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Ask a B2B website how much its product costs and you will often find a pricing page. Ask how long it takes to go live and you usually get one word, like "fast" or "quick". I run marketing at Storylane, and I saw this again and again in the Storylane Buyability Index, which checked 10,580 buyer questions on 529 B2B websites.
Implementation time came up on 502 of those 529 sites. The website gave a full answer only 40% of the time. On 59% of those sites, not one question about implementation time got a full answer. I call this the how-long gap.
Where do these numbers come from?
They come from the Storylane Buyability Index. It takes the questions a buyer would ask about a company and checks the company's website for each answer. Between Sep 8 and Oct 20, 2026, people ran scans on 529 B2B websites, which produced 10,580 questions.
Two caveats matter here. The questions are generated for each company to reflect what a buyer would plausibly ask. They are not logged from real buyers. And the 529 sites were chosen by the people who ran scans, so this is not a random sample of B2B. Read every number below with both in mind.
Do buyers care more about time than price?
About the same. In the Storylane Buyability Index, 816 questions are about time (how long, how quickly, timelines) and 901 mention cost, price or pricing.
The wording is different, though. 550 questions open with the words "how long" and only 128 open with "how much". Price questions come in many shapes, like "is pricing per seat" or "are there hidden fees", because buyers know the words pricing pages use. Time questions mostly come as "how long", because there is no standard page to borrow words from. That missing page is the real story.
How often does a website say how long implementation takes?
Not often. Across 529 implementation-time questions on 502 sites, the website gave a full answer 40% of the time and a partial answer 50% of the time.
Pricing questions do a bit better. The 1,530 pricing questions got a full answer 46% of the time. When price goes unanswered, it is usually on purpose. 158 pricing questions were gated or sent to sales. When time goes unanswered, nobody decided it. Only 2 of the 529 implementation-time questions were sent to sales. The rest were just half answered.
| Question type (Storylane Buyability Index, 529 sites) | Questions | Fully answered | Partly answered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opens with "how long" | 550 | 39% | 52% |
| Opens with "how much" | 128 | 47% | 49% |
| Implementation time (any wording) | 529 | 40% | 50% |
| Pricing topic (all questions) | 1,530 | 46% | 35% |
A partial answer is what the how-long gap looks like. The site says something like "fast setup" or "live in days". The buyer learns the vendor thinks it is quick. They don't learn whether it means two weeks or two quarters for a company like theirs. That was the only thing they asked.
Why do websites avoid giving a timeline?
The easy answer is that timelines vary, so vendors don't want to promise one. That is true. But prices vary too, and most sites still publish a starting price and the conditions that change it. So variation alone doesn't explain it.
I have a theory. The vendor controls the price. The timeline depends on both sides. It depends on the customer's data, their IT queue, their security review and who owns the project on their team. Publishing a timeline feels like promising someone else's work. So teams write about the part they control, and that part fits in one word.
The data fits this theory. When the buyer was tagged as self-serve, "how long" questions got a full answer 55% of the time. When the buyer needed high assurance, that fell to 27%. The bigger the rollout, the vaguer the website gets. That is exactly where the timeline matters most.
Who asks "how long"?
Mostly people who will never join your sales call. Of the 550 "how long" questions, 423 (77%) were tagged as executive questions. Across all questions, the share was 44%. Executives ask about time before they sign off. They want to know when the project stops taking up attention and starts paying back.
Executives are also the least likely to hear your answer in person. In internal Storylane deal data covering 637 B2B deals, the average account had about 23 known contacts and 2.3 people on calls. Your rep may say "about six weeks" on the call. The person who decides reads the website, a forwarded summary, or whatever an AI assistant pulled from your pages. If the site says "quickly", that is the answer they get.
Where are the full answers today?
Not where buyers start. Of the 216 "how long" questions that got a full answer, 6 were answered on the homepage and 3 on the pricing page. The rest came from case studies, blog posts, help centers, docs and other pages.
That causes a second problem. More buyers now let an AI assistant do the reading. AI browsers and agents will find a timeline buried in a case study. They will also find "live in days" on your homepage and "the rollout took four months" in an old blog post. Then they have to pick one.
What does a good timeline answer look like?
Give it the same care you give a pricing page. A good answer has four parts.
- A range for each type of customer. Not one number. For example, small self-serve teams take X weeks, mid-market teams with SSO and a CRM sync take Y, and enterprise teams with a security review take Z. Use your own delivery data. If you don't have that data, start there.
- What the customer has to do. List the steps on their side, like access, data and approvals. Vendors are nervous about this part. Buyers trust it most, because it shows you have done this before.
- The slowest step. Say which step usually takes longest and why. Buyers already suspect it. Naming it makes the rest of your range believable.
- Time to first results, separate from time to finish. 70 of the "how long" questions were about payback, not setup. They got a full answer only 34% of the time. "Live in three weeks, first results in the first month" answers both questions an executive is really asking.
Then put it where people look. Add a line to the pricing page, a timeline to every case study, and a page your champion can forward. A timeline does its work in the meeting you're not in.
Where Storylane fits
We sell products that answer buyer questions on websites, so I have an obvious interest in this finding. RepX is a website agent built for teams that want those questions answered the moment they are asked. You train it on your website, docs, decks and call scripts. It answers questions, shows interactive demos, qualifies the buyer and hands sales-ready buyers to your team. Qualified leads flow to HubSpot, Salesforce and Slack.
It is best for teams that have written their timeline down. Give it the range, the customer's steps and the slowest step, and every buyer who asks "how long" gets that answer, day or night.
What to do on Monday
Ask your onboarding lead for the last ten implementations. Get the start date, live date, customer type, and what slowed each one down. Turn that into a range and a slowest step. Put it on one page, link it from pricing, and add the number to each case study. Then scan your site to see which other buyer questions get one word instead of an answer.
Buyers ask about time about as often as they ask about price. Most websites answer price with a page and time with a word. Closing that gap is mostly a writing job, and it is one of the cheapest fixes you will find this quarter.
If you want to see how an agent handles your buyers' timeline and pricing questions on your own site, book a demo with our team.