2025 B2B Buyer First Report

April 25, 2025 min to read

by Madeleine Work , , & Natalie Marcotullio , Drew Giovannoli

About the data

For the third year in a row, we reviewed the websites of the 100 top B2B SaaS companies (list sourced by Keyplay, ranked by company size). These are the same companies featured in our 2024 and 2023 Buyer First reports.

This year, we also conducted six in-depth interviews with senior SaaS buyers, facilitated by Buried Wins.

To collect the data, we manually reviewed each company's website and booked a sales call. We documented whether the website followed our Buyer First best practices:

Usable: How easy it is for buyers to get hands-on with your product from your website.‍
Accessible: How convenient and quick it is for buyers to book time with your sales team.‍
Visible: How transparent your pricing and packaging information is on your website.

Note: When booking demos, we used a Chili Piper Alias email address to simulate a real buyer.

Below is a breakdown of the sub-industries, sizes, and revenues for the companies included in this report:‍

Sub Industries

Company size

Revenue

Buyer first trends

Compared to last year, we saw only slight improvements across all three buyer first best practices.

Calendar booking: 9% of websites had calendar schedulers (1% increase from last year)

Interactive demos: 33% of websites had interactive demos (2% increase from last year)

Pricing: 72% of websites had a pricing page (4% increase from last year)

Avg response time: 16% of companies did not respond to us (3% decrease from last year)

When we got these results, we were surprised they were almost identical to last year. So we asked a few marketing experts why they think the data hasn’t changed much.

Below are some of their thoughts:

"In 2024, as things got tougher and efficiency was demanded, a lot of marketers were able to tell the story that these things are worth it for efficiency. Companies were more willing to experiment with that.

As those tougher economic times continued into 2025, companies are demanding more than just your intuition and your expertise as a marketer. They're demanding more hard data and A/B testing to show that transparent pricing is better.

For interactive demos to show that you don't lose out on pipeline, but rather create better pipeline. I think that more and more companies are demanding data and ROI, and I don't know if that data is abundant out there to show actual results.

— Peyton Walbeck, VP of Marketing @ Nectar

"Those who are comfortable showing the product (because they know competitors will get their hands on it if they want to) have already opted in. The rest still can't convince leadership that it's OK to show the product — and that product innovation is NOT the moat they think it is. (Your tool is either the same or incrementally better — and others are right behind you playing catch up.)

— Erin Balsa, Content Marketing Director for B2B Startups

We heard a common theme of a lack of data or trust that these best practices will work.

So, for the rest of this report, we’re focusing on:

Benchmarks to see how your buying process compares to other B2B SaaS companies
Metrics you can measure to see if there are gaps in your buyer-first process
Quotes from buyers and buyer first companies to confirm that these best practices make a difference in the buyer experience

All to help marketers provide proof to their team or leadership on why these buyer first principles matter.

How to convince leadership to go buyer first

We know it’s not always easy to show your CEO, sales team, or leadership how buyer first best practices actually impact revenue.

So instead of just pointing out that B2B buying is broken, we looked at the real metrics our combined customers and prospects said improved after making changes.

The Buyer First framework can help spot where buyers are getting stuck in your funnel:

Usable: Are website visitors bouncing because they don’t understand what your product does?
Accessible: Are people filling out your demo form but not scheduling a meeting (or no-showing when they do)?
Visible: Are prospects dropping off after the discovery call when they finally see your pricing?

In the next sections, we’ll show you how to measure each one and share buyer quotes and real examples from us requesting demos to help make the case internally.

In each of these sections, we also include some examples from the buyer interviews or from emails or experiences we noticed when booking these demos.

Usable: Website → qualified lead

Metric #1: Website Conversion Rate

How to measure:

For sales-led companies: Demo form submissions / total website visitors
For product-led companies: Free sign-ups (trial or freemium) / total website visitors

Benchmarks:

Demo submissions: 2%–5%
Free trial: 2%–15%
Freemium: 3%–20%

Questions to ask:

Are visitors bouncing from key website pages like product or solutions?
Is your product content easy to find on the website or buried behind multiple pages and gated forms?

Gated vs ungated.

Author Tip: A majority of the top 100 SaaS companies have ungated demos. If gating your demo, don’t hide it behind a long form upfront. Consider gating mid-way once the buyer is already engaged and seeing value.

Buyer perspective:

"I like being able to see that there’s a product. I like to be able to see some cleanliness of the UI user experience. So I do like seeing the product, even if it is just like screenshots or walkthroughs of features or anything like that"

— Isaac Ware, AI Demand & ABM @ UserGems

"I very much want to go into that first call having explored the product myself. So I would put interactive demos first."

— Jenny Narod, Director @ Samsara

Metric #2: Product Engagement Rate

If you're already offering interactive demos or product videos, this metric helps you measure how many prospects engage with your product before they sign up for a live call.

A product-engaged lead is a visitor who interacts with a demo, video, or other product content on your website.

How to measure: Product-engaged leads / website visitors to the page with your product content

Benchmark: 50% - 70% engagement rate

Questions to ask:

Is your demo or video available on a dedicated demo center page, or is it buried within a product page?
Do you have different product content for different personas or use cases?

Author Tip: The most common way the top 100 SaaS companies use demos is a dedicated demo center. If you have multiple personas, industries, or use cases, try creating dedicated demos so buyers can select the path most relevant to them.

Buyer perspective:

"I'd much rather go for the Navattic click through, even if it is somewhat limited. Sitting and watching a demo video, I tend not to do that. But if there’s an opportunity to explore, even if it's just like a click-through experience, that I would love."

— Jenny Narod, Director @ Samsara

Usable: What buyers liked

1. Clay’s free plan.

2. Ramp interactive demo.

"Ramp has a brilliant product tour. It’s just easy to use. You explore the product in a meaningful way. I mean, I also love Ramp. But for me, it’s the walkthrough of the product tour in a digestible and meaningful, and not just throwing you into a demo environment"

— Kyle Lacy, CMO @ Docebo

3. Riverside free plan.

"The free trial, I use Riverside, and I originally had only a Riverside free trial. And because it was such a great product, I upgraded immediately."

— Kyle Lacy, CMO @ Docebo

"Riverside does a good job with that. They are very good at exposing parts of their product. They have everything out front. They are not gatekeeping a lot of things, and they are showing the way things are as is"

— Chirag Madhrani, Director of Product Marketing @ Zafin

From the company's perspective

"When your product is great, the best marketing is simply letting people experience it. Instead of making big promises and dragging people through long sales cycles, we focus on showing the value of Riverside up front. The product should speak for itself."

— Abel Grunfeld, VP Marketing @ Riverside

Usable: Things buyers didn’t like

1. Gated demos.

"I haven’t abandoned it, but I wasn’t happy either. So I’m like, oh, just show me parts of it. Right?"

— Chirag Madhrani, Director of Product Marketing @ Zafin

"If I were on a website, just checking out a brand or a product, and if I saw an opportunity to engage with an interactive demo or like demo video without a form, I would probably be 10 times more likely to actually do that.

Because with the form, I have to talk to a person. I have to schedule time. It’s like more of a commitment. "

— Mary Batchelder, Marketing @ CaliberMind

Author Tip: Long, linear only demos can fatigue users. Try a “choose your own adventure” style experience, and keep each path short, ideally 5 to 15 steps.

2. Constant “click here” demos.

"So often you end up in these interactive demos where it’s just you clicking through little speech bubbles over and over again and not really getting into the platform"

— Isaac Ware, AI Demand & ABM @ UserGems

Author Tip: Incorporate more of a “choose your own adventure” setup with demos instead of one long click-through. Also, keep demos to 5 - 15 steps to not fatigue the end user.

Accessible: Form submissions → demo held

Metric #1: Demos Scheduled from Qualified Form Fills

Qualified form fills exclude spam, personal emails, or submissions that don’t meet your basic qualification criteria.

How to measure: Demos scheduled / number of qualified “book a demo” form fills

Benchmark: 30 - 66.7%‍

Questions to ask:

How long does it take a prospect to hear back after submitting a demo request?
Is the delay caused by internal routing or qualification?

Author Tip: Top-performing SaaS companies respond to demo requests within 8 hours on average. Those responding the same day do so in about 3 hours. Try going through your own flow to see how long it takes to get a response.

Buyers perspective:

"I'm trying to get it through procurement fast. And so even just that, delay inlike requesting a demo, or filling out athis form, and waiting for the rep to then they'll get back to me. You lose a day or two in that whole process. And I would schedule the same day meeting if it's available."

— Jenny Narod, Director @ Samsara

"Yeah, online for sure. And not, not it's more of like an integration with like a Calendly or Chili Piper, you know, type of experience versus versus like you submit a form and then that whole thing."

— Randy Gibson, Director of Product Management @ SingleStore

Metric #2: Demo Attendance Rate

How to measure: Demos held/ demos scheduled

Benchmark: 65 - 80%

Questions to ask:

Who is first reaching out to your buyer after they book—an SDR, BDR, or AE?
If a prospect needs to reschedule, how easy is it for them to find a new time?

Author Tip: About 70% of the follow-up emails we received came from SDRs or BDRs, even though buyers told us they preferred skipping rigid qualification. When possible, have an AE follow up directly, and use enrichment data behind the scenes to pre-qualify leads.

Author Tip: Make rescheduling simple. Buyers shouldn't have to go back and forth over email to find a new meeting time.

Buyers perspective:

"There's nothing more frustrating or annoying than going back and forth over email to find a time slot. So [the booking process] is really a measure of ease and also it's your first impression of the company, your first brand interaction."

— Jenny Narod, Director @ Samsara

"I would say just get, get straight to the point with everything. As long as you have your basic discovery out of the way, get to the product and pricing, and solutions as quickly as possible."

— Isaac Ware, AI Demand & ABM @ UserGems

Accessible: What buyers liked

1. Clear and easy to schedule follow-up.

2. Knowing who we’re booking with.

"When I go to request a demo, I’m booking right there and not just like booking in general, but I know who I’m booking with, which is kind of cool. If I’m meeting with a contact from like HubSpot or G2 for example, they generally all have calendar links that I can book off of. So I don’t usually have any headaches with that "

— Mary Batchelder, Marketing @ CaliberMind

3. Unstructured and conversational discovery.

"There’s a company called Limelight that I demoed recently, and a big piece of their value prop was usability and ease of access to the data. So that one was demoed by a CEO. He hopped right into the product, was very open, answered questions really quickly, didn’t try to structure the conversation too much.

I feel like some demo or discovery calls you get on, they have their script and they were, are only willing to skip or stick to their script, and I think that can be a problem. So as long as it’s a conversation, I think I always have a positive experience with discovery calls"

— Isaac Ware, AI Demand & ABM @ UserGems

Accessible: Things buyers didn’t like

1. Manually scheduling.

"Definitely a calendar link. I think it’s really painful to manage schedules any other way. You know, pulling up your schedule and their schedule alongside."

— Mary Batchelder, Marketing @ CaliberMind

2. Vague emails with company-focused messaging.

Author Tip: Avoid confusing buyers with emails from multiple team members. We noticed that sometimes two or three different people would reach out, so we didn’t know who our main point of contact was.

Author Tip: Instead of immediately calling buyers after they submit a form or sending vague emails with no calls to action (like the ones above), send a quick email with a scheduling link.

‍

Visible: Discovery → qualified opportunity

Metric: SQLs to Opportunity Rate

How to measure: Qualified opportunities / Sales-qualified leads (SQLs)

Benchmark: 35%

Questions to ask:

If you share pricing on your website, do buyers come to discovery knowing how your pricing works?
If you hold pricing until discovery, are you hearing common objections around "this is out of budget"?

Author Tip: The most common place for the top 100 SaaS companies to put pricing is directly from the navbar. If you do have a pricing page, make it easy to find.

Author Tip: Even if you’re not ready to share exact numbers, share a pricing range or a model on the website or during early conversations to stop unqualified buyers from entering your sales cycle.

Buyer perspective:

"Transparent pricing? Number one for me personally, I’d love to know what I'm looking at on a monthly, annual basis, and so on, and what’s the pricing structure like per seat, or is it a single license? I like getting that information right up front."

— Chirag Madhrani, Director of Product Marketing @ Zafin

"Pretty important. It helps to understand if it’s going to be a fit. I get a lot of people have issues with specific pricing. I really like being able to do the internal math to just make sure we’re not wasting each other’s time. Just have ranges"

— Mary Batchelder, Marketing @ CaliberMind

Visible: What buyers liked

1. PostHog transparent usage-based pricing:

"If you have freemium, you move up as you consume, like usage-based pricing, that seems to be where a lot of people are going. That was a great experience at PostHog compared to my previous experiences.” “If PostHog didn’t have transparent pricing, now I’m forced to talk to someone, and I get all those reservations you get when you’re not in control. It’s this weird dynamic that nobody wants to be in. You want to be in control as a buyer."

— Randy Gibson, Director of Product Management @ SingleStore

From the company's perspective

"We're very opinionated about how pricing should work. We don't think anybody wants to 'Talk to Sales' just to see what pricing looks like, because everyone knows it's never as simple as that. First you talk to sales, then they want you to sit through a demo, then they want to talk to your boss, then they want you to join their webinar, then...It just goes on and on. No, thank you.

We solve this situation by being transparent on everything we can be. We tell users about our pricing up front so they can make smart decisions; we post a salary calculator on our job descriptions; we talk openly about how we make product and marketing decisions.

It's better for us and our users. It's better for us in terms of where we spend time -- if we're transparent on pricing we spend more time talking to informed users, rather than users who are just curious!"

— Joe Martin, Product Marketing Lead @ PostHog

"Have you ever visited a pricing page that has "Contact us" buttons on every plan and contains no actual pricing? Does anyone actually enjoy that??

We're trying to build a generational company, and to do that, building a brand plays a major role. This is especially true when building a product that's largely geared toward developers who, a) don't like to be sold to, b) prefer self-serve options, and c) can smell BS from a mile away.

So in everything we write, we try to be direct, concise, and honest. Optimizing for the long-term brand value instead of short term revenue goals is something we've been intentional about from the beginning, and means we operate differently than most companies in a variety of ways:

1. Usage-based pricing, not value-based pricing. No need for a sales team to "size you up" to see how much cash they can squeeze out of you. (We don't even have an outbound sales team.) This can reduce the sales cycle from months to minutes.

2. Product-led growth. We focus our efforts on building great products. Our customers are our best salespeople.

3. Ultimately, we just try do the right thing. When you earn trust from your audience, it means you can become the default option in your customer's minds, which is especially useful when you offer multiple products. If you don't have to compare prices and you can just trust that PostHog always has your back, you don't need to shop around.

Having transparent pricing is really just the tip of the iceberg of a larger, more fundamental difference in how PostHog operates compared to most B2B SaaS companies "

— Cory Watilo, Lead Designer @ PostHog

2. Pendo’s package differentiation:

"I liked Pendo’s pricing page from what I remember. I looked at it a year and a half ago, and Pendo did a good job in showing pricing - they had a free plan, a basic plan, and a premium plan. They did a good job in explaining what you get with free and what you get with paid"

— Chirag Madhrani, Director of Product Marketing @ Zafin

Visible: Things buyers didn’t like

1. Vague estimates upfront.

"I want them to be able to at least tell me on the first call where they think I’m probably going to fall because I don’t want to get halfway through a sales process and find out that it’s double what my budget is for and have to have to deal with that.

I’m pretty forceful up front of just like, hey like, let’s save both of our time. Let’s get it out of the way of like what range are we in? "

— Isaac Ware, AI Demand & ABM @ UserGems

Conclusion

If you’re looking to test out more of these buyer-first best practices, try building a free demo with Navattic or book a demo with Chili Piper. And to make it even easier for your buyers, let them book a call directly from an interactive demo.

‍Check out our new integration here. Or would you like to know what your buyers think? (For free?) Select an account you wish you had 100 more of, and Buried Wins will interview them and deliver a 3–5 page custom analysis. Check out the offer here.

See the power of Chili Piper in action today!

About the author

Madeleine Work

Madeleine Work is Product Marketing Manager at Chili Piper. She loves bringing people together, learning new things, and making hilarious jokes. When she's not typing away at her laptop, you'll probably find her running, hiking, or hanging out with her baby. Follow Madeleine for laughs and product marketing tips on LinkedIn.