B2B Lead Gen Statistics & Benchmarks
Sourced b2b lead gen market data, cost benchmarks, and industry statistics, every figure cited to its origin.
Marketing Agencies
Marketing Agency New-Business Statistics (2026)
Marketing agencies still depend on referrals for 66 to 74% of new business, and only 14% call their own sales pipeline "very healthy." 59% have tried outbound sales as a new-business strategy, but only 9% call it very effective. Cold-booked B2B meeting no-show rates climbed from 18% in 2020 to 32% in 2025. This page collects the sourced new-business numbers behind those patterns, every figure linked to its source.
Read more →Marketing Agency Industry Statistics (2026)
IBISWorld counted 114,014 advertising agency businesses in the US as of 2026, up 4.4% year over year and a 6.7% CAGR from 2021 to 2026. Other estimators put the total agency count anywhere from 41,250 to 120,000 to 134,000, a spread wide enough that it reflects differing definitions of "agency" more than genuine disagreement about growth. Industry-average utilization runs around 60%, with a 65 to 80% range considered peak-profit territory, and only 20% of agencies track profitability by client, project, or service line. This page keeps the count-spread and its definitional caveat visible rather than averaging it away, and cites every figure to its source.
Read more →Agency Business Development Cost Benchmarks (2026)
Hiring a dedicated in-house Director of New Business costs a marketing agency $150,000-plus a year before technology, bonuses, benefits, and ramp-up time, and 76% of agencies that make that hire lose the person within two years. The outsourced-agency alternative runs $3,000 to $9,950 a month in published retainers among major B2B appointment-setting vendors, or $150 to $900 per meeting on a pay-per-meeting model, with a fully-loaded in-house SDR costing $700 to $1,150 per meeting once amortized. VA Horizon publishes a $300 one-time setup, then $250 to $450 per held, double-confirmed meeting, positioned inside the legitimate part of the pay-per-meeting band and under both the retainer and in-house-SDR cost per meeting.
Read more →Agency Proposal Win-Rate Benchmarks by Service Line (2026)
R3 Worldwide reported the average 2024 agency pitch win rate at 22%, dropping to 19% for mid-sized agencies. Pitchsite's 2026 benchmark, built on Proposify, PandaDoc, and HubSpot data, put the blended average at 43%, with branding and creative agencies winning 52% of proposals, the highest segment measured, and PR agencies winning just 33%, the lowest. The average agency loses $28,800 to $60,480 a year pursuing proposals that do not close. Both headline averages are real and sourced; the segment breakdown is the more useful number, since it lets an agency compare its own win rate against its actual service line rather than an industry-wide blend.
Read more →Shared / Cross-Sector
B2B SDR Hiring Economics: Cost, Ramp, and Turnover Statistics (2026)
A fully loaded in-house B2B SDR costs an estimated $98,000 to $173,000 a year, takes an average of 5.7 months to ramp to full productivity, and turns over at roughly 34% annually, close to 3 times the average across other industries. Converted into a per-meeting figure, published vendor estimates put a fully loaded in-house SDR at $700 to $1,250 per qualified meeting booked. This page collects the sourced numbers behind those figures. Every stat below links to its source and is labeled by how directly it is verified: most of this section is DIRECTIONAL, meaning it comes from a real but secondary or aggregated estimate rather than a single primary study you can pull the number from yourself.
Read more →B2B Appointment Setting Cost, Broken Out by Industry (2026)
Published appointment and lead pricing varies enormously by industry: roofing vendors publish $175 to $200 per booked appointment, solar vendors publish $150 to $600, and commercial insurance and staffing vendors mostly hide behind a monthly retainer instead of a per-meeting rate at all. Nobody in any of these categories breaks a rate card out by vertical the way this page does. VA Horizon publishes a per-meeting rate in every one of these industries, from $200 in business funding to $600 in SaaS, plus one flat $300 setup fee, and every row below puts our rate next to the closest published competitor number we could find for that industry.
Read more →AI SDR Market Statistics: Pricing, Churn, and Enforcement Records (2026)
AI SDR tools price from about $900 a month (AiSDR) to roughly $5,000 a month (11x), but a documented pattern sits behind those numbers: a TechCrunch investigation found 11x displaying customer logos, including ZoomInfo, without authorization, the FTC settled with Air AI for an approximately $18 million judgment and a permanent marketing ban in March 2026, and a secondary industry analysis puts AI SDR contract cancellation at 50% to 70% within 90 days. This page tracks the pricing, enforcement, and churn data behind the AI SDR wave, with every figure linked to its source.
Read more →Commercial Insurance
Insurance Producer Shortage Statistics (2026)
The insurance industry faces an estimated 400,000-worker deficit as boomer-generation agents retire, with roughly 47,000 annual job openings projected for insurance sales agents through 2034. The workforce skews sharply older: 1.37 million workers are 55 or older, against just 214,000 aged 20 to 24. Replacing a departed producer costs 75% to 150% of that producer's salary, $15,000 to $50,000 in direct cost, and January 2026 alone saw 11,300 insurance jobs lost industry-wide. This page collects the sourced numbers behind that shortage, every figure linked to its source.
Read more →Commercial Insurance Market Statistics (2026)
Commercial P&C net premiums written reached $918.6 billion in 2024, up 7.1% year over year, and insurance agencies and brokers employed 996,100 people that same year. CIAB's own Q2 2025 survey shows the market softening, overall rates up just 3.7%, down from 4.2% in Q1, with five lines posting outright declines, while CIAB's Q3 2025 resource is titled plainly "Soft Market Clear in Q3 2025." This page tracks the CIAB quarterly rate survey by line and refreshes as new quarterly data publishes, so the rate figures below reflect the most recent CIAB survey available at time of writing.
Read more →Commercial Insurance Lead Cost Benchmarks (2026)
Exclusive commercial insurance leads cost $25 to $200 a lead, shared or personal-lines-adjacent leads run $5 to $30, and live-transfer calls run $30 to $120 or more, per sourced 2026 pricing guides. Among appointment-setting vendors, only Superhuman Prospecting publishes real numbers: Flex cold-calling from $1,197 a month and Premium SDR bundles from $2,950 a month or more, both monthly subscriptions rather than per-meeting rates. VA Horizon publishes a $300 one-time setup, then $300 to $550 per held, double-confirmed meeting, positioned above the raw lead and live-transfer tiers to reflect a meeting that has already cleared two confirmation checkpoints.
Read more →Commercial Insurance Appointment Setting Vendor Pricing (2026)
Among the commercial insurance appointment-setting vendors reviewed in this research, only Superhuman Prospecting publishes real pricing: Flex cold-calling from $1,197 a month and Premium SDR bundles from $2,950 a month, both against a documented 4.9-star G2 rating and 5.0-star Clutch rating across 46 reviews. Client Focus Corp, Quality Contact Solutions, and MarketReach all decline to publish pricing, and Hit Rate Solutions leads with a labor-cost framed headline, "From $7 an hour," rather than a per-appointment rate. That gap, one vendor transparent, the rest gated behind a form, is close to universal across this category, and VA Horizon's own published $300 setup plus $300 to $550 per-meeting range is built to be the exception, not the norm.
Read more →Business Funding (MCA)
MCA Industry Statistics (2026): What the Fed's Own Survey Data Shows
7% of small businesses (under 500 employees) regularly used merchant cash advances in 2025, per the Federal Reserve's Small Business Credit Survey, identical to the 2017 rate. MCA had a 12% application rate in 2025, behind business line of credit (43%), business loan (32%), and SBA loan (20%), and a 48% full-approval rate, behind auto and equipment loans (71%) and mortgages (55%) but ahead of business lines of credit (45%). The 2025 survey reached more than 6,500 small employer firms surveyed September through November 2025. This page deliberately does not cite a total MCA market-size figure. At least four industry-research aggregator sites publish current market-size estimates that disagree with each other by more than 2x, with no shared methodology disclosed anywhere in what is publicly available. The Fed's usage-rate data below is the more defensible number, and it is the only market-size-adjacent framing this page uses.
Read more →MCA Enforcement Tracker: FTC, State AG, and TCPA Actions (2026)
The MCA industry has an active, recent enforcement record: the FTC has brought at least four dated actions since 2022, including a $20.3 million judgment and permanent industry ban against Jonathan Braun of RCG Advances in February 2024, and the New York Attorney General settled with Yellowstone Capital for roughly $1 billion in total debt relief, with $534 million in merchant debt automatically canceled, the largest MCA enforcement action found in this research. Eleven states now require commercial financing disclosure, and TCPA class-action filings tied to cold-calling and cold-texting operations rose 283% year over year in September 2025 alone. Every compliance resource built for this space is written for lawyers or for merchants who already got burned. This tracker is written for ISOs, brokers, and funders who need to know their own exposure. It is informational, not legal advice; confirm current requirements with your own counsel before making a compliance decision based on it.
Read more →Merchant Services
US Card Purchase Volume Statistics for Merchant Services (2025-2026)
Total US card purchase volume, credit, debit, and prepaid combined, reached $12.498 trillion in 2025, up 5.0% year over year, per the Nilson Report. Visa alone processed $7.028 trillion (up 6.8%), and Mastercard processed $2.958 trillion (up 6.3%), for a combined Visa and Mastercard total of $9.986 trillion (up 6.6%). Combined credit card volume across American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa reached $6.512 trillion (up 6.1%). This page collects those figures in one sourced place, the transaction volume behind every merchant a merchant services agent prospects.
Read more →Payments Telemarketing Enforcement Tracker: TCPA and FTC Actions (2025-2026)
TCPA lawsuit volume against telemarketers rose sharply through 2025: 880 lawsuits were filed between January 1 and April 30, 2025, up 44% year over year, and by September 2025, 2,128 lawsuits had been filed year to date, up more than 50%, with 78% of that September's filings being class actions. The clearest payments-specific case is National Retail Solutions (NRS Pay), which settled a TCPA class action for up to $6,510,240 over unauthorized prerecorded ringless voicemail calls. The FTC separately settled with payment processor Paddle.com for $5 million in June 2025, and secured refunds from First American Payment Systems over surprise exit fees, per FTC announcement coverage. This page tracks each action with its dates and, where available, its case number.
Read more →SaaS
SaaS Outbound Benchmarks: Deliverability, Dial Volume, and Channel Risk (2026)
Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication for any sender exceeding 5,000 emails a day, and enforce a 0.3% spam-complaint threshold (Google recommends staying under 0.1%), with 2025 enforcement moving from warning to outright rejection. Separately, the average number of dial attempts needed to reach a contact rose to an estimated 21, up from 17 the year before, and LinkedIn's own User Agreement explicitly prohibits automated messaging and contact-adding. Every number below is cited to its source and labeled by how directly it is verified. Cold-email open and reply-rate figures circulating elsewhere in this category could not be independently verified in this research and are deliberately excluded from this page.
Read more →SaaS Demo No-Show Statistics, Broken Out by Source and Deal Size (2026)
Demo show rate varies enormously by where the demo came from: an industry-estimate benchmark puts inbound branded-search demos at 78% to 88% show rate, cold outbound at 32% to 48%, and outbound-SDR-sourced demos in between at 48% to 62%. That means the corresponding no-show rate, calculated as the complement of the same figures, runs roughly 12% to 22% for inbound versus 52% to 68% for cold outbound, a difference of several multiples depending entirely on source, not on any single "average" no-show number. A second cut of the same data shows deal size matters too: PLG-priced demos under $5,000 ACV show at 65% to 78%, against 42% to 52% for strategic, $1 million-plus ACV deals. A general demo no-show range circulates elsewhere in this category, but could not be independently verified in this research and is not used here.
Read more →SaaS SDR Turnover Statistics, and What They Actually Cost a Demo Pipeline (2026)
SDR turnover runs an estimated 34% annually, roughly three times the average across other industries, with median tenure of 14 to 18 months. Ramp time to full productivity rose from 4.3 months in 2020 to 5.7 months in 2025, a 32% increase, both figures attributed to Bridge Group's research through secondary aggregators. For a SaaS pipeline specifically, that math compounds badly: a rep who leaves at median tenure has spent roughly a third of their time at the company still ramping, and software already has the lowest SDR quota attainment of any industry measured (an estimated 41.2%), meaning the rep who does stay often still misses target once fully ramped.
Read more →SaaS Cost Per Meeting Benchmarks: Mainstream and Enterprise Tiers (2026)
A converging vendor-blog estimate puts SaaS appointment setting at $150 to $600 per meeting for a standard, mainstream B2B ICP, rising to $800 to $1,500 or more for complex or enterprise targets, tiered further into basic ($150 to $300), ICP-matched ($300 to $500), and full BANT-verified with no-show replacement ($400 to $750). The one named agency in this category that publishes real pricing, CIENCE, structures its per-meeting commission on top of a $5,000 setup fee and roughly $2,499 a month in platform and strategic-team fees. Downstream cost data corroborates the same order of magnitude: median cost per SQL runs $762 and cost per MQL runs $198 in B2B SaaS, both attributed to Directive Consulting's 2024 data. VA Horizon publishes $300 setup plus $350 to $600 per held, double-confirmed demo, sitting inside the market's own mainstream range.
Read more →Staffing
Staffing Industry Statistics: The Clean 2026 Summary
The US staffing industry is forecast at $180.2 billion in 2026, per Staffing Industry Analysts' March 2026 update, down from a $243.9 billion peak in 2022. Roughly 27,000 staffing and recruiting companies operate about 54,000 offices nationwide, employing an average of 2.2 million temporary and contract workers in a typical week during 2024, and hiring 12.7 million temporary and contract employees across all of 2023, all per the American Staffing Association. Every figure below is cited directly to ASA or SIA, the two primary trade bodies tracking this data, rather than to a secondary aggregator.
Read more →Staffing Industry Quarterly Tracker: Q4 2025 and Q1 2026
Q4 2025 US staffing sales were $29.9 billion, up 2.6% sequentially but down 6.2% year over year. Q1 2026 sales were $27.6 billion, down 4.3% sequentially and down 1.6% year over year, the smallest Q1 sequential decline since 2022 and the narrowest year-over-year gap since 2023, all per the American Staffing Association. Q1 2026 temp and contract employment fell 7.5% sequentially, a loss of 154,000 jobs, but only 4.6% year over year, a sharp improvement from the 10.8% year-over-year drop in Q1 2025. This page is updated as new ASA quarterly releases publish.
Read more →Staffing Agency Client Acquisition Cost: A Built Benchmark
No public, audited benchmark for staffing agency client acquisition cost exists. A direct search for one turns up articles that reference the concept without ever publishing a number. This page builds a transparent estimate instead, from two verifiable inputs: vendors' own published monthly pricing and advertised meeting-volume ranges, and a stated range of assumed meeting-to-signed-client close rates, since no staffing-specific close-rate benchmark is publicly available either. The output is a calculated range you can rerun with your own known close rate, not a single audited figure presented as universal fact.
Read more →Staffing Agency BD Vendor Pricing, Compared
Of the vendors reviewed with staffing-specific offers, Cleverly publishes the clearest number: $2,997 a month for 10 to 40 appointments. Sapper Consulting publishes tiered monthly retainers of $5,250 to $8,750 on a 13-month term, or $5,750 to $9,250 on a 7-month term. Belkins and Intelemark do not disclose direct pricing; Intelemark instead anchors its pitch against an estimated $60,000 cost to set up one new in-house sales rep, and Belkins cites a $60,000 average deal size and an up-to-50% appointment-setting rate as vendor-published claims, not audited figures. VA Horizon publishes $300 one-time setup plus $300 to $550 per held, double-confirmed meeting, the only structure among those reviewed with no monthly retainer of any kind.
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