How To Close Enterprise Deals Faster 

Enterprise deals don’t grind to a halt in one big, obvious moment. They slow down in ways that are barely noticeable. If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with meetings continuously slipping into next quarter, or a key contact taking longer to reply. In Salesforce, the opportunity will usually ‘look fine’. Same stage and close date, but if you sell into large, complex businesses, you know that these kinds of deals can start to drag so easily. In fact, studies show anywhere between 40% and 60% of deals today end up lost to customers who express their intent to purchase, but ultimately fail to act. Now apply this to enterprise sales which involve 7–10 decision-makers, and have grown 25% longer in recent years, it’s easy to see why these sales cycles are so long winded, and why so many companies waste valuable resources on them. 

Salesforce shows you the skeleton of your deal – the account, contacts, and activities, but not the living network of people who decide whether it moves forward. It won’t tell you that your CFO contact has lost influence with the COO. It won’t capture the fact that the VP of Sales is quietly swaying your economic buyer because they bonded over a football match last quarter. It won’t flag that your champion’s “final” approval still has to survive a review with someone in procurement you’ve never met.

Packing more calls into your already full calendar or pushing harder on “urgency” won’t close your enterprise deals faster. The answer lies in visualizing stakeholder relationships inside your Salesforce org, so you can create better business relationships and act on them with confidence. 

This article breaks down three common bottlenecks that are slowing your enterprise sales cycles, and how you can fix them all inside Salesforce so that you can start closing these deals and hit your targets!

1. Late-Stage Surprises

You’re approaching the close date & the business case is agreed. Your champion’s talking about rollout plans and the hard work you’ve put in is finally going to pay off. Then a new name appears in the email thread, “looping in finance”, and suddenly the conversation has changed. 

Have they even been approved to spend this budget with you?

It’s not always finance, sometimes it’s legal trying to rewrite clauses you’ve never had pushback on before. Or IT raising security requirements you didn’t know about. In complex enterprises,  these functions join the sales cycle late by design. The main problem is that they’re joining without any of the context you’ve built with the buying team. You could be more than 6 months into the deal, and now you’re starting from scratch with someone who has veto power. You have no existing relationship with them, and you’re not prepared. 

When working deals in Salesforce, it’s easy to miss these people until they show up uninvited. 50% of sales leaders claim that their CRM is difficult to use, and a lot of orgs are set up in a way that makes salespeople feel like they’re being dragged away from valuable selling time to fill out useless fields. This is particularly important considering salespeople spend an average of 5.9 hours per week manually logging data into CRM for a new report.

It’s common practice to track the people you’ve spoken to, and maybe add a few contacts that are “likely to be involved later” roles. But unless there is a user-friendly way to check for gaps and close them before those people surface, salespeople are only meeting blockers when they raise a concern. 

So, how do you work your deals in a way that avoids these late stage surprises? Or, at least, make sure you’re prepared for them?

You map everyone, and engage stakeholders early.

Engaging Stakeholders Early Inside Salesforce

When you’re building an org chart, don’t just log the people you’ve met, map every function you might see before close, even if you don’t yet have names. Finance, procurement, compliance, legal, security – whoever can slow your sales cycle should be on your radar from day one. Then make it a habit to review that list after every milestone. If a new department shows up in your internal deal dialogue, they should be in Salesforce too, so you can start building a relationship before you need their approval. 

This is doable outside of your CRM, but your team needs to be spending their time selling, not updating a Google sheet.

We could make all sorts of promises here, but we’d rather share what our customers say:

When using a tool like OrgChartPlus, stakeholder maps become more than a quick checkbox done just to please leadership – they become a live, shared, visual inside Salesforce. Move fast from templates that reflect the full stakeholder structure for your market or deal type. Missing someone from finance? It’s instantly visible. Noticed that EMEA deals always pull in a data privacy lead months earlier than US deals? Create a separate template for each region so you’re not relearning the same lesson.

Over time, these maps become a source of patterns you can act on. You’ll start to see, for example, that certain functions consistently become blockers if they’re not engaged before stage four. You’ll have direct visibility into things like if it’s been too long since you’ve spoken to a stakeholder, you stop creating a list that doesn’t really impact your deals, you act on your relationships better, and simultaneously speed up your cycle while increasing close rate.

Avoid the “surprise” entirely by making their involvement part of your plan, not your clean-up work.

2. Stakeholder Title Bias

When a large deal is on the horizon, the instinct is often to start at the top. Find the most senior person with budget authority and sell hard. This simply doesn’t work anymore. We know that in enterprise deals, authority and influence aren’t the same thing. 

A CFO might have the power to sign, but if the department lead they trust isn’t convinced, you’re not closing. VP of Sales might control the budget, but they might also delegate evaluation entirely to their director and then simply stamp whatever that director recommends. Influence can hide two or three levels down, and if you ignore it, you hand your competition an easy way in that you can’t even see!

Salesforce doesn’t help much here. While it is great at recording formal titles and reporting lines, it’s blind to informal networks. This means your opportunity record might look perfectly “balanced” when in reality you’ve invested all your time in people who can’t actually carry your deal forward.

How Do I Avoid Stakeholder Title Bias?

For each contact in the deal, assess three things: their influence over both the buying decision and other stakeholders, but also the strength of your relationship with them. Someone low on the org chart but high on both of those metrics is far more valuable than a high-ranking executive who doesn’t know you well, and doesn’t have the time to jump on a call. 

Then, use that assessment to decide where you spend time. If influence is high but relationship strength is low, prioritise building trust with that person. If both are high, try to turn them into a real champion. Make sure they’re armed with the context and arguments they’ll need when they’re speaking for you behind closed doors.

Visualizing Stakeholder Influence and Sentiment Ratings 

OrgChartPlus brings influence and relationship ratings directly into the stakeholder map inside Salesforce. That means you can see (in one view) who actually shapes the decision and how close you are to them. You can also spot where you’re overinvesting in high-authority but low-influence people, or underinvesting in the informal connectors who can move your deal faster.

Over time, this mapping also reveals patterns. Maybe in the US, the CFO is almost always the economic buyer, but in EMEA, the COO often takes that role. Or perhaps in your public sector accounts, mid-level IT managers consistently block deals unless they’re engaged early. In high stakes enterprise deals, you’ll start to see these patterns emerge because every deal is mapped the same way.

And once you know who matters most, you can keep them warm. The same gentle nudges that flag long gaps in communication help you avoid losing momentum with your highest-impact contacts. The value is obvious: instead of chasing senior titles for optics, you’re building relationships with the people who can actually accelerate the close.

3. Momentum Loss Between Touchpoints

We’re all well aware that enterprise deals don’t follow a straight line from “qualified” to “closed.” They ‘circle back’. Buying groups revisit conversations you thought were settled, because new information has come in, or someone fresh to the process wants to re-open old questions. Gartner’s research shows this is the norm, with a massive 95% of buying groups having to go back and revisit decisions at least once as new information emerges. 

The damage happens when context is lost inbetween these ‘circle backs’. An AI call recorder sends meeting notes to one salespersons inbox that they haven’t read, whereas notes from the last conversation with the CTO is written up in a Word doc nobody else has access to. A technical deep dive happened two weeks ago, but the next meeting starts with “Can you remind me how you handle…?” because no one’s looking at the same record of what’s been said, agreed, or pushed to next steps.

Salesforce will happily log activities, but those activities don’t automatically connect to a coherent picture of where each stakeholder stands right now. Which means if the deal touches multiple sellers, each of them is working from their own partial, slightly out-of-date view. That’s how momentum evaporates without a single dramatic event. 

How To Maintain Momentum In Enterprise Deals

Make stakeholder engagement a shared asset, not a personal notebook. Every interaction should live where the whole team can see it, alongside the stakeholder’s position in the deal. That way, when a meeting loops back to an old topic, you can pick it up with the exact same language and context you used last time, instead of rehashing or contradicting yourself.

Just as importantly, make it easy to see gaps in recent contact. If a key influencer hasn’t heard from you in three weeks, that’s a risk to the relationship. 

Maintain Visible Notes Into Your Contacts

With OrgChartPlus, every stakeholder’s profile on the visual map can carry their engagement history, or relevant information. It’s not buried in a generic activity list anymore, it’s tied to the person, so you see at a glance what’s been discussed, who led the conversation, and where it left off.

This is especially powerful in team selling. If your solution engineer covered a technical objection last month, the next person meeting that stakeholder doesn’t need to guess whether it was resolved, they can see the exact exchange, and use it to accelerate the sales cycle. 

In a long sales cycle, the space between touchpoints is where competitors build doubt. Staying visible, consistent, and context-aware is how you keep the deal moving forward when it’s at risk of drifting.

Start Closing Enterprise Deals Faster Inside Salesforce

Enterprise sales aren’t slowing down because your team is bad at selling. It’s slowing because the rules of the game changed: bigger buying groups, longer cycles, hidden influencers, endless loops. Salesforce gives you the pipeline view, but not the human network behind it, and that gap is exactly where momentum dies.

The teams who close faster aren’t the ones who push harder on urgency or stack up more meetings. They’re the ones who see the deal as a living system of people (who’s involved, who’s missing, who’s drifting)  and act on that visibility before it turns into a closed lost.

OrgChartPlus brings the missing layer that turns contact lists into stakeholder maps, activities into shared context, and static opp records into a live view of the deal.If you want to stop watching enterprise deals die in your forecast, this is where you start. Without fixing visibility, you’ll keep losing deals you should be winning.

The solution is waiting for you inside Salesforce. Book a tailored demo today!