B2B deals take months to close, often requiring sign-off from six to ten decision-makers. That's why shortening your time to revenue matters: it's the difference between closing deals faster and watching them stall.
Shortening your time to revenue (TTR) means closing deals faster, protecting profitability, and spotting what's actually working in your sales process.
Below, we break down what TTR measures and share seven tactics B2B teams use to shorten it.
What is time to revenue?
Time to revenue (TTR) is a metric that tracks how long it takes for a company to convert a lead to a paying customer.
This means tracking their journey from the moment they first discover your product to when the deal is officially closed. Their first touchpoint could be via your website, an ad, a lead magnet, or a demo request.
“Through the time to revenue metric, companies can measure the speed at which they turn leads into revenue and gain insight into the conversion rate, CAC, and average closing time,” explains Padmaja Santhanam, Partner and Growth Manager at FirstPrinciples.
Because the B2B buying cycle is typically complex, failing to track this metric means that you could miss out on this valuable data altogether.
Why you should measure time to revenue?
Tracking TTR gives you concrete data on conversion rates, CAC, and average close times—and shows you exactly where deals slow down or stall.
It helps you understand your sales cycle
TTR shows you exactly where your buyer's journey starts—which channels and stages capture mindshare before prospects are ready to buy. This makes it easier to spot channels and stages you can take advantage of to capture your prospect’s mindshare before they are ready to buy.
“We know that 80% of a B2B buying journey happens before a prospect even speaks with Sales, but that's your true sales cycle,” explains Seth Steinman, Sr. Director of Growth at Electric IT.
“It's vital to understand the time between First Touch and Revenue because that's the lead time you need to make any Top of Funnel investments. For example, if your bookings goals double in January to $1 million, and you have a 6-month time to revenue, you better start increasing your marketing investments the PREVIOUS July.”
It helps you measure product-market fit
“Time to revenue is an important metric to track because it forces intellectual honesty on the startup team, especially around their product/market fit,” says Deniz Kuran, Head of Marketing at Idiomatic.
“Startups can often feel like they’re making progress through shipping features and having potential customers or investors tell them they’re interested, but if they fail to gain actual paying customers, this can be a mirage. Cash in the bank from a customer provides undeniable proof of progress.”
It helps you spot bottlenecks in the sales process
TTR exposes bottlenecks in your sales process and pipeline generation strategies—like deals stalling at a specific stage or low conversion from specific channels. Spot these early, and you can fix them before they tank your quarter.
“The time to revenue metric tells you how long it's taking your team to close deals and convert leads into paying customers,” adds Will Yang, Head of Growth at Instrumentl. “This is a key metric for businesses because it can help you identify bottlenecks in your sales process and take steps to improve your conversion rate.”
7 ways to accelerate time to revenue
Joe Jarvie, Senior Account Executive at UserGems, is blunt about it: “Time kills deals.”
The longer a deal takes — which is often the case for enterprise companies with high-ticket sales — the harder it will be to close.
Meanwhile, your team burns time and resources on deals that may never close. That’s what makes it so important to track and optimize your TTR.
We asked B2B founders and revenue leaders how they actually shorten TTR. Seven tactics stood out:
1. Get the relevant data
Start by understanding your target customer’s buying behavior from existing data.
B2B buyers research across multiple channels before they talk to sales. That's why you need a tech stack that pulls data from those channels into one view—so you can see the full buying journey.
Here’s how Seth Steinman of Electric IT tracks their buying cycle to shorten time to revenue:
“The first step is getting the data, and we leverage multi-touch attribution through Bizible to understand First Touch all the way through Closed Won.
Then, we try to shorten every part of the funnel. 6sense intent data allows us to understand which accounts are in an active buying cycle, are on our website, and are interacting with our emails.
We then target those accounts with marketing dollars & sales activities (we also offer them gifts, since we know they're in-market & are aware of us).
Once SDRs get prospects on the phone for a qualification call, we have a 'Direct to Demo' option for fast-moving, qualified accounts, essentially skipping a Discovery step (these leads have 2x shorter sales cycles).”
2. Build relationships with multiple stakeholders
“multithreaded to power users and connect your solution to a specific business outcome they care about. This accelerates deals,” says Joe Jarvie of UserGems.
Connect with multiple decision-makers, champions, and influencers in your target account. They can see your product's value and push the deal forward internally. Plus, you're not stuck if one executive leaves or can't get budget approval.
3. Streamline your sales process
A streamlined sales process means everyone—buyers and reps—knows exactly what happens next at each stage.
For example, your sales rep knows which buyer to send a case study to based on the sales funnel stage they’re in. This can help the buyer convince other stakeholders of the product’s value, or it can be used as an incentive to move the deal forward.
“Making sure your sales reps know what to do at every stage involves project planning,” says Ryan Iacoviello, Senior Account Executive at UserGems. He shares these tips for a streamlined sales process that shortens time to revenue:
“Set KPIs, build consensus/educate all the stakeholders, so they know what to expect post signature and proper handover between sales and customer success teams.
Set a kick-off call where teams review the project plan.
Take care of groundwork presale, such as list building, building content, etc.”
Will Yang, Head of Growth at Instrumentl, adds, “streamlining your sales process also involves automating some steps, such as sending follow-up emails or scheduling reminders.”
These admin tasks eat into selling time. According to Dooly's 2022 Sales Happiness Index, 41% of the sales workday is spent on non-selling activities, such as contact researching and updating the CRM. Automate these tasks so reps can focus on selling and moving deals forward.
For example, Meeting Assistant by UserGems is a FREE tool that allows your sales team to:
Automatically add your prospects and their team members to a meeting invite
Create new or update existing records of your contacts in SalesForce after meetings
Get notified when any of your contacts change jobs so you can schedule a meeting and sell to them again.
4. Create buyer enablement content
Your sales process guides the buyer experience. Buyer enablement takes it further—it turns buyers into champions.
Give buyers the information they need before they have to ask for it.
Alex Kracov, CEO and co-founder of Dock, relies on buyer enablement to shorten their time to revenue.
“Sales reps need to guide buyers through the sales process using mutual action plans and support champions as they talk to internal stakeholders.
“One great way to assist buyers is to put together a digital sales room that includes all the information about your product in one place. It's an amazing asset for buyers to share with their boss when trying to get approval for a new product purchase.”
5. Invest in customer success
Time to revenue requires continuous attention and monitoring. You can help your customers find value in your product and retain them through ongoing data-driven customer success.
Strong onboarding builds loyalty and reduces churn from day one.
“Make onboarding feel like an investment in their business, not just another software purchase.” says Will Yang.
6. Build a strong waitlist
For startups, building a strong waitlist before they launch is a great way to shorten time to revenue.
Or, if you have an existing company, but you’re launching a new product, speak to new and existing customers before it goes live.
“When interviewing potential customers, ask them if they’d be willing to pre-commit to purchase as soon as it’s launched for a discount,” advises Deniz Kuran of Idiomatic.
Getting their buy-in beforehand guarantees you’ll have customers who are ready to buy from you right off the bat. Plus, it will give you time to carry out pre-sale activities like building your prospecting list before you launch. This can be a nifty B2B prospecting strategy to get you going.
7. Track job changes of past customers, prospects, and champions
Tracking customer job changes helps you generate qualified pipeline that’s more likely to convert faster. Current and past customers, as well as champions, are some of the best warm leads you can leverage.
A UserGems internal survey has shown that past customers are 3x likely to buy from you because they’re pre-qualified leads who understand the value of your product.
Past clients moving to a new job also open up an opportunity to win a new account. Even if they hold supporting roles rather than key decision-making positions, they can make an introduction or recommendation.
By tracking these warm leads and surfacing them in your CRM with relevant context, UserGems helps you:
Protect and generate more revenue by capturing valuable but easily lost contacts across all your accounts
Improve your ABM campaign execution by surfacing key decision-makers for multithreading
Align sales and marketing to go after the same accounts, thereby accelerating time to revenue.
Customers like Cobalt love that UserGems has helped them to automate pipeline generation and improve ROI by surfacing warm leads.
Improving B2B time to revenue
If you're not tracking TTR, you can't see where deals slow down—or where competitors might be beating you to the punch.
Start by reviewing your data. Use enrichment tools to map the full customer journey. Then ask customers directly what slowed them down.
UserGems surfaces warm leads—past customers, champions, and key decision-makers who just changed jobs—directly in your CRM. These contacts are 3x more likely to buy because they already know your value. See how it works in a demo 👇
