Sales leaders track why deals were won or lost. That's normal. What most companies never look at is how their own team worked together, or fought each other, to get that deal done.
Buying committees keep getting bigger. That's the external complexity everyone talks about. Almost nobody talks about the internal complexity: what your own team has to fight through just to move a deal forward. The best reps push through all of it. Everyone else gets stuck.
Every new approval step adds friction. Legal has to sign off. Engineering has to weigh in. Finance has to bless the terms. On top of that, reps are hunting for the right marketing material and updating three tools that don't talk to each other. Every one of those steps slows the deal down.
Companies build these processes to create transparency. Often they do the opposite. More steps and more tools make problems harder to spot, not easier. A 2015 CEB study found 70.2 percent of sellers said their job was highly complex. That number hasn't gotten better since.
Fix the internal process before you buy more software. Map out what your team actually has to do to move a deal from stage to stage. Cut what doesn't need to be there. Write down what does. Only after that's clean should you add a tool, and only a tool that fits the process you just built.
Most companies buy software first and hope it fixes the process. It doesn't. Start with the process. Then find the tool that fits it.
Your internal process should never be harder for your team than closing the deal itself. Strip out the friction. Give your reps a clear, simple path. That's how you get more time on selling and more deals closed.