At a Glance
- Secured Research’s 2025 middle market survey found that 71% of equipment finance deals above $5 million involve four or more decision-makers, with an average close cycle of 14.3 months.
- The sales process for large-ticket deals is a stakeholder navigation exercise, not a pricing competition—yet most firms train their RMs on product features and rate positioning.
- Firms that formalized their large-deal process with milestone-based pipeline stages saw win rates increase by 22% and cycle times compress by an average of 11 weeks.
- The biggest risk in a $5M+ pursuit isn’t losing to a competitor. It’s losing to “no decision”—the prospect reverting to their existing bank line or deferring the equipment acquisition entirely.
The Small-Deal Playbook Doesn’t Scale
Most equipment finance sales organizations were built to process transactions. A lead comes in, a proposal goes out, the credit team turns it, and the deal funds or it doesn’t. For deals under $1 million, this transactional approach works reasonably well. The decision-maker is usually one person—a CFO, a controller, an owner—and the evaluation criteria are straightforward: rate, term, structure, speed.
Above $5 million, everything changes. The equipment decision is entangled with capital allocation strategy, board-level approvals, tax planning, and sometimes M&A timing. The person your RM is talking to is rarely the person who makes the final call. And the competitive set expands beyond other equipment finance companies to include bank revolving facilities, cash purchases, and the increasingly attractive option of doing nothing at all.
