Customer & Key Account Acquisition
8 MIN READ
How To Win Customers When the Sales Cycle Is Long and the Product Is Complex
With long, technical sales cycles, one of the biggest costs is pursuing the wrong opportunities for too long.
Bianca Marasescu
Key Account Manager at PBS Sales
September 2026
QUICK ANSWER
Don’t chase more contacts; chase the right ones. With long, technical sales cycles, one of the biggest costs is pursuing the wrong opportunities for too long. Customer acquisition improves when you tighten targeting, understand where your technology has a real application, and qualify continuously instead of simply following up.
Winning a first conversation is only the beginning in complex B2B sales. Months can pass between initial contact and an order. Engineering has to evaluate the fit, purchasing negotiates terms, quality may require documentation, samples or tests may be needed, and priorities can change along the way.
Meanwhile, technical buyers arrive increasingly well informed. The 2026 State of Marketing to Engineers study found that around 62% of the technical buying process happens online before buyers engage directly with sales. This is something we also experience in the field.
After more than 14 years in international technical sales and European OEM business development, my approach is: spend less energy on contact volume and more on developing the right opportunities and nurturing the right customer relationships.
Go beyond the product pitch
The salesperson does not need to replace the engineer. But in technical sales, you need enough understanding to recognise an application, ask useful questions and communicate between the customer and your technical team.
You also need to stay flexible. The opportunity you discover may not be the one you expected. A customer may identify another application. Requirements change. Another department becomes involved. New technology changes what is possible.
That is where experience and technical understanding become particularly valuable. In my own work, I still rely heavily on personal connections and on understanding the customer’s expectations, including where their reservations or barriers are. This helps me understand whether we need to reposition the product, adjust our argument or even reconsider which market sectors we should target.
Use AI for reach and research. Judgement still belongs to us
From my colleagues’ experience and my own, AI is making customer research and market analysis considerably faster. Buyers are using it too. In the same 2026 engineering study, 69% of respondents said they use generative AI during the purchasing process, yet average trust in AI-generated answers was only 4.7 out of 10.
For me, that illustrates the opportunity and the limitation very well. AI can help us see more possibilities and work faster. But someone still needs to understand whether there is a real technical and commercial opportunity behind the information and be able to communicate that opportunity credibly to the customer.
Qualify continuously, not just at the start
Long sales cycles require persistence, but persistence does not mean following every contact indefinitely. Keep asking: Are we learning more about the application? Are we reaching the right people? Is the customer investing time too? Are we moving toward an RFQ, test, sample or quotation?
If the answers repeatedly remain no, it may be time to reconsider the investment.
For complex technical products, successful customer acquisition is therefore not primarily a numbers game. It is about finding the right opportunity, understanding it technically, developing it consistently and knowing where your sales effort is worth investing.
CASE STUDY
Start where you actually have a chance
In one international PBS sales project for a German manufacturer of technical marking solutions that I ran, we analysed the segments where the company was already successful and used that knowledge to identify comparable applications and key customers in other countries. Existing OEM and supplier relationships helped us gain access, but each opportunity still had to be developed individually.
“Who could theoretically buy this?” is therefore not the right question. A better one is: “Where does this technology solve a real problem?”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bianca Marasescu
Bianca Marasescu is a Key Account Manager at PBS Sales with more than 14 years of experience in international technical sales and European OEM business development. She combines technical understanding, hands-on customer development and multilingual skills to build key accounts and long-term relationships across international markets.