The B2B Startup Benchmark Guide: Key Metrics and Trends from LinkedIn & HubSpot

Introducing Our Definitive B2B Startup Benchmark Report

LinkedIn Marketing for Startups collaborates with thousands of startups every year to build go-to-market (GTM) strategies to help them achieve their aggressive growth goals on our platform. And with startups continuing to push the boundaries and innovate in today’s competitive tech landscape, it is essential to have clear insights into effective GTM approaches.

As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn Marketing for Startups has unique insight into how top-performing startups are evolving their strategies. Since over 75% of B2B startup marketers measure success on marketing-sourced pipeline, HubSpot for Startups was the ideal partner for this research. 

The result of this partnership is the comprehensive B2B Startup Benchmark Report that democratizes the top metrics and best practices that are critical to driving efficient growth.

Drawing from a survey of B2B startup marketing leaders, plus exclusive insights from LinkedIn, this report offers a unique view into how early-stage companies are building and evolving their GTM strategies to help sales and marketing leaders optimize for sustained growth and efficiency.

Whether you’re a seed-stage startup or working towards Series C, this report will help you benchmark your performance, impress investors, and achieve your growth milestones. 

What’s Inside?

The report is packed with actionable insights, including:

• Marketing and sales benchmarks, including average lead volume, conversion rates, and cost per efficiencies through the funnel by ASP;
• Top-performing startup-specific LinkedIn strategies and performance benchmarks;
• Marketing and sales alignment best practices from top-performing startups with the highest funnel conversion rates and YoY growth.
  

Marketing and Sales Benchmarks 

This report highlights key data points (number of customers, year-over-year (YoY) growth, and churn rates by Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)) while adding on the critical marketing metrics startups need to drive predictable pipeline and profitability. Startups can use metrics detailed in the report including average conversion rates and cost pers through the funnel by average sales price (ASP) as a checklist against their company's metrics. For example, startups with an average ASP of $100k on average sees a 10-15% conversion from lead to sales meeting. 

Top-performing Startup-specific LinkedIn Strategies and Performance Benchmarks

Our report also features exclusive insights from LinkedIn, including trends across top performing startups on our platform. One key trend is startups’ approach to full funnel. Looking at trends in startups’ investment allocation across LinkedIn campaign objectives the answer is clear: A healthy balance between upper-funnel brand awareness and lower-funnel demand capture.

For example, LinkedIn's data reveals that earlier-stage startups prioritize upper-funnel brand awareness tactics, like sharing ungated content to educate B2B buyers and fuel retargeting audiences. Then, as they mature in stage, later-stage companies prioritize larger allocations towards lower-funnel strategies, like lead generation with high-value gated content and request demo/talk to sales messaging. Startups active with a full funnel strategy achieve a 6x higher lead conversion rate and leads are ready to talk to sales 2x faster than startups active only with bottom funnel tactics.

And what top-of-funnel messaging works best? 75% of startups surveyed cited content featuring their company execs or industry thought leaders as well as third party reports as their most impactful content types in accelerating the buyer’s journey.

HockeyStack is one such example.

“HockeyStack tripled our revenue in H1 2024,” said Emir Atli, Founder and CRO at HockeyStack.

“We sourced 85% of our revenue, all inbound, from the executive thought leadership strategy we deployed on LinkedIn. This included regular posting from HockeyStack's executive team, myself included, and subject matter experts, as well as expanding our reach with industry influencers, happy customers, and tapping into LinkedIn’s Thought Leadership Ads. Every HockeyStack team member started contributing to content creation, allowing us to speak to different personas at different stages of their journey.”

Marketing and Sales Alignment on GTM Best Practices

We’ve also highlighted how the most successful startups – those with the highest year-over-year growth, conversion rates, and funnel efficiencies— have elevated their GTM execution to overcome challenges and thrive in today’s tough buying environment. We found in our research that excellent sales and marketing alignment is what sets top performing startups apart from the pack.

Scale Ventures validates this in how they advise their portfolio companies.

“Deepened collaboration between marketing and sales is essential. Right now, sales and marketing can’t afford to be disjointed. There is no margin for error,” said Craig Rosenberg, Chief Platform Officer at Scale Ventures.

“The strongest performing startups’ sales and marketing teams share a revenue number. That should tell us a lot: When we do this together, we’ll be more successful. And these teams look at all efforts across the customer lifecycle as a cohesive experience. It’s not marketing’s paid campaign, it’s a paid campaign that sales and marketing are doing together to ensure messaging and approach is tightly aligned. If a lead converted on a gated piece of content or engaged with your LinkedIn content, sales must leverage that as a signal because it shows their current mindset and what they care about.”

Dive Deeper Into the Data

These highlights are just the tip of the data-driven iceberg. Ready to dive deeper into the data, discover how your startup stacks up, and take your startup's growth to the next level? Access the full report now and stay ahead of the competition by applying these proven strategies and metrics to fuel your startup’s growth.