So leading SaaS growth stage VC fund Insight Partners surveyed 100+ of its top later-stage B2B companies to see how they did marketing and demand gen and pipeline creation in particular.
What they learned:
- Marketing drives 48% of pipeline across B2B companies. Sales drives 33%. And Partners and Channel 15%. An interesting break-down. Not a shocker but useful to see this across 100+ leading B2B scale-ups. See above.
- 70% of pipeline for marketing comes from events, search both paid and free, and social. That’s it. SEO is undergoing the biggest change, but it’s still in the Big 4 Here.
- SEO is under stress today from GenAI and changes at Google, but is still the second-highest driver of pipeline after events. SEO may not be the same, but is still works. If you adapt. Like outbound 🙂
One thing that really jumps out is the mismatch today on energy into events vs the ROI. You can see here how events and trade shows are what helped put Datadog on the map:
And yet, I see so many marketers putting less energy there than pre-2020 especially. Not because events don’t work, but because they are a lot of work. And we all got out of practice here in 2020-2022. The top events in every industry are where many top customers are. But they are … work. Push your team here if they don’t want to do them. Or phone them in.
Now having said all that, in the end, most customers come at least in part from word-of-mouth. It’s often the original touch, if not the last touch.
In many cases, these demand gen activities assist word-of-mouth — and vice-versa. Many leads and most pipeline in the end comes from 2-4 or more touches.
Here’s HubSpot’s breakdown at $1B ARR from here. The #1 source of “first learn about HubSpot”? Word of Mouth:
Measure that, too 😉
But it’s often assisted by all these other marketing activities. Multiple touches to one great outcome.
