What the OpenView SaaS Benchmarks 2023 Tell You

The OpenView SaaS Benchmarks 2023 report is one of the most useful data sets available to SaaS operators and growth marketers, covering growth rates, net revenue retention, burn multiples, and go-to-market efficiency across hundreds of private SaaS companies. If you run GTM strategy for a SaaS business, or advise one, it gives you a rare honest look at what the numbers actually look like when the market gets difficult.

The 2023 edition landed in a moment of genuine reckoning. After two years of growth-at-all-costs thinking, the benchmarks reflected a market that had snapped back hard. Median growth rates fell. Burn multiples tightened. And the companies that held up best were the ones with strong retention and disciplined GTM spending, not the ones with the biggest top-of-funnel budgets.

Why These Benchmarks Matter More Than Most Industry Reports

I’ve spent a lot of time around industry reports. Most of them are produced by vendors with a stake in the conclusions. The methodology is buried, the sample is self-selected, and the findings conveniently point toward whatever the publisher sells. OpenView’s benchmark report is different in structure. It surveys private SaaS companies directly, and the data set is large enough to segment meaningfully by ARR band, growth stage, and GTM motion.

That doesn’t make it gospel. No report is. But it gives you something you can actually compare yourself against, rather than aspirational case studies from companies with very different resources and very different market positions.

When I was running agencies and advising on growth strategy, one of the hardest conversations to have with SaaS clients was around what “good” actually looked like at their stage. Everyone wanted to benchmark against Salesforce or HubSpot. OpenView lets you have a more grounded version of that conversation, because the data is segmented by ARR band and you can find companies that are genuinely comparable.

If you want broader context on how GTM strategy connects to growth outcomes, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture, from market entry to scaling commercial operations.

What the Growth Rate Data Actually Shows

The headline finding most people latched onto was the drop in median ARR growth rates. Companies that had been growing at 50-60% annually in 2021 and 2022 were posting growth in the 20-30% range in 2023. For anyone who had built their GTM plans around the previous era’s assumptions, that was a significant recalibration.

But the more instructive finding was the distribution. The top quartile of companies by ARR growth was still performing well. The gap between top-quartile and median performance widened. That tells you something important: the market didn’t slow down uniformly. It got harder for average operators and rewarded the ones with stronger GTM discipline.

I’ve seen this pattern before, not in SaaS specifically, but in the broader advertising market during downturns. When I was at iProspect, growth was coming from winning share in a contracting market, not from the market expanding. The companies that held budget and kept investing in the right channels took share from the ones that cut indiscriminately. The OpenView data reflects a similar dynamic: the top quartile didn’t just survive 2023, they extended their lead.

The growth rate data also reinforces something that Vidyard’s analysis of GTM difficulty has pointed to: the mechanics of go-to-market have genuinely changed, and companies that are still running 2020-era playbooks are feeling it.

Net Revenue Retention: The Number That Separates Sustainable Growth From the Rest

If there’s one metric in the OpenView report that deserves more attention than it typically gets, it’s net revenue retention. The report consistently shows that NRR above 100% is the clearest indicator of a healthy SaaS business, and the companies with strong NRR were able to grow with significantly less new logo pressure than those with weak retention.

This is not a new insight in theory. But in practice, most GTM teams I’ve worked with were still over-indexed on acquisition. The pipeline review, the board deck, the sales comp plan, all of it pointed toward new logos. Retention was a CS metric, not a revenue metric. The OpenView data makes a clear commercial case for changing that framing.

When NRR is above 100%, your existing customer base is growing without additional acquisition spend. That’s compounding. When NRR is below 90%, you’re running to stand still, because you’re losing more from churn and contraction than you’re adding from expansion. The benchmarks show that the median NRR in 2023 sat in the low-to-mid 100s for the best performers, and significantly lower for companies that had prioritised volume over fit during the growth era.

The lesson I draw from this, and one I’ve tried to apply in client conversations, is that acquisition strategy and retention strategy are not separate problems. If you’re acquiring customers who churn at high rates, you’re not building a business, you’re filling a leaking bucket. The ICP work, the onboarding investment, the product-market fit rigour, all of it shows up eventually in your NRR, and the OpenView benchmarks make that connection explicit.

Burn Multiples and the GTM Efficiency Question

The burn multiple, net burn divided by net new ARR, became the efficiency metric of the moment in 2023. OpenView had been tracking it for a few years, but the 2023 report showed how sharply investor expectations had tightened. A burn multiple above 2x was increasingly difficult to justify. The best-performing companies were operating at or below 1x.

What this means practically for GTM teams is that the question is no longer just “how much pipeline are we generating?” but “how much does it cost us to generate each dollar of new ARR, and is that sustainable?” That’s a more honest question, and it changes how you think about channel mix, headcount, and the role of marketing versus sales in the revenue equation.

Earlier in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel performance channels because they made the attribution story easy. Click, convert, done. But I came to understand that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who already knew the product and was ready to buy was going to convert regardless. The harder and more valuable work is reaching people who don’t know you yet, building enough credibility and relevance that they consider you when the moment arrives. That’s where brand and content investment pays off, and it’s where the burn multiple conversation gets interesting.

Companies with strong brand recognition and content infrastructure have lower CAC over time because they’re not paying to reach the same people repeatedly. The OpenView data doesn’t isolate brand investment as a variable, but the efficiency metrics of the top performers are consistent with companies that have built durable GTM infrastructure rather than paid their way to every deal.

For a grounded look at how market penetration strategy connects to GTM efficiency, Semrush’s breakdown of market penetration approaches is worth reading alongside the OpenView data.

Product-Led Growth: What the Benchmarks Actually Show

PLG has been positioned as the dominant GTM motion for SaaS for several years now. The OpenView report has consistently tracked PLG companies separately, and the 2023 data is more nuanced than the evangelism around PLG suggests.

PLG companies did show stronger NRR on average, which makes sense given the model. When users adopt a product through genuine use rather than a sales process, the fit tends to be better and expansion more natural. But the growth rate advantage of PLG over sales-led was narrower in 2023 than in previous years. And the companies that were struggling most were often pure-PLG businesses that had underinvested in sales capacity as they moved upmarket.

The practical implication is that PLG and sales-led are not binary choices. The best-performing companies in the OpenView data were running hybrid motions, using product usage signals to prioritise sales outreach, and using content and community to reduce the cost of early-stage acquisition. That’s a more sophisticated GTM design than “give it away free and hope they upgrade.”

I’ve watched a number of SaaS businesses treat PLG as a strategy when it’s really a tactic. The strategy is still about reaching the right people, demonstrating genuine value quickly, and converting that value into durable revenue. PLG can support all of that, but it doesn’t replace the need for clear positioning, a defined ICP, and a coherent path from acquisition to expansion.

What the Benchmarks Say About GTM Headcount and Spending

One of the more useful sections of the OpenView report covers GTM headcount ratios and spending as a percentage of ARR. The 2023 data showed that companies were trimming GTM headcount relative to ARR at a faster rate than in previous years, reflecting both the efficiency pressure and the reality that many companies had over-hired in 2021 and 2022.

The benchmarks for sales and marketing spend as a percentage of ARR varied significantly by stage. Early-stage companies (under $1M ARR) were spending proportionally much more on GTM than later-stage ones, which is expected. But the companies that had the best burn multiples at mid-stage ($5M to $20M ARR) were typically spending in the 40-50% of ARR range on GTM, not the 60-80% that had been normalised during the growth era.

When I grew a team from around 20 people to 100 during my time in agency leadership, the hardest discipline was not hiring fast enough to meet demand, it was making sure every hire was genuinely additive to commercial output. Headcount is the most expensive and hardest-to-reverse GTM investment. The OpenView data reinforces that the best-performing companies in 2023 were running leaner GTM teams with higher output per head, not just cutting for the sake of it.

For context on how agile scaling principles apply to commercial teams, BCG’s work on scaling agile is a useful reference, even if it’s not SaaS-specific. The underlying tension between speed and control is the same.

The Category Creation Question

One thread running through the OpenView report that doesn’t always get enough attention is the role of category positioning in growth outcomes. Companies that had invested in clear, differentiated positioning, rather than competing on feature lists in crowded categories, tended to have better NRR and lower CAC. This is hard to isolate statistically, but it shows up in the qualitative commentary and in the patterns of the top performers.

Category creation is expensive and takes time. Most SaaS companies don’t have the resources or the market position to do it properly. But the data suggests that even a sharper version of category positioning, being the clear choice for a specific segment rather than a general choice for everyone, has measurable commercial impact.

I’ve judged at the Effie Awards, which means I’ve seen behind the curtain of what actually drives marketing effectiveness. The campaigns that win on effectiveness, not just creativity, almost always have one thing in common: they’re built around a clear and specific claim about who the brand is for and why it matters. That’s as true for a B2B SaaS company targeting mid-market finance teams as it is for a consumer brand. The OpenView benchmarks, read carefully, point toward the same conclusion.

Forrester’s ongoing work on go-to-market struggles in specific verticals illustrates how positioning clarity becomes even more critical when you’re operating in a complex or regulated category.

How to Use the Benchmarks Without Being Misled by Them

The most dangerous way to use any benchmark report is to treat it as a target-setting document. “The median company at our ARR stage spends X% on marketing, so that’s our budget.” That’s not strategy, that’s averaging your way to mediocrity.

The right way to use the OpenView benchmarks is as a diagnostic. Where are you materially above or below the median, and do you have a clear reason for that? If your NRR is below the median for your ARR band, that’s a signal worth investigating. If your burn multiple is significantly above the top quartile, that’s a conversation to have with your leadership team before it becomes a crisis.

The benchmarks are also useful for challenging internal assumptions. I’ve sat in enough planning sessions where the growth targets were set based on what the team wanted to be true rather than what the market data suggested was plausible. Having an external data set that shows what companies at comparable stages are actually achieving gives you a grounding mechanism, a way to ask “is this ambition or is this evidence?”

That said, benchmarks reflect the average of what has happened, not the ceiling of what’s possible. The top quartile in any metric was once below the median. The data should inform your thinking, not cap your ambition.

For a broader view of the tools and frameworks that support data-driven growth decisions, Semrush’s overview of growth tools covers the practical infrastructure side of this.

The Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub brings together the strategic frameworks that sit behind these metrics, from GTM design to scaling commercial operations, and is worth bookmarking if you’re working through these questions in your own business.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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