Benchmarks versus Baselines in B2B Marketing

B2B marketers want to know how their marketing ops and demand generation performance compares to industry benchmarks. I commonly hear from colleagues and clients that they want to see industry standard benchmarks.  This is especially common from SaaS executives with engineering backgrounds because it’s easy to measure things like uptime and speeds and feeds. I get it. It’s natural for managers to want to compare how well their teams are performing. Benchmarks are a problem, however, because the averages are not based on comparable organizations.
Marketers can sign up with expensive analyst firms who will provide their own benchmarks based on the companies they have surveyed in their client base and how they uniquely index conversion stages.  Interestingly, these benchmarks vary from firm to firm. These same firms should also provide the same disclaimer I’m giving here.
Think about how misleading benchmarks are in our everyday experiences.  Government figures tell us what