The Inbound Funnel: Benchmarking Your Way to Success

Inbound isn’t a secret. It’s a funnel.

When someone tells me they’re not getting the results they want from inbound, I always come back to this funnel. And it hasn’t failed me yet.

Maja Voje and I benchmarked the data across a range of B2C and B2B startups to get metrics you can rule of thumb against.

Let’s break it down:

1: How many people see you?

You’ve got to reach people. The metric to look at is impressions. If you’re not reaching 10K people, you’re probably not going to be getting any customers when all the math works out.

The channels that we’ve found are most reliable to start with for these are LinkedIn organic and SEO. Neither will yield 10K impressions a day overnight. But you can get there within a year of focused, daily effort. This is true for B2B and B2C.

2: How many visitors do you drive?

The next step is: how many people are moving from social media to you? Overall, somewhere between a 5–15% conversion rate is normal. But it’s crucial to use your own data.

A lot of this depends on the quality of your offer:

• B2C lead magnets can convert much higher.
• On the other hand, bland B2B homepages convert much worse.

3: How many leads do you get?

Once someone’s on your site, you want to measure whether you are turning them into something useful for you. Most often, this ‘something useful’ is that people are interested in getting their contact information and interest in being contacted.

• In B2C, this might be as simple as an e-mail address for a newsletter, which converts better.
• In B2B, it might be as complicated as a multi-step funnel through a free trial and booking time with sales form, which converts worse.

When all is said and done, it tends to be in the 15–20% range.

4: How many are actually potential customers?

Quite a few people who reach out are still not going to be potential buyers of your product. Your price is too high, or they need another solution, or something else. It’s always something.

• In B2C, people tend to underestimate this multiplier. They just focus on visitor to conversion rate. So this number feels abnormally low.
• B2B is used to sales teams qualifying leads and only opening opportunities with real opportunities.

It tends to be in the 10–20% range.

5: How many paying customers do you get?

The last step is where money gets involved. Across B2B and B2C, this tends to be in the 20%+ range if you have a strong product.

Of course, the benchmarks are not going to apply to your business. They’re merely to help you get the broad contours.

In fact, that’s why the funnel works. Compare where your product differs, and use that as fodder to identify of which step of the funnel to improve next. Then obsessively improve it.

That’s how you use the inbound funnel to grow.

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Ready to go deeper on inbound?

We shared super tactical guides on LinkedIn and SEO in the deep dive (+the other 6 GTM motions).