The Ultimate Guide to B2B Conversion Rate: Industry Benchmarks & Strategies

The increasing competition and plethora of information in the market make B2B lead generation extremely challenging. As complex as it sounds, B2B lead gen is also as simple as - 

• How do I attract more people to my website? 
• How do I engage them to buy my product/service? 

You're not alone if you feel B2B lead generation is difficult. Tracking, reaching, and engaging with potential clients is the biggest pressure point for B2B marketers, as per Hubspot’s recent report. 

When even the slightest difference in your B2B conversion rate can double your revenue, there’s a dire need for a proper B2B conversion rate optimization strategy. 

We’ve detailed everything you need to know about B2B conversion rates to cover this lead generation gap. Let’s dig in - 

What is a B2B conversion rate? 

A B2B conversion rate is a metric that measures the percentage of website visitors or leads that take a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.

For example, if a B2B website receives 1000 visitors monthly and 100 of them fill out a contact form, the conversion rate would be 10%. Similarly, if a company sends out 1000 email campaigns and 100 of them lead to a sale, the conversion rate would be 10% again.

What is a good B2B conversion rate? 

According to various sources, average B2B website conversion rates vary from 2% to 10%. However, it's common to see conversion rates as low as 1% or even less for some businesses.

A reasonable B2B conversion rate can vary widely depending on the industry, the specific business, and the type of conversion being tracked. However, it's useful to compare your conversion rate to industry averages or benchmarks to understand its relative performance.

Conversion rate is only one of the metrics to measure the success of a B2B business. A good rate is determined by the number itself and the context of your business, the goals, and the target audience.

It's important to note that a high conversion rate alone is only sometimes a guarantee of success, as it may only sometimes translate to a significant revenue or profit. Factors like the average order value, customer lifetime value, and overall customer satisfaction, among others, are also essential to consider when evaluating the overall performance of the B2B business.

How to measure B2B conversion rates? 

To measure B2B conversions, it is necessary first to define what constitutes a conversion for your business. This could be a completed sale, a new customer lead, or even a meeting or call with a potential customer. Once you have defined your conversion goal, you can track and measure it using a variety of tools and methods, such as:

• Web analytics: Use tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics to track website traffic and conversion rates.

• CRM software: Use customer relationship management (CRM) software to track and measure the progress of leads through your sales funnel.

• A/B testing: Test different versions of your website or marketing materials to see which leads to the most conversions.

• Surveys and feedback: Ask customers for feedback on their experience with your business and use that information to improve conversion rates.

• Sales data: Track your sales data to see which products or services are most likely to lead to conversions.

It's important to track conversions over time and different marketing channels separately to identify the most effective channels and optimize your B2B marketing strategy.

How do B2B conversion rates differ? 

The average conversion rate for B2B industries can vary widely depending on the specific industry and the type of conversion being tracked. However, according to various sources, the average B2B website conversion rate is around 2-5%. However, it's common to see conversion rates as low as 1% or even less for some businesses.

These numbers are just averages, and that conversion rates can vary widely depending on several factors, such as the target market, the specific business, and the type of conversion being tracked. So let’s explore some of those.

Average conversion rates by Industry 

Ruler Analytics’ report showcases the B2B conversion rate across different industries, and here’s what the data has to say - 

Conversion rates are different for industrial segments, but one thing is evident - customers prefer low-ticket purchases over high-ticket ones, and so is the effect with conversion rates. High-ticket purchases often involve long customer journeys. However, it’s the opposite with low-ticket purchases.

Here’s your cue, instead of engaging a prospect into buying your product, offer a free trial, an exclusive insider view, or one-day access to your product to help them understand why yours is the best. 

The way customers research and make purchasing decisions can also vary by industry. For example, a B2B customer in the manufacturing industry may require a face-to-face meeting, product demonstration, and a longer decision-making process before buying. In contrast, a B2B customer in the e-commerce or SaaS industry could be more comfortable purchasing based on online research and reviews.

Channels that convert  

According to Marketo, referrals convert better than any organic or inorganic channels. The highest B2B conversion rates are with Account-based Marketing, where each user is identified in different stages, as problem-aware, solution-aware, and product-aware, and targeted accordingly.

                                                                                                               Solution

What does this tell marketers? Here’s a summarised breakdown 

1. Referral: Referral is the highest acquisition channel for conversion rate, almost 4x the average. Fast adoptions of companies like Gmail, Dropbox, and Zappos can be credited to "word of mouth". Takeaway: Build a great product experience, show it to the world, ask them to tell the world (maybe even reward them), and you’ll profit.
2. Inbound: Content is king; people who choose to interact with your brand naturally convert higher (28% more than paid marketing).
3. Prospecting: Leads sourced from prospecting convert at one-third of the average. Age-old prospecting, like door-to-door or cold calling, doesn’t work well compared to other sources. It’s much more efficient to have sales do what they do best: selling, not cold calling.
4. Email and Nurture: Emails have the lowest conversion rate, but they have amazing ROI for multi-touch attribution after you’ve acquired the lead.

What is the benchmark for B2B Conversions? 

Did you know that for every $92 spent on user acquisition, businesses spend only 1$ on CRO?

When launching a new project, marketing strategy, or campaign, the need to understand the B2B benchmarks for your industry leads to marketing professionals needing to be aware of BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing). 

Benchmarking B2B conversion rates provide important data and information, helps you make better decisions, and offers alternatives to consider and weigh your options. Continue reading if you want to learn how to use this metric effectively.

Marketing Qualified Lead to Sales Accepted Lead should be very high 

MQL-to-Sales Accepted Lead measures if the sales team looks at a lead and says, “Yes, calling /emailing this person is worth my time.” Your Sales Acceptance rate should be >80%. If that’s not the case, here’s why - 

• The sources of the problem could be inflated lead scores, missing data quality controls, or a demographic fit that’s too broad. If Sales can tell by looking at a lead that it’s not worth their time to pick up the phone, don’t MQL them in the first place. 

• If you’re seeing 98% SAL rates, your MQL threshold might be too restrictive. Look at your Engaged leads that don’t quite meet your MQL threshold because some legitimate leads could be stuck there.

Sales Accepted Lead-to-Meeting Schedules are always low! 

The benchmark for SAL-to-Meeting-Scheduled is just 5-15%. If you're seeing less than 5%, the problem could be that you’re MQLing folks doing general research and not in an active buying cycle. It could also be that you’re not hitting the SLA, or it might be a “people problem.”

 The pandemic has also had a disastrous effect on this funnel stage. If you see a SAL-to-Meeting-Scheduled rate over 15%, give your lead generation expert a raise!

You own everything between Meeting Scheduled and to Meeting Held 

Meeting-Scheduled-to-Meeting-Held shows how many of your people show up to the meetings. The rate should be at least 50%. If your Meeting Held rate is <50%, check who is responsible for rescheduling meetings, scrutinize how you follow up with prospects about the meeting and how often, and check if it's a "people problem" by looking at the conversion rate on an individual level.

Are Held Meetings being converted into Opportunities? 

Meeting-Held-to-Opportunity should be 50-70%. If it's lower, organize a role play with reps and see if folks are deviating from the script, adding irrelevant product pitches, or needing additional training. Clearly define what Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing mean for your business and reinforce it constantly.

If you have been consistent with your b2b conversion rate optimization strategy and are still not getting the desired results, here are a few tips to optimize it. 

Tips for Better B2B Conversion Rates 

1. Learn about your audience 

To improve B2B conversion rates, it's important to track the behavior of visitors when they land on your website or a specific page. Analyze small details such as how much time they spend on a page, whether they interact with the call-to-action (CTA), if they complete forms, and if they engage with chatbots. 

Understanding the reasons behind their behavior can help you create a better strategy to meet their needs. By tracking visitor behavior, you can make changes to enhance the customer experience and connect with your audience, making conversions more likely. This is an effective tactic for conversion rate optimization.

2. Simplify their experience 

Simplifying your sales funnel and customer experience can often be the most effective yet overlooked step for improving B2B conversion rates. Unfortunately, many companies need more clarity in their process, resulting in potential customers becoming frustrated and leaving the website without completing a purchase or signup form. 

According to the Baymard Institute, 26% of customers report abandoning their purchase due to a lengthy or complicated checkout process. To improve conversion rates, it's important to minimize the steps required for conversions by re-evaluating your sales funnel stages and identifying opportunities to simplify the process. Consider removing unnecessary steps, and ask yourself if all stages are necessary for conversion.

3. Promote your content strategically 

Effective content marketing is crucial for improving B2B conversion rates. This includes strategies such as regular newsletters, eBooks for loyal customers, testimonials on your website, reviews on reputable sites, personalized emails, and new content strategies for new customers. Regularly publishing blogs and maintaining a consistent schedule are also important.

B2B buyers are often interested in the technical aspects of products or services, so providing them with relevant and informative content can help guide them through the sales funnel without having to seek out the information actively.

However, it's important not to overdo it with content promotion. A strategy that sends notifications about every new piece of content to every subscriber may not necessarily boost conversions. It can even annoy people if the content is irrelevant to them. Instead, take a more targeted approach by promoting content to specific leads and customers based on where they are in the sales funnel.

For example, promoting beginner's guides and 101s to new leads while sending case studies and testimonials to leads further down the funnel. 

4. Leverage Retargeting 

Retargeting is an effective strategy for re-engaging visitors who have left your website without taking the desired action, regardless of your key conversion metric. By tracking visitors to your website and serving them ads as they visit other sites around the web, you can increase the chances of them returning to your website and converting. This is especially effective when retargeting visitors who have been to your highest-converting web pages.

However, to make retargeting effective, you need a well-crafted copy, engaging visuals, and a compelling offer. A good example of this is United's retargeting campaign, which focused on reaching people who had viewed their ads and were already considering booking a vacation. They promoted a 15-second video with a call-to-action, resulting in 52% of conversions attributed to YouTube being direct click-through conversions from the ad in just one month.

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It's important to remember that retargeting should be part of a holistic strategy and should be used in conjunction with other tactics like A/B testing, audience segmentation, and content personalization.

5. Test Everything

Testing is essential for conversion rate optimization. Using tools such as Revenue Hero, you can conduct A/B and multivariate tests to gather data on what works best for your users. This allows you to make data-driven changes to your website rather than relying on guesses or assumptions.

When conducting tests, remember to go through the five phases of testing: research, hypothesis, prioritization, testing, and learning. In the research phase, you can learn from the data you currently have. 

In the hypothesis phase, you can develop educated ideas to test. In the prioritization phase, you can focus on the changes that will impact your site the most. In the testing phase, you can run and collect data from your tests, and in the learning phase, you can use your tests' results to make further future improvements.

It's important to remember that testing is an ongoing process, and there are many potential things you can test, such as different wording, button colors, layouts, etc. Remember, the only failed test is the one where you don't learn anything. With these tips, you can optimize your conversion rates and improve the performance of your B2B website.

Get the most out of your CRO efforts.

With RevenueHero’s instant scheduling/demo booking software, double your form to meetings conversion rate, match the intent displayed by visitors filling up your contact us form by giving them the option to book time on your sales team's calendars right away. Qualify, distribute and set up meetings between your prospect and your sales team right on your website/landing page. 

Automate even meeting distribution amongst the sales team and build custom distribution logic in seconds with Round Robin. Sync every meeting and its outcome to the CRM. Maximise selling time while maintaining CRM sanity. Automated meeting workflows can increase show rates for your meetings. 

Would you like to learn more? Schedule a demo now!