5 pages
Funnel benchmarks
Stage-by-stage conversion, cost and cycle numbers from published sources, with the median, the middle half and where each number came from.
By stage
| Conversion | Published figure | Range on a common scale | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visitor to lead83 companies | 1.1% | First Page Sage, B2B landing page conversion rates | |
| Lead to MQL | 39% | First Page Sage, 2026 funnel benchmarks | |
| MQL to SQL | 38% | First Page Sage, 2026 funnel benchmarks | |
| SQL to opportunity | 42% | First Page Sage, 2026 funnel benchmarks | |
| Opportunity to closed won | 37% | First Page Sage, 2026 funnel benchmarks |
From MQL to SQL conversion rate benchmarks and B2B funnel conversion rates by stage, which explains each source and its caveats.
Index
| Page | Stage | Updated |
|---|---|---|
| CAC payback benchmarks for B2B: by ACV band, motion and growth rateThe median B2B SaaS CAC payback was 16 months in 2025, 10 months for the fastest quarter. Benchmarks by ACV band, growth rate and the gross-margin formula. | Whole funnel | |
| MQL to SQL conversion rate benchmarks and B2B funnel conversion rates by stageB2B SaaS MQL to SQL conversion runs about 38%, or 26% to 51% by channel. Stage benchmarks, definitions and worked math for each funnel step. | Whole funnel | |
| LinkedIn ads benchmarks: CPC, CPL and CTR by objective, from published dataLinkedIn ads benchmarks: the median B2B advertiser paid $376 per lead in 2025, against a $202 spend-weighted figure, with a $9.39 CPC and 0.67% CTR. | Lead | |
| Average B2B Sales Cycle Length by Deal Size and SegmentB2B sales cycles run from within 14 days under $2,000 ACV to 6 to 18+ months over $500,000. Gong data puts a $97k average deal at 69 days. | Opportunity | |
| B2B Win Rate Benchmarks by Deal Size and SegmentAverage business-to-business sales win rate: about 21% of all opportunities, about 29% of qualified ones, and lower as deal size rises. | Closed won |
Tools
- CAC payback calculator for B2B: months to earn back the cost of a customer: Customer acquisition cost (CAC) payback is the number of months of gross profit a new customer takes to repay what you spent to win them. Enter the sales and marketing spend for a period, the new customers it won, their average first-year contract value and your gross margin. The calculator returns CAC and the payback in months.
Elsewhere
- Guides (4): Explanations of the ideas demand teams argue about, with the definitions and the numbers on the table.
- Calculators (5): Each calculator shows its formula and a worked example before you touch an input, so you can check the arithmetic by hand.
- Playbooks (6): Programs written as steps, each ending in the number it should move and how to read it.
- Templates (3): Working documents to copy: service levels, scoring sheets, dashboards. Each one explains every field.
- Methods (3): How to measure: attribution, scoring, service levels between marketing and sales, and the definitions behind them.
- Glossary (12): The words of pipeline work, defined once, the way this site uses them.
- Tools (11): every calculator and template, with its formula and a worked example.
- Agencies: demand and pipeline agencies, listed alphabetically and never ranked, with facts from their own pages.
- Voices: what practitioners published that a reader can learn from, with our take.
How pages are made
Pages are written by the Take the Market Desk, which uses AI models to find sources, read them and draft, and are edited before they are published. Every factual sentence is checked against a passage on a source page that was read for that page, numbers are computed in code from those sources, and each page lists its sources. Every page shows the day it was first published and the day a fact last changed. How we work