How MIC Global Manages 6-12 Month Sales Cycles Without Losing Deals

Month three of your enterprise deal: your champion gets promoted and moves to a different division. Month five: the budget you were promised gets reallocated to a different initiative. Month eight: the new stakeholder who replaced your champion wants to restart the evaluation process. Month ten: the company announces a hiring freeze and all new vendors are on hold.

This isn’t a nightmare scenario. It’s just Tuesday in enterprise insurance sales.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Harry Croydon, Co-Founder of MIC Global, an embedded microinsurance company that’s raised over $13 million, shared the brutal reality of selling in insurance and how his team keeps deals alive through procurement processes that can stretch beyond a year.

The challenge isn’t unique to insurance, but insurance amplifies it. The sales cycles are long regardless of what you’re selling or who you’re selling to. And during those long cycles, everything changes.

The Fundamental Challenge

Harry doesn’t sugarcoat the problem: “The hard part about insurance is really the decision making process around whichever channel you’re in. The decision making process can be quite long and challenging because of that.”

This isn’t about one specific buyer or one specific channel being slow. It’s structural across the entire industry. Whether MIC Global is selling direct, through brokers, or through insurance company partnerships, the pattern holds.

“I’ve been selling technology insurance for a long time and the sales cycle, whether it’s to brokers, if it’s to insurance companies, or is very long,” Harry explains, drawing on decades of experience watching deals move at glacial pace.

The length itself creates the core problem: entropy. The longer a deal takes, the more opportunities for things to fall apart. Stakeholders change. Priorities shift. Budgets evaporate. Market conditions evolve. And with each passing month, the probability of something derailing your deal increases.

What Actually Changes During Long Sales Cycles

The changes aren’t abstract. They’re specific and predictable. Harry identifies the pattern clearly: “A lot of things change, you know, during a six months or a year long procurement process.”

Personnel changes are the most obvious. Your champion gets promoted, leaves the company, or moves to a different role. The new person inheriting the project has different priorities, different relationships with vendors, and no emotional investment in decisions made before they arrived.

Priority shifts are equally common. The initiative that was critical in Q1 becomes less important in Q3 when a new competitive threat emerges or a different executive pushes their agenda. Your deal doesn’t get killed—it just gets deprioritized into indefinite limbo.

Budget realities evolve. The money that was allocated when you started might get reallocated, frozen, or simply disappear into a broader cost-cutting initiative. Even if everyone still wants your solution, the financial resources might not exist anymore.

Organizational dynamics shift. Mergers happen. Restructures occur. New executives arrive with their own vendor relationships and preferences. The political landscape you navigated in month one looks completely different by month nine.

The Core Strategy: Mutual Commitment

MIC Global’s approach to managing these long cycles centers on a deceptively simple principle: both sides need to stay equally committed to the process.

“You’ve got to keep very focused and keep, you know, you make sure that you’ve got client buy in all the time, you know, to make sure that you keep them on track as much as you on track,” Harry explains.

Notice the framing: keeping them on track as much as you on track. This isn’t about pushing reluctant clients toward a close. It’s about maintaining mutual momentum through a process where natural forces constantly pull toward inertia.

The word “buy in” is critical. Not just approval. Not just interest. Actual investment—emotional, political, and eventually financial—in making the deal happen.

Why Buy-In Requires Active Management

Client buy-in isn’t a one-time achievement. It’s a state that requires constant maintenance and renewal.

When deals take six to twelve months, the relationship dynamics change completely. In a 30-day sales cycle, you can maintain momentum through sheer persistence and frequency of contact. In a year-long cycle, persistence without value becomes annoying.

The challenge is providing ongoing value and maintaining engagement without being pushy or desperate. You need touchpoints that reinforce why the client started this process in the first place, remind them of the problem you’re solving, and keep the vision fresh.

This is especially critical when stakeholders change. When your champion leaves and someone new inherits the project, they’re inheriting context they weren’t part of creating. They might not fully understand the original pain point or the evaluation process that led to selecting you.

The Art of Keeping Clients Engaged

Harry’s phrasing—”keep the client managed along that route”—reveals the active nature of this process. It’s not passive relationship maintenance. It’s deliberate engagement management.

This means understanding what’s happening on the client side. Are they still moving forward with the broader initiative your solution supports? Are the people you’ve been working with still in their roles? Has the organizational priority shifted?

It means adapting your engagement to their process. If they’re in legal review, you’re providing whatever legal needs. If they’re in technical evaluation, you’re enabling their technical team. If they’re in budget planning, you’re helping them build the business case.

It means preemptively addressing the things that typically kill deals. If you know budget reallocation happens in Q3, you work to get budget committed before then. If you know personnel changes are coming, you build relationships with multiple stakeholders, not just your champion.

The Multi-Channel Advantage

MIC Global’s multi-channel approach provides a structural advantage in managing long sales cycles. When you’re selling direct, through brokers, and through insurance company partnerships simultaneously, you’re never completely dependent on any single deal closing.

This creates psychological freedom. When a deal in one channel stalls—and they will stall—you can shift attention to deals in other channels without panicking or desperately trying to force momentum.

Harry describes this as part of their core GTM strategy: “What we’ve done is really focus on this global nature, hence MIC Global and also had a kind of a multi channel approach which is I think different to a lot of startups that we see.”

The global, multi-channel approach means deal flow stays consistent even when individual deals hit inevitable delays. You’re not betting everything on closing three enterprise deals this quarter. You have ongoing conversations across multiple channels, stages, and geographies.

The Reality of Insurance Procurement

Understanding why insurance sales cycles are so long helps manage them better. It’s not arbitrary bureaucracy, though that exists too. It’s structural complexity.

Insurance purchases involve multiple stakeholders: risk managers, legal teams, compliance officers, finance departments, and often C-suite approval. Each stakeholder has different concerns, different timelines, and different internal processes.

Regulatory considerations add layers of review. Insurance products need legal approval. Risk assessment takes time. Compliance reviews can’t be rushed. These aren’t obstacles you can overcome with better sales tactics—they’re realities you have to work within.

Integration requirements extend timelines. Even simple insurance products need to integrate with existing systems, processes, and workflows. The technical evaluation, testing, and implementation planning all take time.

What Founders Can Learn

MIC Global’s experience with extended sales cycles offers lessons beyond insurance. Any B2B company selling into regulated industries, large enterprises, or complex buying committees faces similar dynamics.

The fundamental insight is about shared responsibility for momentum. It’s not your job to drag reluctant clients to a close. It’s your job to maintain mutual commitment through a process that naturally tends toward inertia.

This requires active client management, not just sales follow-up. You need to understand what’s changing on their side, adapt to their evolving needs, and proactively address the things that typically derail deals.

It requires building relationships beyond your champion. When personnel changes happen—and they will—you need other advocates who understand the value and can carry the deal forward.

It requires providing ongoing value throughout the process. In month eight of a twelve-month cycle, you can’t just be checking in on timing. You need to be solving problems, providing insights, and reinforcing why this matters.

The Long Game

Harry’s approach to extended sales cycles reflects broader wisdom about building in insurance: patience and persistence matter more than speed and aggression.

“You’ve got to kind of protect yourself from the unknown really all the time,” Harry advises, referring to unexpected events that derail deals. This protection comes from multiple channels, diversified pipeline, and relationships that survive personnel changes.

The companies that succeed in long-cycle sales aren’t the ones trying to speed up the process. They’re the ones who build systems to maintain momentum through inevitable delays, changes, and complications.

Six to twelve month sales cycles aren’t obstacles to overcome. They’re the reality of the market. The question isn’t how to make them shorter. It’s how to ensure that when month twelve arrives, both you and your client still remember why you started the journey and remain committed to finishing it together.