Shorter buying cycles are usually reported as an improvement, because the reporting is done by firms selling tools that promise to shorten them. Whether a shorter cycle helps you depends entirely on where in the cycle you tend to win.
Two firms, same market
The first firm is known before the search begins. Its buyers arrive with it already on the list, often already ranked first. A shorter cycle helps it, because it shortens the window in which a competitor might displace it and reduces the total cost of the pursuit.
The second firm is discovered during the process, usually late, and wins by being better in the room than the incumbent favourite. A shorter cycle hurts it in two ways at once. There is less time to be discovered at all, and less time between discovery and decision to move a buyer off a ranked preference.
Most founder-led firms are the second one and have not noticed, because both types of firm experience a shortening cycle as the same thing: fewer, faster deals.
How to tell which you are
The test is not win rate. It is how you entered. For your last twenty opportunities, record whether the buyer already knew who you were before the first contact, and whether you were the first firm they spoke to or the third. The pattern is usually obvious after a dozen and is rarely what the firm assumed.
What we take from it
If you win late, compression is a structural threat and no improvement to the conversation offsets it, because the constraint is arriving in time rather than performing once you arrive.
That makes early presence the priority rather than a longer-term ambition to be funded once the pipeline allows. The market is removing the time in which your current advantage works, and the response has to be upstream of the point where you are currently strong.