Originally published on SaaSTR

‍Sources: SaaS Capital 2025 Spending Benchmarks Survey (1,000+ companies), Benchmarkit 2025 SaaS Performance Metrics Report, Growth Unhinged 2025 SaaS Benchmarks (800+ companies), Maxio 2025 B2B SaaS Benchmarks Report

What 1,000 B2B SaaS Companies Reveal About Marketing Spend: 7 Strategic Lessons for B2B Marketers

An analysis of SaaS Capital's 2025 spending benchmarks and what they mean for your marketing strategy

The latest data from SaaS Capital's survey of over 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies confirms what many of us suspected: even in the age of AI and automation, there's no shortcut to growth. Companies that want to scale are spending significantly on sales and marketing—and that investment isn't declining as they grow.

But buried in the headline numbers (15% of revenue on sales, 10% on marketing) are strategic insights that separate companies capturing market share from those watching competitors pull ahead. This analysis unpacks what the spending data actually means for B2B SaaS marketers and provides a framework for making smarter allocation decisions.

The Headline Numbers: What B2B SaaS Companies Actually Spend

Before diving into strategic implications, let's establish the baseline. According to SaaS Capital's 2025 survey:

Median spending as a percentage of ARR:

• Sales: 13% (up from 10.5% the previous year)
• Marketing: 8% (unchanged)
• Customer Success/Support: 8% (slightly down from 8.5%)
• Research & Development: 22% (up from 18%)
• General & Administrative: 14% (up from 11%)
• Hosting: 5%
• DevOps: 4%

Total median spend: 95% of ARR for bootstrapped companies, 107% for equity-backed companies.

Profitability picture: 85% of bootstrapped companies operate within two percentage points of breakeven or profitability. Only 46% of equity-backed companies can say the same.

These numbers provide useful benchmarks, but the real insights emerge when we examine the variations—by growth rate, funding status, and company size.

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Lesson 1: The Growth Premium Is Real—High-Growth Companies Spend 20% More on Sales and 40% More on Marketing

Here's the finding that should reshape how you think about marketing budgets: companies growing faster than their peers spend significantly more on go-to-market activities.

The data shows:

• Higher-growth bootstrapped companies spend approximately 20% more on sales and 40% more on marketing than their slower-growing counterparts
• Higher-growth equity-backed companies follow the same pattern
• Both groups also invest more heavily in customer success

This correlation raises a critical question: does spending more cause growth, or do growing companies simply have more to spend?

The answer is likely both, but the causality matters less than the strategic implication. If you're targeting aggressive growth, budgeting at median levels probably won't get you there. The companies achieving above-median growth are investing above-median resources in customer acquisition.

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What this means for your marketing strategy:

If you're a $5M ARR company targeting 40%+ growth, budgeting 8% of revenue for marketing (the median) positions you for median results. Companies achieving exceptional growth are closer to 11-12%—and that's before accounting for sales investment.

This doesn't mean throwing money at the problem. It means being intentional about the relationship between growth targets and marketing investment. If leadership expects hypergrowth while funding median marketing budgets, something has to give.

Lesson 2: The VC Advantage Is Quantifiable—And It's Bigger Than You Think

One of the most striking findings from the SaaS Capital data is the magnitude of difference between VC-backed and bootstrapped company spending:

VC-backed companies spend:

• 89% more on sales
• 100% more on marketing
• 71% more on R&D
• 14% more on customer success
• 80% more on G&A

That's not a marginal difference. VC-backed companies are investing nearly double in marketing compared to bootstrapped peers.

For bootstrapped companies, this creates a genuine competitive disadvantage in the early stages. You're competing for the same customers with roughly half the go-to-market firepower.

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Strategic responses for bootstrapped companies:

The data doesn't mean bootstrapped companies can't compete—85% are profitable or near-breakeven, compared to only 46% of VC-backed companies. But it does mean competing differently:

1. Efficiency becomes existential. When you have half the marketing budget, every dollar needs to work twice as hard. This means rigorous attribution, faster experimentation cycles, and ruthless cut of underperforming channels.
2. Content and SEO become disproportionately important. These channels compound over time and don't scale linearly with spend. A bootstrapped company with a strong organic presence can compete with VC-backed competitors despite budget disadvantages.
3. Product-led growth earns its premium. If your product can drive acquisition, activation, and expansion with less human touch, you can compete with companies spending twice as much on sales and marketing.
4. Focus beats breadth. VC-backed competitors can afford to attack multiple segments simultaneously. Bootstrapped companies typically win by dominating a niche before expanding.

Lesson 3: Marketing Spend Doesn't Decline as You Scale—It Actually Increases

There's a persistent myth that marketing becomes more efficient at scale—that brand awareness compounds and word-of-mouth reduces the need for paid acquisition. The data tells a different story.

Spending by company size (as % of ARR):

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Marketing spend as a percentage of revenue actually increases as companies scale from early stage ($1-3M) to growth stage ($5-20M). It only plateaus—not declines—beyond $20M ARR.

Why doesn't marketing efficiency improve?

Several factors explain this counterintuitive pattern:

1. Market saturation. As you capture more of your addressable market, finding the next customer becomes harder, not easier. The early adopters and low-hanging fruit get picked first.
2. Competitive response. Success attracts competition. As you grow, you're not just acquiring customers—you're defending against competitors who've noticed your market.
3. Expansion into new segments. Growth often requires entering adjacent markets or moving upmarket/downmarket, each requiring fresh go-to-market investment.
4. Channel maturation. The channels that drove early growth often become less efficient over time. Early SEO gains plateau. Paid acquisition costs increase as you exhaust high-intent audiences.

What this means for planning:

If you're a $3M ARR company assuming marketing will become more efficient at $10M, you're building on a flawed assumption. Budget planning should assume consistent or increasing marketing investment as a percentage of revenue, not efficiency gains.

This has significant implications for fundraising and financial planning. The path to profitability doesn't run through reduced marketing spend—it runs through improved unit economics (higher LTV, better retention, more efficient conversion) at consistent investment levels.

Lesson 4: The CAC Crisis Is Real—And Getting Worse

While the SaaS Capital data focuses on spending percentages, complementary research from Benchmarkit, Maxio, and others paints a concerning picture of customer acquisition efficiency.

Key findings from 2025 CAC benchmarks:

• The median new-name CAC ratio increased 14% year-over-year to $2.00 of sales and marketing expense for every $1.00 of new customer ARR
• The bottom quartile of companies spend $2.82 to acquire $1.00 of new ARR
• CAC payback periods increased 12.5% since 2022
• Companies with $10K-$50K ACV often have higher acquisition costs than those with $50K-$100K ACV

This creates a strategic paradox: companies need to spend more on sales and marketing to grow, but each dollar is becoming less efficient.

The efficient growth imperative:

The most successful companies in the current environment combine two metrics that are often analyzed separately: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and CAC payback period.

According to Kyle Poyar's analysis of 800 B2B SaaS companies:

• High NRR + Low CAC Payback (13% of companies): 71% average growth rate, 47% Rule of 40
• Low NRR + High CAC Payback (12% of companies): 10% average growth rate, 5% Rule of 40

The gap is enormous. Companies in the top quadrant grow 7x faster than those in the bottom quadrant.

Strategic implications:

1. Retention is the new acquisition. Existing customers now generate 40% of new ARR across all B2B SaaS (over 50% for companies above $50M). Expansion revenue costs a fraction of new logo acquisition.
2. CAC optimization matters more than ever. With acquisition costs rising industry-wide, the companies achieving efficient growth are finding ways to reduce CAC through product-led motions, organic channels, and sales process optimization.
3. The "growth at any cost" era is over. VC-backed companies investing 47% of revenue in sales and marketing versus 33% for PE-backed companies are under pressure to demonstrate a path to efficiency.

Lesson 5: The G&A Surprise—Why VC-Backed Companies Spend 80% More on Administration

One of the less-discussed findings is the significant difference in G&A spending: VC-backed companies spend 80% more on general and administrative costs than bootstrapped peers.

SaaS Capital offers a plausible explanation: the overhead of investor relations. Board meetings, audits, reporting requirements, and the finance infrastructure to support them create real costs that bootstrapped companies avoid.

What this means for marketing leaders:

This isn't directly a marketing issue, but it has budget implications. Every dollar spent on G&A overhead is a dollar not available for customer acquisition. Bootstrapped companies may have smaller total budgets, but a higher percentage of their spending goes directly to growth activities.

For marketing leaders at VC-backed companies, this is worth understanding when negotiating budgets. The "we have more resources" argument needs nuance—some of those resources are absorbed by the infrastructure required to manage those resources.

Lesson 6: Public Companies Are Less Efficient, Not More

If there's a silver lining for private companies, it's this: going public doesn't solve the efficiency problem. In fact, public B2B SaaS companies generally have higher customer acquisition costs than startups.

Jamin Ball's analysis of public cloud companies shows no improvement in sales and marketing efficiency at scale. If anything, the largest companies face the steepest efficiency challenges.

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Why does efficiency decline at scale?

1. Market saturation intensifies. When you're Salesforce, finding someone who isn't already a customer becomes exponentially harder.
2. The installed base creates resources for inefficiency. Renewal revenue generates cash that can fund less-efficient new customer acquisition.
3. Enterprise complexity increases. Larger deal sizes often require longer sales cycles, more touchpoints, and higher-touch marketing—all of which increase CAC.
4. Competitive dynamics shift. Public companies compete against each other with significant resources, driving up acquisition costs industry-wide.

Strategic implication:

Don't benchmark your marketing efficiency against public company standards assuming they represent best-in-class operations. Private companies often achieve better unit economics precisely because resource constraints force efficiency.

Lesson 7: The 15/10 Guideline—And When to Deviate

Based on the SaaS Capital data, a reasonable starting point for marketing budget planning is:

• Conservative/profitable growth: 15% of ARR on sales, 10% on marketing (combined 25%)
• Aggressive growth targets: 18-20% on sales, 12-15% on marketing (combined 30-35%)

But these are guideposts, not rules. Several factors should influence your specific allocation:

Factors that justify higher marketing investment:

1. Category creation. If you're defining a new category, marketing investment in education and awareness needs to be higher than in established markets.
2. Product-led growth model. Companies with strong PLG motions may allocate more to marketing (demand generation, content, brand) and less to sales (since the product handles much of the conversion).
3. Long sales cycles. Complex enterprise sales require sustained marketing investment in nurturing and multi-touch attribution over extended periods.
4. Competitive pressure. If competitors are outspending you significantly, maintaining share may require above-benchmark investment.

Factors that justify lower marketing investment:

1. Strong product-market fit with organic growth. If customers find you through word-of-mouth and referrals, forcing marketing spend may be inefficient.
2. Capacity constraints. If your sales team or onboarding capacity is the bottleneck, increasing marketing spend just creates waste.
3. Retention problems. Acquiring customers you can't retain is expensive. Fix the leaky bucket before pouring more water in.
4. Capital efficiency requirements. Bootstrapped companies or those optimizing for near-term profitability may need to accept slower growth with lower marketing investment.

Applying the Benchmarks: A Framework for Marketing Budget Decisions

Rather than simply adopting industry benchmarks, use them as inputs to a more strategic budgeting process:

Step 1: Define your growth archetype

Are you optimizing for:

• Maximum growth (accepting losses)
• Efficient growth (Rule of 40 target)
• Profitability (positive cash flow priority)

Each archetype implies different marketing investment levels relative to benchmarks.

Step 2: Assess your competitive position

• Are you the market leader, challenger, or niche player?
• How do competitor marketing investments compare?
• What's your differentiated advantage?

Market leaders can sometimes spend less efficiently because brand drives consideration. Challengers often need to outspend to gain share.

Step 3: Evaluate channel efficiency

Where are your current marketing dollars most productive?

• What's your CAC by channel?
• Which channels have capacity for increased investment?
• Where are you seeing diminishing returns?

Benchmarks assume average efficiency. If your specific channels are performing above average, you may be able to grow faster at lower investment levels—or justify increased investment in what's working.

Step 4: Align with sales capacity

Marketing budgets need to match sales capacity to convert demand into revenue. The best marketing in the world is wasted if generated leads can't be worked effectively.

• What's your current lead-to-opportunity conversion rate?
• How many qualified opportunities can your sales team handle?
• What's the bottleneck: demand generation or conversion?

Step 5: Build in experimentation budget

Best-in-class marketing organizations allocate 10-20% of budget to testing new channels, tactics, and approaches. This prevents over-optimization for current performance at the expense of discovering more efficient approaches.

The Bottom Line: What the Data Actually Tells Us

The SaaS Capital spending benchmarks confirm several truths that should inform B2B SaaS marketing strategy:

1. There's no efficiency shortcut to growth. Companies that grow faster spend more on sales and marketing, and that relationship holds across company sizes and funding stages.
2. The VC advantage is real and substantial. Bootstrapped companies compete with roughly half the go-to-market resources of VC-backed peers. This requires different strategies, not just tighter budgets.
3. Marketing investment doesn't naturally decline at scale. Plan for consistent or increasing marketing spend as a percentage of revenue, not efficiency gains from brand or market position.
4. Efficiency is getting harder industry-wide. CAC is rising, payback periods are extending, and the companies winning are those combining strong retention with efficient acquisition—not those who've cracked some acquisition efficiency code.
5. Benchmarks are starting points, not answers. Your specific situation—growth targets, competitive position, channel efficiency, sales capacity—should determine your investment levels, informed by but not dictated by industry averages.

The companies that will thrive in the current environment aren't those spending the most or the least on marketing. They're the ones making strategic, data-informed decisions about where and how much to invest—and building the measurement infrastructure to know whether those decisions are working.

Key Takeaways for B2B SaaS Marketers

If you're at a bootstrapped company:

• Expect to compete with roughly half the go-to-market budget of VC-backed competitors
• Prioritize efficiency ruthlessly—every dollar needs to work harder
• Lean into compounding channels (content, SEO, community) that don't scale linearly with spend
• Consider product-led growth as a strategic advantage, not just a tactic

If you're at a VC-backed company:

• Increased spending expectations are real, but so is accountability for efficiency
• Monitor CAC payback obsessively—the "growth at any cost" tolerance is shrinking
• Don't assume more budget solves problems that are really strategy or execution issues
• Build for the transition to efficiency requirements before they become urgent

If you're planning marketing budgets:

• Use 10% of ARR as a baseline, adjusted for growth targets and competitive position
• Expect high-growth scenarios to require 12-15% or more
• Don't plan for efficiency gains at scale—they rarely materialize
• Align marketing investment with sales capacity to avoid waste

If you're measuring marketing performance:

• CAC and CAC payback period matter more than ever
• Expansion revenue contribution is becoming a critical marketing metric
• Channel-level efficiency analysis should drive allocation decisions
• The combination of NRR and CAC payback predicts long-term success better than any single metric

The data is clear: strategic marketing investment remains essential for B2B SaaS growth. The question isn't whether to invest, but how to invest wisely in an environment where efficiency is increasingly difficult and increasingly important.

Bonus: The AI Factor—How Emerging Technology Affects These Benchmarks

One question the SaaS Capital data doesn't directly answer is how AI is affecting these spending patterns. Based on complementary research and market observation, several trends are emerging:

AI isn't reducing marketing spend—it's changing where it goes.

Despite promises of automation-driven efficiency, the data shows marketing spending as a percentage of revenue remains stable or increasing. What's changing is the allocation within marketing budgets:

• Content production costs are declining as AI tools accelerate creation, but content volume expectations are rising proportionally
• Paid acquisition remains expensive because AI benefits both advertisers and platforms—efficiency gains on one side get competed away
• Technical marketing roles are expanding as AI implementation requires new skills in prompt engineering, data integration, and tool orchestration
• Attribution is getting more complex as AI-driven personalization creates more touchpoints to track

The AI-native advantage is real but narrow.

Companies founded after ChatGPT's release (late 2022) show different characteristics than traditional B2B SaaS:

• Faster time to $1M ARR
• Different cost structures (often lower R&D as a percentage)
• Higher growth rates in early stages

However, it's too early to know whether these advantages persist at scale or whether AI-native companies will face the same efficiency challenges as they mature.

Strategic implication:

Don't assume AI will fundamentally change the marketing investment requirements for growth. The companies achieving efficient growth with AI are typically using it to do more with their existing budgets—not to achieve the same results with smaller budgets. Plan accordingly.

Building Your Marketing Investment Case

For marketing leaders who need to advocate for appropriate budget levels, the SaaS Capital data provides valuable ammunition. Here's how to use it:

When leadership questions marketing spend levels:

"Our marketing budget at 8% of ARR is below the industry median of 10%, and significantly below the 12-15% that high-growth companies invest. If we're targeting growth rates above median, we need to consider whether our marketing investment supports that ambition."

When comparing to VC-backed competitors:

"Our VC-backed competitors are investing approximately twice what we are in marketing. We can compete effectively by being more efficient and focused, but we should be realistic about the resource disadvantage and prioritize accordingly."

When budgets are being cut:

"The data shows that marketing spend as a percentage of revenue doesn't decline as companies scale—if anything, it increases from 6% at early stage to 10% at growth stage. Cutting marketing budget now may create short-term savings but will likely require reinvestment later to restart growth."

When CAC is rising:

"Rising CAC is an industry-wide trend, with new customer acquisition costs increasing 14% year-over-year across B2B SaaS. Our focus should be on relative efficiency compared to peers, not absolute improvement against historical benchmarks."

Final Thoughts: The Spending Paradox

The most striking insight from the SaaS Capital data is what economists might call a spending paradox: the companies that achieve the best outcomes are often those that spend more, not less, on customer acquisition.

This runs counter to the efficiency narrative that has dominated B2B SaaS discourse since 2022. Yes, efficient growth matters. Yes, unit economics must work. But efficiency alone doesn't create growth—it creates profitable stagnation.

The companies navigating this paradox successfully share common characteristics:

1. They invest aggressively but measure obsessively. High spending with weak attribution is waste. High spending with granular attribution is strategy.
2. They balance acquisition and retention. The best CAC in the world doesn't help if customers churn before payback. Efficient growth requires both.
3. They match spending to capacity. Marketing investment that generates demand your sales team can't convert is waste. Alignment across the revenue organization determines whether spending translates to growth.
4. They plan for the long game. The companies winning market share today are investing ahead of revenue. The companies optimizing for short-term efficiency may find themselves without the market position to compete when growth becomes the priority again.

The benchmark data won't tell you exactly how much to spend. But it should inform how you think about the relationship between investment and growth—and help you make the case for appropriate resources to achieve your goals.

Sources: SaaS Capital 2025 Spending Benchmarks Survey (1,000+ companies), Benchmarkit 2025 SaaS Performance Metrics Report, Growth Unhinged 2025 SaaS Benchmarks (800+ companies), Maxio 2025 B2B SaaS Benchmarks Report

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