2024 Benchmark Report on Demo Form Conversion Rates

Madeleine Work
December 22, 2023
min to read

2024 Benchmark Report on Demo Form Conversion Rates

Madeleine Work
December 22, 2023
min to read

B2B buying is frustrating.

No transparent pricing. Going back-and-forth on discounts. Endless discovery questions

But perhaps the most perplexing reality about the B2B buying journey is how difficult it can be to actually talk to a sales rep when you’re ready. 

In our recent B2B buying journey report, we found only 11% of companies have a calendar scheduler on their website. 

This hurts buyers, who are waiting days just to hear back from a rep to schedule a time for a demo. But it hurts vendors even more. 

To the tune of a 30-40% conversion rate of form fill to booked meeting.  

AKA…for every 10 qualified prospects filling out your form, only 3 of them actually book a meeting.

That’s like working a 40-hour week… but only getting 30% of your paycheck. 

Or leaving your phone to charge overnight… and only charging to 30%. 

In short, a 30-40% conversion rate is not great.

In our recent Demo Form Conversion Rate report, we compiled product data from customers using Chili Piper’s form scheduling solution — to get you data on benchmark conversion rates from folks currently using a form scheduling solution.

We’ll cover: 

  • What are the metrics marketers should track in your inbound funnel? 
  • What are the average conversion rates by industry/month? 
  • How can you improve your conversion rates? 

Let’s dive in. 

P.S. We added a new section to this report in March 2024! “Conversion rates by Funding Round”. Check it out 👀

The New Inbound Funnel: Website Traffic to Qualified Held Meetings

Historically, the marketing funnel ended at “conversion”: The demo form submit. As soon as a lead submits that demo form, marketing’s job is done. They pass leads off to sales and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. 

But when only 30-40% of those form submits are actually booking a time with sales —  you start to wonder if the typical funnel is broken. 

That’s why, at Chili Piper, we’ve reinvented the marketing funnel to go beyond the form submit:

Our “new funnel” includes 3 new definitions: 

Qualified Hand-Raiser

A “qualified hand-raiser” is someone who has filled out your demo form to talk to sales AND is a qualified prospect.

Your form fills to qualified hand-raiser conversion rate ratio says A LOT. Mostly about: 

  • Your ability to drive qualified traffic to the page
  • Your ability to pre-qualify before people fill out your form 

Here’s that calculation:

Qualified Booked Meeting

A Qualified Booked Meeting is when a prospect is qualified AND books a meeting with a rep. 

Most form schedulers qualify right on the form and tracks this conversion rate automatically. For example, Chili Piper’s parameters for qualification are “more than 10 employees” and “uses Hubspot or Salesforce CRM”. 

Here’s how you calculate your Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate: 

Qualified Held Meeting

A qualified held meeting is someone who has booked a meeting AND showed up. 

On the Chili Piper marketing team, Qualified Held Meeting is the main metric we track (no MQLs here).

Here’s that calculation:

Note: This report does not include conversion data for Qualified Held Meetings. That will be included in a future report, stay tuned.

What kind of data are we talking about here? 

For this benchmark report, we looked at form conversion rates from a sample of Chili Piper’s 45,000 customers.

2,948,575 form submits. 2,042,453 qualified form submits. 1,307,505 booked meetings. That’s a lot of very long numbers, you might say. 

And you’d be right. 

What’s the average form conversion rate?

From all that juicy data, we were able to determine the average Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate and the average Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate. 

This data means that, on average, 86.97% of form submits are from qualified customers.

And 65.09% of those qualified prospects are actually booking time with sales. 

Pretty good compared to the baseline of 30-40%, yeah? 

Nice job, everyone! 🥂

How does your inbound funnel stack up?

So if your conversion rates aren’t quite up-to-speed, how can you increase your form conversion rates?

It depends on what time of conversion rate you’re talking about:

If your “Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate” is low…

It could mean you’re over-qualifying prospects on your form. You might want to take a look through folks who were deemed “unqualified” to make sure you’re not disqualifying good accounts.

It could also mean you’re sending the wrong people to your website. A lot of unqualified form submits can be a good indicator that you’re targeting and/or messaging is off. Dig into this data to see if the unqualified form submits are because of company size/industry 

If your “Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate” is low…

It could mean your reps’ availability is too limited. Make sure your reps don’t have free time marked as “busy” on their calendars. Also, be sure you’re using flexible round-robin (to show all reps’ availability)

It could be an issue with your speed to lead. 78% of B2B customers purchase from the vendor that responds first, so if you’ve responded too late — your prospect might have already gone with your competitor. Schedule a demo to get that sorted out for yourself 😜

If your “Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate” is high, but your “Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate” is low…

It could mean that your qualification criteria is too broad. Try limiting the number of people who can book a meeting through your form, to ensure the right people are booking a meeting 

Demo Conversion Rates By Industry 

Here’s where things start to get interesting.

Of the customer data we analyzed, we bucketed everyone into 15 different industries: 

And we found that conversion rates vary pretty dramatically across industries…

The goal is to tighten the gap between Qualified Hand Raisers and Qualified Booked Meetings.

Ideally, you want ALL your qualified hand-raisers to book a meeting with sales. 

The smaller the gap, the more qualified prospects you have booking meetings with sales. A large gap = qualified prospects who never booked a meeting = leakage.

Demo Conversion Rates by Funding Round

After we released this report in January 2024, we got a lot of requests for conversion rates based on company maturity. 

So… we pulled those numbers. 

Major kudos to those folks who requested these numbers, because wow. There are huge discrepancies between Series A and Post-IPO. 

As companies grow in maturity, their Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate also increases. My interpretation is that hte more mature companies get, the more mature their entire GTM motion becomes — high conversion rates are a team sport!

So if you’re Series A and your conversion rate from qualified hand-raiser to booked meeting is above 59%, you’re well above average. Good for you! 🎉

Demo Conversion Rates by Month

We looked to see if demo conversion rates changed at all throughout the year — interestingly, there’s not much variation.

The highest Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate (90.06% in January) isn’t even 10% higher than the lowest Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate (83.1% in December).

There’s even less variation for Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate. The highest conversion rate (65.79% in August) is less than 2 percentage points higher than the lowest conversion rate (63.91% in July).

Final takeaways: 

Lots of qualified meetings = fewer qualified booked meetings

This seems especially true for companies that work with small businesses (e.g. Travel, Hospitality, and Wellness). 

They’re qualifying almost 95% of form fills — but then only 66.84% of those book a meeting.

Side note: This is why we’re seeing lots of folks who work with small business add on Concierge Live — which immediately connects prospects with a sales rep, in real-time.

Engineers still don’t want to talk to sales

Data and Analytics Software and Infrastructure and Development tools both have a sharp discrepancy between Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate and Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate. 

Buyers of those types of software tend to be developers, data analysts, and engineers — who notoriously don’t like to speak to sales. They’d rather play around with software first and build everything out, and only talk to sales once they have specific, functionality-related questions. 

This is why we’re seeing lots of our customers who sell into developers, data analysts, and engineers add in-app “book a meeting” prompts.

So customers/prospects can book a meeting while they’re using your product — and Chili Piper routes to account owner, or round-robins based on industry, company size, location, or any other routing parameters you’ve set up. 

Improving conversion rates is an effective way to make an impact

Unlike other types of marketing activations, there is no bad time to start focusing on your conversion rates.

If you run a B2B marketing campaign over the last two weeks of December, you’re not going to drive much traffic — even if your messaging and targeting are absolutely spot-on. 

But focus on your conversion rates? You’ll see impact right away. 

What’s next?

Are you loving this original data goodness? If yes, check out our two previous Chili Insights:

Love spicy marketing content? Subscribe to The Sauce. It’s monthly, no-nonsense, and you can read it in 5 minutes or less. 

We’ll be releasing more Chili Insights in 2024. Next time, we’ll drop the average Qualified Held Meetings Conversion Rate (AKA meetings that were booked AND showed up). Be sure to subscribe to get that sent to your inbox 👀

Want to double your conversion rates? Schedule a demo of Chili Piper 🌶️

B2B buying is frustrating.

No transparent pricing. Going back-and-forth on discounts. Endless discovery questions

But perhaps the most perplexing reality about the B2B buying journey is how difficult it can be to actually talk to a sales rep when you’re ready. 

In our recent B2B buying journey report, we found only 11% of companies have a calendar scheduler on their website. 

This hurts buyers, who are waiting days just to hear back from a rep to schedule a time for a demo. But it hurts vendors even more. 

To the tune of a 30-40% conversion rate of form fill to booked meeting.  

AKA…for every 10 qualified prospects filling out your form, only 3 of them actually book a meeting.

That’s like working a 40-hour week… but only getting 30% of your paycheck. 

Or leaving your phone to charge overnight… and only charging to 30%. 

In short, a 30-40% conversion rate is not great.

In our recent Demo Form Conversion Rate report, we compiled product data from customers using Chili Piper’s form scheduling solution — to get you data on benchmark conversion rates from folks currently using a form scheduling solution.

We’ll cover: 

  • What are the metrics marketers should track in your inbound funnel? 
  • What are the average conversion rates by industry/month? 
  • How can you improve your conversion rates? 

Let’s dive in. 

P.S. We added a new section to this report in March 2024! “Conversion rates by Funding Round”. Check it out 👀

The New Inbound Funnel: Website Traffic to Qualified Held Meetings

Historically, the marketing funnel ended at “conversion”: The demo form submit. As soon as a lead submits that demo form, marketing’s job is done. They pass leads off to sales and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. 

But when only 30-40% of those form submits are actually booking a time with sales —  you start to wonder if the typical funnel is broken. 

That’s why, at Chili Piper, we’ve reinvented the marketing funnel to go beyond the form submit:

Our “new funnel” includes 3 new definitions: 

Qualified Hand-Raiser

A “qualified hand-raiser” is someone who has filled out your demo form to talk to sales AND is a qualified prospect.

Your form fills to qualified hand-raiser conversion rate ratio says A LOT. Mostly about: 

  • Your ability to drive qualified traffic to the page
  • Your ability to pre-qualify before people fill out your form 

Here’s that calculation:

Qualified Booked Meeting

A Qualified Booked Meeting is when a prospect is qualified AND books a meeting with a rep. 

Most form schedulers qualify right on the form and tracks this conversion rate automatically. For example, Chili Piper’s parameters for qualification are “more than 10 employees” and “uses Hubspot or Salesforce CRM”. 

Here’s how you calculate your Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate: 

Qualified Held Meeting

A qualified held meeting is someone who has booked a meeting AND showed up. 

On the Chili Piper marketing team, Qualified Held Meeting is the main metric we track (no MQLs here).

Here’s that calculation:

Note: This report does not include conversion data for Qualified Held Meetings. That will be included in a future report, stay tuned.

What kind of data are we talking about here? 

For this benchmark report, we looked at form conversion rates from a sample of Chili Piper’s 45,000 customers.

2,948,575 form submits. 2,042,453 qualified form submits. 1,307,505 booked meetings. That’s a lot of very long numbers, you might say. 

And you’d be right. 

What’s the average form conversion rate?

From all that juicy data, we were able to determine the average Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate and the average Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate. 

This data means that, on average, 86.97% of form submits are from qualified customers.

And 65.09% of those qualified prospects are actually booking time with sales. 

Pretty good compared to the baseline of 30-40%, yeah? 

Nice job, everyone! 🥂

How does your inbound funnel stack up?

So if your conversion rates aren’t quite up-to-speed, how can you increase your form conversion rates?

It depends on what time of conversion rate you’re talking about:

If your “Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate” is low…

It could mean you’re over-qualifying prospects on your form. You might want to take a look through folks who were deemed “unqualified” to make sure you’re not disqualifying good accounts.

It could also mean you’re sending the wrong people to your website. A lot of unqualified form submits can be a good indicator that you’re targeting and/or messaging is off. Dig into this data to see if the unqualified form submits are because of company size/industry 

If your “Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate” is low…

It could mean your reps’ availability is too limited. Make sure your reps don’t have free time marked as “busy” on their calendars. Also, be sure you’re using flexible round-robin (to show all reps’ availability)

It could be an issue with your speed to lead. 78% of B2B customers purchase from the vendor that responds first, so if you’ve responded too late — your prospect might have already gone with your competitor. Schedule a demo to get that sorted out for yourself 😜

If your “Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate” is high, but your “Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate” is low…

It could mean that your qualification criteria is too broad. Try limiting the number of people who can book a meeting through your form, to ensure the right people are booking a meeting 

Demo Conversion Rates By Industry 

Here’s where things start to get interesting.

Of the customer data we analyzed, we bucketed everyone into 15 different industries: 

And we found that conversion rates vary pretty dramatically across industries…

The goal is to tighten the gap between Qualified Hand Raisers and Qualified Booked Meetings.

Ideally, you want ALL your qualified hand-raisers to book a meeting with sales. 

The smaller the gap, the more qualified prospects you have booking meetings with sales. A large gap = qualified prospects who never booked a meeting = leakage.

Demo Conversion Rates by Funding Round

After we released this report in January 2024, we got a lot of requests for conversion rates based on company maturity. 

So… we pulled those numbers. 

Major kudos to those folks who requested these numbers, because wow. There are huge discrepancies between Series A and Post-IPO. 

As companies grow in maturity, their Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate also increases. My interpretation is that hte more mature companies get, the more mature their entire GTM motion becomes — high conversion rates are a team sport!

So if you’re Series A and your conversion rate from qualified hand-raiser to booked meeting is above 59%, you’re well above average. Good for you! 🎉

Demo Conversion Rates by Month

We looked to see if demo conversion rates changed at all throughout the year — interestingly, there’s not much variation.

The highest Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate (90.06% in January) isn’t even 10% higher than the lowest Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate (83.1% in December).

There’s even less variation for Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate. The highest conversion rate (65.79% in August) is less than 2 percentage points higher than the lowest conversion rate (63.91% in July).

Final takeaways: 

Lots of qualified meetings = fewer qualified booked meetings

This seems especially true for companies that work with small businesses (e.g. Travel, Hospitality, and Wellness). 

They’re qualifying almost 95% of form fills — but then only 66.84% of those book a meeting.

Side note: This is why we’re seeing lots of folks who work with small business add on Concierge Live — which immediately connects prospects with a sales rep, in real-time.

Engineers still don’t want to talk to sales

Data and Analytics Software and Infrastructure and Development tools both have a sharp discrepancy between Qualified Hand-Raiser Conversion Rate and Qualified Booked Meeting Conversion Rate. 

Buyers of those types of software tend to be developers, data analysts, and engineers — who notoriously don’t like to speak to sales. They’d rather play around with software first and build everything out, and only talk to sales once they have specific, functionality-related questions. 

This is why we’re seeing lots of our customers who sell into developers, data analysts, and engineers add in-app “book a meeting” prompts.

So customers/prospects can book a meeting while they’re using your product — and Chili Piper routes to account owner, or round-robins based on industry, company size, location, or any other routing parameters you’ve set up. 

Improving conversion rates is an effective way to make an impact

Unlike other types of marketing activations, there is no bad time to start focusing on your conversion rates.

If you run a B2B marketing campaign over the last two weeks of December, you’re not going to drive much traffic — even if your messaging and targeting are absolutely spot-on. 

But focus on your conversion rates? You’ll see impact right away. 

What’s next?

Are you loving this original data goodness? If yes, check out our two previous Chili Insights:

Love spicy marketing content? Subscribe to The Sauce. It’s monthly, no-nonsense, and you can read it in 5 minutes or less. 

We’ll be releasing more Chili Insights in 2024. Next time, we’ll drop the average Qualified Held Meetings Conversion Rate (AKA meetings that were booked AND showed up). Be sure to subscribe to get that sent to your inbox 👀

Want to double your conversion rates? Schedule a demo of Chili Piper 🌶️

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.

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