75 Best Practice SaaS Benchmarks for your Business Case

Throughout my career, I developed a strong desire to share my experience with other entrepreneurs. My goal was simple: to increase their chances for financing and success. This is why I started working on Lean-Case in 2016. I want you to avoid the pitfalls I have seen, by using the right formulas, applying the right assumptions, making the business case look appealing, and building a model to support scenarios and continuous analysis and tracking. Originally, benchmarking was an integral concept in Lean-Case but I learned that there was no single benchmarking data source that Lean-Case could leverage, but that there was a wealth of information regarding benchmarks spread across the web. However, most of this information is burried in PDF files or graphic, not vailable as data and not applying the same taxonomies to describe benchmarks. This is how the idea for a separate service developed which we originally called Lean-Marks. We decided to re-integrate Lean-Marks into Lean-Case and have plans to take it forward.

Benchmarking is a common practice and sensible exercise to establish baselines, define best practices, identify improvement opportunities, and understand how to compete. Benchmarking helps companies gain an independent perspective. They can understand how well they perform against peers, identify and prioritize specific areas of improvement, validate assumptions as well as set performance expectations.

Benchmarking works well when the process being benchmarked is a standard one and essentially is the same for all units (either internal or external) participating in the exercise. For example, it’s useful to compare the cost of developing the same widget, providing the same kind of online support or using the same kind of cloud service. But benchmarking is not informative when it is used to compare fundamentally different processes or products. For example, Dropbox would probably not benefit from studying SAP’s selling process, a start up would not benefit from comparing its churn rate with the churn rate of public SaaS companies such as Salesforce or Box. Be reasonable and do not compare Apples and Oranges – simplistic benchmarking using aggregate statistics only has certain validity.

We combine benchmarking with the strategic process of finding the right business focus. SaaS companies must focus on the right metrics for each stage of their product growth lifecycle.

If I want to convince potential investors that my business idea is viable, to what extent and how should I use a benchmarking comparison of successful companies and consequently shape my plan?

Benchmarking based on available information about similar companies in other markets can be a useful way to add granularity and credibility to your business plan. Depending on how much information on these other examples you have, applying the benchmark company growth patterns, or ramp-up numbers, or market penetration can be useful.

But be careful as you do this. You should be sensitive to the factors you are considering because they come from a different time and a different market, and may not be relevant to your own business. Be respectful of these differences, and - if at all possible - adjust your numbers to reflect them. These adjustments will add credibility to your plan.

We’ve seen plans and pitches in which entrepreneurs simply apply somebody else’s growth rate or profitability to their own projections. And potential investors wonder if those projections are relevant to your business. It’s a natural reaction, so anticipate it.

So, yes, use results from similar companies to help build your early projections. But do it carefully and with adjustments for your specifics. Then, it will give your plan credibility.

There are many great sources to find and check benchmarks online. They cover countless insights on the general business economics, funding, sales and marketing, customer success as well as product and software development.

However, they are not easy to find, they only focus on specific functions or topics, it is difficult to put them into context, they come in PDF format and they cannot be searched and compared. On such a basis, it becomes really hard to check them out and make meaningful decisions.

This is why we setup  the Lean-Case Benchmark to cover the best sources of publicly available SaaS and Software benchmarks in one place for the following target groups:

On the Lean-Case Benchmark Portal, you can kick off searching for benchmarks with a fulltext search (e.g. enter the keyword “quota”). 

Lean-Case shows relevant results for your search (see below). With the search bar on your right, you can refine your search (e.g. search by benchmark publication or searching by several keyword categories).

Each benchmarks is referenced, tagged and visually represented (see figure 3).

All benchmark sources covered on Lean-Case enjoy high social media activity and virality. The Lean_Case benchmark portal is your starting point to dig deeper into them. In the following sections, we provide a subset of benchmarks which are available on the portal.

This is the overview of Benchmark Sources which Lean-Case currently covers. 

If you start building your business case, you have to make a few choices. Are you starting from scratch and building your own Excel model, or can you reuse an older model which you used before, or could you even use a model someone else has built? Maybe you want to task experts like us to help you build your model with simulation and reporting capabilities. However, if you are sick of Excel, you could also use a Lean-Case create and share your case.

In all cases, for any of these options, you have to deal with business assumptions which typically fall into a few categories. Benchmarks in those categories help you to make your plan better. For this post, we are applying the same categories as used by the Lean-Case service. In the following chapters, we describe benchmarks on

This post provides SaaS entrepreneurs, Business Managers and Investors with the top 75 best practice benchmarks for your SaaS and Software business. Within this chapter we are covering a few operational Benchmarks.

There are many more operational benchmarks which you can look at and explore directly on Lean-Marks. We picked three categories

If you want to look up definitions of SaaS Metrics while reading through the benchmarks, please refer to our post Lean SaaS Metrics – The Definitive Guide to create business impact.