Benchmarks and best practices for conquering your B2B SaaS metrics

According to a recent study by S&P Global Market Intelligence, 80% of businesses can’t consistently meet revenue goals and almost half of them believe that the metrics they’re tracking don’t offer insight into why they’re missing those goals. If you’re struggling with choosing and implementing the right metrics for your digital marketing initiatives, you’re not alone.

In this article, we’ll explore metrics that reflect the top objectives for B2B SaaS companies and share benchmarks so you can better understand the health of your business in relation to others in the software industry. We generated these benchmarks by analysing data from thousands of Adobe Marketo Engage customers. Then we narrowed them to a set of software customers so we could provide a reliable source of common industry challenges and trends related to funnel performance and the journey of a lead from first touch to win.

Lead creation and conversion

When your business is short on high-quality leads progressing through the funnel, you need to be able to understand why.

• Is marketing not attracting enough leads or are the leads low quality?
• Are leads growing stale because sales isn’t being proactive enough with those demonstrating the highest interest?
• Is selling software simply getting harder in general?
• Are all SaaS firms experiencing similar results?

It’s difficult to pinpoint the root cause of lead shortages when you’re not getting useful indicators of where things are going wrong. But when you pay close attention to the lead creation and conversion process, the answer will start to reveal itself.

When it comes to lead creation, it seems intuitive that more leads result in more opportunities. But then you need to determine which leads are worth your time, who is responsible for following up and whether they have time to sort through them. The reality is that 10 exceptionally well qualified leads beats 1,000 “maybe-they-will-maybe-they-won’t” leads every time and the data supports this.

The following chart shows year-over-year changes in the percentage of leads that progress from each stage to the next. In 2023, fewer leads moved through early stages of the funnel, but a higher proportion are converting to opportunities.

It’s clear from this benchmark that more is not always better. In fact, we’re seeing that tighter top-of-the-funnel qualification has increased the percentage of opportunities year-over-year. When you’re more stringent about who you progress down the funnel, it helps clear the noise for sales, so they can focus on the leads that matter.

One tip is to use the experience of your sales team when developing qualification criteria. They have hands-on experience with what separates a good lead from a bad one. And if they help set the criteria up front, you’re getting immediate buy-in and they can own the outcome with you. Then, incorporate these criteria into sales’ service level agreements (SLAs) to solidify that trust in the quality of your MQLs. After all, collaboration drives real results. In one case study with Interactive, a leading IT services provider in Australia, we noted an increase in sales-accepted leads by 250% through automation, robust lead scoring and unprecedented visibility across teams.

To figure out what will work best for you, get everyone to pay close attention to the different stages of your funnel. Start by joining the 64% of digitally driven organisations tracking MQL to SQL conversion to develop a more efficient funnel.

Pipeline velocity

Understanding how leads progress through the sales funnel is foundational to your business. Once you can start being honest about which leads are actually qualified, it’s time to think about how quickly those leads move through the pipeline. Looking at the stages of your pipeline can help you to diagnose challenges with lead velocity and assign resources appropriately to mitigate them.

When you dig into your own pipeline velocity, what you’re likely to find might be a little bit alarming — your sales cycle is getting longer and longer over time. But this shouldn’t be cause for panic. We’ve looked at the industry trends and this is happening across the board. There is growing complexity in B2B buying due to unpredictable budgets and more stakeholders than ever involved in the process.

Macro changes like this are difficult to combat, so don’t spend too much time trying to make sense of the whole puzzle. Instead, focus on what you can control — how long your leads spend in each stage and what resources you dedicate to each of those stages.

While there are many notable figures in this chart above, the obvious stand-out is the year-over-year lengthening of the prospect stage. Extending the earliest stage of the funnel allows marketers to take advantage of ever-improving automation in data collection and qualifying. That way, as leads move down the funnel, more is known about who they are and what they’re looking for and importantly, there is more confidence around their likelihood to buy.

We’ve seen this kind of automation and data collection result in tremendous improvements. IT infrastructure company DiGiCOR achieved a reduction in the average number of days for open opportunities from 72 to 30 days and a win rate increase from 34% to 43% by automating lead engagement throughout the entire marketing funnel.

It’s also important to note that the SQL stage lengthened year-over-year as much as the prospect stage, which may signal some challenges in deciphering what are real opportunities and what are not. In contrast to the prospect stage where more time spent could be a healthy indicator, an extended SQL stage is something to keep an eye on given the high cost of involving sales resources. It is vitally important for marketing to pass along insights so that sales can enter lead conversations with relevant context at moments of high propensity.

By keeping leads in the prospect stage longer, it’s possible to combat some of the challenges of lengthening sales cycles. Remember, longer cycles don’t necessarily spell trouble. Take the time to carefully qualify leads with automation and close collaboration between sales and marketing and the result will be rewarding partnerships between vendor and buyer that bring long-term value to everyone involved.

Channel performance

Funnel performance is obviously fundamental to understanding the overall health of your business, but we’ve so far only discussed signals of a healthy funnel that already has high-quality leads flowing through it, which begs the question: How do digitally driven organisations attract and nurture the best leads? The right mix of marketing channels can sometimes feel like throwing darts at a board and hoping for the best, but our benchmarks provide clear, actionable insights on managing channels.

The following chart shows the share of opportunities and revenue based on first-touch attribution — or how often a brand-new lead led to an opportunity within three months.

There are some clear winners here. Events stand out as a very strong channel for generating opportunities, with a 24.5% share of all new opportunities and an 8.8% share of total revenue generated. In absolute terms, events lead the way in both categories. However, events are relatively inefficient compared to email and web marketing, which turn opportunities into revenue 54% and 40% of the time, respectively. The takeaway is that while events are excellent at making noise, email and web marketing are highly effective at turning leads into revenue.

Email is one of the fundamental elements of digital marketing and is at the core of nurture programmes that turn hand-raisers into customers. In 2023, the number of emails sent increased, as did delivery rates, thanks to cleaner email lists. However, open rates and click-through rates both decreased, emphasising the need for highly relevant emails, as it’s only getting more difficult to get people’s attention. Encouragingly, form fills on landing pages increased, indicating that if you can get leads to click, there’s more likelihood of follow-through.

There’s no getting around it — email fatigue is real. But that doesn’t mean email isn’t vital. Instead of trying to wave a magic wand to fix fatigue, digitally driven marketing operations teams are looking downstream, leaning on their marketers by providing them with self-serve tools to better understand their specific audiences, track email performance and even create the assets that speak to the audiences they know so well. By implementing these practices, our partner in this benchmarking exercise, business planning software company Anaplan, has seen a landing-page form-fill success rate upwards of 10%, more than 5% over the median.

If you only take away one insight about channel performance, it’s that the only absolute truth in channel mix is that no one channel will do it all. Events, email and web marketing are great at casting a wide net and efficient at converting first touches. Direct mail and paid media don’t have the same first-touch power but are useful for progressing leads down the funnel. A successful marketing strategy includes them all. In fact, Anaplan noted that there is a direct correlation between deal size and the number of marketing engagements, regardless of channel.

How to deliver better marketing results in B2B SaaS

Achieving success in B2B SaaS marketing requires a holistic approach that balances quality lead generation, efficient sales cycle management and effective channel utilisation. Prioritise well qualified leads over sheer volume and improved conversion rates will follow. Understand the length and complexity of your sales cycle and you’ll better utilise automation, allocating resources only where they’re vital. Tie it all together with a mix of marketing channels to ensure a steady progression of leads through the funnel. Modern B2B buying is complex and ever-changing, so leverage your data and enable your teams. Digitally driven and collaborative teams are successful teams.

Learn more about Adobe Marketo Engage.

Methodology

Adobe aggregated 2022 and 2023 data from thousands of Marketo Engage customers and narrowed it to a subset of 11 software companies to build the charts you’re seeing in this article. Adobe has validated Marketo data accuracy through individual customer meetings and has received consent from all customers in this peer set to have their data shared in aggregate.

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