A sale to a large organisation can take many months for a product the buyer wanted from the first meeting. The delay lives in the buying process rather than in the decision.
The buyer is a committee
Significant purchases involve a user who will operate the product, a manager who owns the budget, and functions such as finance, legal, security and procurement.
Each has a different concern, and each can delay the purchase without being able to approve it. The seller is answering to several audiences with incompatible priorities.
A proposal that satisfies the user and ignores security will stall. So will one that satisfies procurement and gives the user no reason to want it.
Sequence adds elapsed time to everything
The reviews mostly happen one after another rather than in parallel. Legal begins after commercial terms are settled, and security review often begins after legal.
Each stage has its own queue, and none of them is working solely on this purchase. The waiting between stages exceeds the work inside them.
Which is why removing a single approval stage can compress a cycle noticeably, while making each stage faster typically changes very little.
Budget cycles gate the timing
Money is allocated on an annual or quarterly rhythm. A purchase agreed outside that rhythm waits for the next allocation regardless of how strong the case is.
Unbudgeted spending requires a higher approval level, which introduces people who were not part of the evaluation and have no context for it.
This produces the pattern of deals clustering at period ends. The commercial logic was settled earlier; the calendar decided when it could be signed.
The default option is doing nothing
The most common outcome of an enterprise evaluation is no purchase at all. Continuing with current arrangements requires no approval, no budget and no personal risk.
Nobody is blamed for a purchase that was never made, while a purchase that disappoints is attributed to whoever championed it.
Sellers therefore compete against inertia more than against named competitors, and the case has to address the cost of continuing unchanged.
Internal selling happens without the seller
Most of the persuasion occurs in meetings the seller does not attend. A champion inside the organisation presents the case to colleagues and executives.
Whatever the seller has given that person is what gets presented. Material that cannot be repeated accurately by someone else does not travel.
This is why simple, transportable arguments outperform comprehensive ones in long cycles. The argument has to survive being retold by a non-expert under questioning.