals down just as much as the buyer side. When a proposal has to pass through three different people before it can even be sent, you're automatically adding days to the deal. When a small pricing change turns into a phone call, an email thread, and then a meeting, you're wasting time. Every extra day of delay pushes your win rate down and gives your prospect more time to reconsider, go with a competitor, or simply lose interest.

How to Reduce Time to Close

Now for the good part. Here's how to shorten your sales cycle and close deals faster.

1. Identify all Decision-Makers Early

Deals drag on when you're talking to the wrong person. You spend weeks with someone who says they're the decision-maker, only to find out late in the process that three other people need to weigh in. Then you have to start over.

Many teams send a proposal to their primary contact and hope it gets shared with everyone who matters. But they have no idea who's actually looking at it or what questions they have.

Proposify's "Identify to View" feature flips this dynamic. Turn it on, and anyone who wants to view the proposal has to enter their name and email first. You can see exactly who's looking at it. Instead of waiting for objections to filter back to you through your champion, you can involve all decision-makers early and avoid last-minute surprises.

2. Use Proposal Tracking to Follow Up

Guessing when to follow up rarely works. With Proposify, you can track if a proposal has been opened, how long someone spent on it, and which sections they focused on. Follow-ups become easier and more relevant.

If a buyer opens the proposal multiple times in a day, that's a signal to reach out while it's still top of mind. If they spend time on pricing, they probably have questions, and a quick call can clear things up. If the proposal hasn't been opened in a week, you know it's time to change your approach instead of sending another generic nudge.

Tracking helps you respond to buyer behavior.

3. Use Templates to Cut Proposal Creation Time

If it takes you three days to build a proposal, you've just added three days to every deal. Multiply that across dozens of proposals per quarter and you're looking at weeks of unnecessary delay.

The fastest way to speed this up is with reusable templates. Instead of starting from scratch, select from Proposify's business template gallery. You can also create custom templates with the AI Template Generator.

4. Remove Approval Bottlenecks

Internal approvals shouldn’t slow deals down. If proposals are sitting in inboxes for days, you need to fix the process.

Proposify lets you set up approval workflows so the right people are automatically looped in. You can also define rules up front, such as skipping manager approval for smaller deals or requiring finance sign-off only when discounts exceed a certain threshold. Once those rules are in place, approvals move faster without constant back-and-forth.

5. Build a Content Library

Every sales rep has their own version of "the proposal" saved somewhere. When pricing changes or you add a new case study, someone has to update every version manually. Or worse, reps keep using outdated content because they don't know it changed.

One source of truth for all your proposal content solves this. When pricing updates, it updates everywhere. When you add a case study, every rep has access immediately. This significantly reduces proposal prep time and ensures you're never sending outdated terms or pricing.

Use Proposify's content library to keep everything in one place.

6. Close Deals the Same Day with Built-In E-Signatures

If a buyer has to print, scan, or email documents back and forth, you’re adding friction when they’re ready to move forward.

Proposify E-signature removes that friction. When buyers can sign inside the proposal, there’s nothing extra to do and nowhere to get stuck. Deals that would normally drag on for days or even a week can close the same day simply because the process is easy.

7. Automate Follow-Ups (But Don't Set It and Forget It)

Automated reminders keep deals moving without you having to remember every follow-up. But automation works best when it supports you, not replaces you.

Set up reminders to notify you when a proposal goes unopened for 3 days or when a viewer hasn't responded. Use templates for common scenarios to save time, but personalize them before you send. Mention something specific from your last conversation. Reference a section of the proposal.

Make it clear you're paying attention. Let Proposify automations handle the routine work while you focus on the relationship.

Best Practices for Reducing Time to Close

A few extra habits can make a real difference in keeping deals moving and improving close rates.

1. Benchmark Against Your Industry

Research the average time to close for your industry and deal size. This gives you context for your own performance. If your time to close is significantly longer than average, you likely have opportunities for improvement.

Track leading indicators like time to first proposal sent, average time between proposal sent and first follow-up, and time from proposal sent to signed contract. These metrics help you identify specific bottlenecks in your process.

2. Keep Buyers Engaged

Some deals take time, and that's fine. What you want to avoid is going silent for weeks and expecting the buyer to stay interested. Stay in touch in ways that are helpful, not pushy.

Share relevant industry content, offer to connect them with a customer in a similar role or industry, or share a case study that speaks to their challenge. The goal is to stay top of mind without becoming annoying. If you're only reaching out to ask, "Any updates?" you're doing it wrong.

3. Learn From Every Outcome

When a deal closes faster than usual, take a moment to understand why. What changed? What worked? When deals drag on or fall apart, look for the same signals. Over time, patterns will emerge, and those patterns are what help you tighten your process and close deals more consistently.

4. Use Technology as an Enabler

The right tools can dramatically reduce friction in your sales process. Proposify brings together proposal creation, tracking, analytics, automated follow-ups, and e-signatures in one platform. No more cobbling together multiple tools.

Close Deals Faster with the Right Tools

Time to close is one of the most important metrics in sales. Reducing it requires visibility into what's working, efficient processes, and smart follow-up based on real prospect behavior. Proposify gives you all three. With real-time proposal tracking, engagement analytics, automated reminders, and e-signatures, you can shorten your sales cycles and close more deals without working harder or burning out your team. Book a demo today.