By: Grant Johnson, 6x Public and PE-backed CMO & Chief Marketing Officer of Chief Outsiders
In previous blogs, I discussed fast ways for CEO’s to assess relative marketing performance, and covered proven approaches to improving six industry benchmark-based Key Performance Indicators (reach, share, engagement, loyalty, pipeline, and progression) that can boost overall marketing effectiveness. Today, I'm going to review some of the key findings from recent research around Marketing Performance benchmarks. I'll select key metrics from each of these three benchmarks and their implications for optimizing marketing performance.
Here a few key takeaways
🎯 ICP discipline drives higher marketing productivity. In one study, “targeting the mid-market proved to be a more attractive growth opportunity.”
📊 ROI is critical. Most CEO’s, CFO’s, boards and investors “expect > 2:1 return on marketing spend.”
🚀 Conversion is key to pipeline health. You need to achieve an “MQL to Opp Conversion Rate of 25% or greater” to beat industry benchmarks
And now the findings.
First, in the 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmarks, Carilu Dietrich, Ray Rike, Jon Miller, and Bill Macaitis, published a comprehensives study with input from more than 300 companies. The Benchmarks include interactive filters to see how a given company measures up in the findings.
There are lots of meaningful insights, and the one that stood out the most to me is regarding Marketing ROI. In the chart on “Marketing Expenses per ($) of New Logo Revenue/ARR”, the averages were: companies in the $5M-$20M averaged $1.03; in the $20M-$50M, companies averaged $.55 and in the $50M-$100M, companies averaged $.50. If you are performing like the average in the first revenue band, it’s going to be hard to justify additional marketing investment, when your overall return is not even 100%. But even for the larger revenue segments, most CEO’s, CFO’s, boards and investors will not be very eager to only get a 2:1 return on marketing spend. Over the course of my six times as a CMO, I've averaged at least 3:1, and as high as a 10:1 return (the Gold standard) on marketing investments.
Second, in the 2025 B2B SaaS Marketing Spending and Performance Benchmarks survey in March, 2025, Omar Akhtar, and his company Benchmarker conducted a survey of 275 respondents involved in budget planning for marketing at B2B SaaS companies in the US. There were many insightful findings, including “both companies with high-growth and high-performance allocated a higher percentage of spend to marketing, not just as a portion of revenue, but also as a portion of the combined sales and marketing budget. It underscores the fact that you can't “cut your way to growth.” Over the last few years, many companies have shifted their operational focus from “growth at any cost” to “profitable growth,” which is sensible. However, many have discovered that at some point you have to start investing if you want to grow at or above the market average. Another interesting finding from this research was that targeting the mid-market is an attractive growth opportunity . “Many companies move up-market as part of their growth strategy, but our data shows that the highest growth rates come from businesses selling to the mid-market segment.”
Third, in Insight Partners, SaaS Marketing Periodic Table, they provide benchmarks for various SaaS revenue bands “enriched by the most recent quarterly data from our diverse portfolio of private and public SaaS companies. These benchmarks are meant to be a resource to highlight the marketing metrics that are critical to driving growth.” With Insight Partners data, you can select and view benchmarks for companies below $10M ARR, from $10M-$100M, and above $100M ARR. Let’s pick the middle segment, the $10M-$100M band. Under the category of “Marketing Budget,” it shows that “Marketing Spend vs. New Logo ARR” should be less than 70%, which means marketing is a net positive contributor to new logo acquisition, which is similar to the marketing productivity parameters from The Benchmarkit study above. Insight also shows a key pipeline conversion efficiency metric should be a: “MQL to Opp Conversion Rate of 25%+.” This is further confirmation on the importance of the quality of marketing qualified leads vs. just the quantity - if MQL’s don’t convert and become actual revenue, you’re not operating efficiently, and it’s unlikely more budget alone will close the gaps.
What Good Marketing Productivity Looks Like
With these recent benchmarks in mind, let’s examine constructing a hypothetical waterfall. Having helped create, progress and close several billion dollars in pipeline over the past two decades, there are certain benchmarks for pipeline efficiency that I’ve come to expect, and these three broad-based research studies reinforce what good companies should be able to achieve with effective marketing strategies and tactics, along with proper Sales alignment, effective tech stacks and operational rigor.
While there are various GTM motions from PLG to SLG, from SMB to enterprise, for the purposes of this illustration, let’s look at a sales-led example for mid-market SaaS companies with an ACV of say $100k. I’m going to work from the bottom up to make it easier to understand a simplified conversion and efficiency model. Let’s say you close one out of four opportunities - which good performing companies do regularly- you will need $400k in opportunities for every closed-won deal. Most companies have what I call an intermediate stage before an opportunity can be formally qualified by an account exec whereby a Sales Development Rep (also called a BDR) does the initial qualification and converts a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) into a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). Generally speaking, one of these two converts from SAL to a Sales Qualified Opportunity (SQO). So now that would represent $800K in potential pipeline. Now working back to first general stage of pipeline creation, the MQL, or marketing qualified account (MQA), good companies will typically convert about one out of two MQAs to SALs. That means you need $1.6 million in pipeline at the top of the funnel. So, in summary, it will take $1.6M in pipeline potential to create $100k in closed-won business. So how much should you spend to create $1.6M in pipeline? From the research above, many companies are spending between $50,000 and $100,000 to achieve $100K in ARR revenue.
From my experience, marketers should be able to do much better. I think most companies can achieve 3:1 or even 4:1 ROI and thus in the example above, it should only take $25k-$33K in marketing spend for every $100K in closed-won Sales. Another way of looking at it is that it takes around 20 leads to produce 1 MQA, 2 MQAs to produce 1 SAL, 2 SALs to produce 1 SQO, and 4 SQOs to 1 closed won deal. Here’s a table that summarizes marketing investment to a solid pipeline productivity path.
| Pipeline Productivity | |||||
| Scenario A | ACV = $100K | Stage | Quantity | Conversion | Value |
| Marketing Investment | $25,000 | Raw Leads | 320 | n/a | |
| Cost per MQA | $1,563 | MQA | 16 | 5% | $1,600,000 |
| Cost per lead | $78 | SAL | 8 | 50% | $800,000 |
| (20 leads per MQA) | SQO | 4 | 50% | $400,000 | |
| Won (ACV) | 1 | 25% | $100,000 | ||
| Key metric call out | MQA to SQO =25% |
In my next blog, I’ll share more tips on improving marketing performance and ROI. If you’d like to learn more about key performance benchmarks and metrics, here’s a 2 minute overview of the Marketing Performance Index, and there are more than a dozen blogs with additional insights and tips on the CMO Mentor website.
If you’re interested in a free diagnostic to see how your marketing performance compares to industry benchmarks, just send me a note and we can schedule a call. It takes about an hour to compile your confidential score. Happy performance improvement!