I remember you!

The 6 challenges of long B2B sales cycles in digital analytics

In B2B, sales cycles can drag on for weeks, months, or even years. It’s not like B2C, where transactions happen in minutes or days. B2B purchases take time—there are more decision-makers involved, high-value deals on the table, and negotiations that can go on forever. While these long sales processes can lead to huge payoffs (eg. lifetime value!), but they bring some real challenges when it comes to tracking things with digital analytics.

Here’s a quick look at some of the biggest hurdles B2B businesses face in tracking and analysing data throughout these long sales cycles, plus some tips on how to overcome them:

Attribution and lookback window limits

One major challenge with long sales cycles is tracking conversions back to your marketing efforts. Tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) only let you look back up to 90 days. But if your sales cycle stretches beyond that, important interactions early on might not even get counted.

Challenge 1:

How do you track and attribute conversions that can take six months or more to complete?

Solution:

CRM integration: To get around the 90-day limit, integrate your CRM with your digital analytics tools. This way, you can track customer interactions over a longer period and connect their behaviour to eventual conversions (yep, when the deal finally closes!).

Multi-source attribution: Use a combo of tools—like GA4, marketing automation platforms, and CRM data—to get a complete view of the customer journey, especially for those interactions that happen outside of the 90-day window.

Multiple decision-makers and stakeholders

B2B sales usually involve a bunch of decision-makers—everyone from end-users to department heads and executives. They’ll all interact with your website, download resources, or attend webinars, but these actions might not lead to a purchase until months down the road.

Challenge 2:

How do you track and differentiate all the interactions from different stakeholders within the same company?

Solution:

Account-based marketing (ABM): Instead of tracking individual users, focus on accounts. By tracking all the touchpoints from one company, you get a better understanding of the buying process and where each person is in their decision-making journey.

Custom segments: Use custom segments in GA4 or your CRM to group users by their role (e.g., end-user vs. decision-maker) and track how each group behaves on your digital platforms.

Nonlinear customer journeys

B2B customer journeys are hardly ever straightforward. A potential client might find your site through an organic search, attend a webinar six months later, talk to sales after that, and finally make a purchase months down the line. Tracking these winding paths can be tricky, especially when users bounce between devices and platforms.

Challenge 3:

How do you track and make sense of a customer journey that’s all over the place?

Solution:

Path exploration in GA4: GA4’s path exploration tool lets you see how users interact with your site at different stages. You can spot which events (like page views or content downloads) happen before a conversion and where people are falling off.

Measuring mid-funnel engagement

B2B sales cycles have multiple stages—awareness, consideration, decision, and sometimes a long evaluation period. Mid-funnel actions like webinar attendance, content downloads, or product demos are super important, but measuring their impact can be tough since the actual sale might happen much later.

Challenge 4:

How do you measure the success of mid-funnel content and activities when conversions take forever?

Solution:

Micro-conversions: Track micro-conversions, which are key actions that show someone’s engaged, like signing up for a webinar or downloading an eBook. These might not lead to an immediate sale, but they’re a sign the lead is still interested—basically, they’re not ghosting you.

Lead scoring: Implement a lead scoring system to assign value to different interactions. This helps you assess the quality of leads based on how they engage with mid-funnel content.

Long sales cycles and marketing ROI

It’s hard to prove the ROI of marketing when there’s a big gap between when you run campaigns and when a deal actually closes. (‘I remember you!’); In some cases, it could take months or even years for a lead to go from engaging with your content to becoming a paying customer you are shouting Christmas drinks.

Challenge 5:

How do you connect your marketing efforts to long-term sales in a meaningful way?

Solution:

Data-driven attribution models: GA4 offers data-driven attribution for the 90-day window, but pair this with CRM data to track how long-term marketing activities, like nurturing campaigns, contribute to overall revenue.

Full-funnel reporting: Use tools that let you create full-funnel reports, connecting top-of-funnel activities with CRM sales data. This way, you can see how marketing is impacting leads throughout the entire sales process. This might require a bit of ‘data knitting’ – but definitely doable without much effort via something like Looker Studio linked to the data.

Customer re-engagement and lead nurturing

With long sales cycles, there are usually periods where potential customers go quiet and stop engaging with your website or content. Knowing how to re-engage them at the right time is crucial but requires good tracking and monitoring.

Challenge 6:

How do you stay on top of cold leads and re-engage them when it matters?

Solution:

Behaviour-based triggers: Set up behaviour-based triggers in your CRM and analytics tools to automatically alert you when a prospect re-engages, like when they revisit your site or download new content.

Drip campaign analytics: Track how well your drip email campaigns are performing. Analyse which emails or content pieces drive re-engagement and push leads to the next stage of the funnel.

Long B2B sales cycles can definitely complicate digital analytics, but they also give you more opportunities to track customer journeys in detail. By using tools like GA4, integrating with CRMs, and focusing on key touchpoints (like mid-funnel engagement and account-based tracking), you can navigate these challenges and make data-driven decisions that help your business in the long run.

At the end of the day, even though long sales cycles can be tricky, they give your BD team the chance to build deeper, more valuable customer relationships—if you track them right!