Between 2024 and 2025 two things moved in the same direction in the 6sense buyer data. The average buying cycle shortened from 11.3 months to 10.1 months, and the point at which buyers first contact a seller moved from 69 percent of the way through the journey to 61 percent.
Why this reads as good news and is not
On the face of it, a buyer who makes contact earlier is a buyer with more of their mind still open. Eight percentage points of a ten month cycle is roughly six to seven weeks of additional exposure, which is the sort of thing a commercial team would ordinarily be pleased about.
The same report gives the reason to be careful. Ninety-four percent of buyers could rank their shortlist before contacting anyone, and the pre-contact favourite still won four deals in five. Earlier contact has not made the buyer less decided. It has made them decided sooner, and then willing to talk.
What is being brought forward, on this reading, is not deliberation. It is verification. The buyer has formed a view faster, partly because the research is faster to do, and they are now checking it against a person.
What it changes about the first conversation
A conversation that arrives during verification has a different job from one that arrives during deliberation. It is being used to confirm or break a position the buyer already holds, quickly, and the fastest way to break it is to appear not to know what they have already read.
A discovery script that opens by asking what the business does, what problem they are trying to solve, and what their timeline looks like is aimed at a deliberating buyer. Run against a verifying one, it reads as a firm that did not prepare, and the verification concludes unfavourably in the first four minutes.
What we take from it
The preparation window shrank along with the cycle. A commercial system that relies on a seller reading up between booking and meeting has less time to do it than it did a year ago, and the compression falls on the stage that was already the weakest.
Our working thesis is that this is where automation earns its place most clearly. Assembling what is publicly knowable about a company and what that particular buyer has already engaged with is production work with a defined finishing state. Deciding what any of it means is not. A system that hands a prepared seller into a verification conversation is spending the scarce resource where the shorter cycle has made it scarcer.