Challenge: How to Close in Three Days?

When your sales cycle stretches beyond 120 days, you are not just delaying revenue. You are exposing every opportunity to the risks that come with time. Competitors get more chances to swoop in. Budget priorities shift. Decision makers change roles. The longer the cycle, the more things can go wrong. Your team spends months nurturing opportunities that could disappear overnight because of factors entirely outside their control.

The maths is simple. If your reps spend less time closing each deal, they can close more deals. A sales team operating on a 90-day cycle rather than a 150-day cycle can nearly double its output in the same period. When you are sitting in Q4 trying to hit annual targets, that difference is not marginal. It is the difference between making the number and missing it entirely.

Back in 2020, I faced exactly this problem. The pandemic had wiped out about 35% of our pipeline overnight and frozen decisions on what remained. We had just expanded the team and needed results. The sales cycle was hovering somewhere over 120 days, and the environment was changing weekly. Investment freezes were becoming standard. Any deal that needed multiple months to close was unlikely ever to reach closed won.

We rallied around one question: How to close in three days?

The actual goal was never to hit three days. The goal was to set an audacious target that forced us to cut out all the slack from our sales process. When you commit to closing in three days, suddenly everything changes. You cannot suggest the first meeting in two weeks. The default becomes tomorrow. Proposals cannot go out tomorrow. They need to be sent today. The product team cannot take five days to answer prospects' questions. It needs to be the same afternoon.

We asked this question everywhere. Every deal review. Every pipeline review. Every weekly kick-off. Every management meeting. How to close in three days? The question itself became the tool for spotting inefficiencies. It helped us identify where time was being wasted and where processes could be tightened.

By the end, we reached an average of just under 80 days and got the business impact we were after. Having an over 30% shorter sales cycle made a considerable impact on the following year, too. The transformation was not just about speed. It was about making selling easier. The team enjoyed their work more because they were not stuck in endless cycles. They were closing deals and moving forward.

As said, the real goal is never actually to reach three days. The real goal is to challenge your people to think differently and change behaviour. If you go from 120 days to under 80 days, you have already created a massive impact on your annual numbers. The power is in questioning the status quo.

Pick the sales cycle as your northstar KPI. This is a metric your entire organisation can rally around. Ask yourself and your team: How do we get a new customer approached, pitched, and signed in just three days?

There is no single magic trick. It is a hundred smaller tweaks. As a leader, you need to ask yourself first where the slack exists in your process. Where are the unnecessary delays? Then ask your team the same question. Listen to them. They know where the friction is. They live it every day. Their answers will give you the specific changes that will make selling easier and faster.

Start asking yourself and those around you: How to close in three days?

The question alone will change how your team operates. It will surface the inefficiencies you have been tolerating. It will push everyone to think about time differently. And over the months that follow, you will see your sales cycle shrink, your win rates improve, and your team gain momentum.

The transformation begins with the question.