The State of Booking Inbound Demos: Insights from 51,219 Meetings⁠

In the world of B2B software, booking demos with qualified inbound leads is often seen as the holy grail of marketing. But what drives these demos?We analyzed data from over 51,219 Default meetings to uncover some surprising insights that might change how you think about leveraging scheduling tools on your website.

TLDR:

• Analyzed 51,219 inbound demo requests from 100 B2B Software companies
• Lead-to-Meeting Rate: 75.6% booked vs 24.4% not booked
• UTM Impact: Only 4% of meetings have UTMs, with lower conversion rates

Part I: Demo Request Benchmarks

Our data reveals a strong success rate that qualified demo requests will convert into a meeting:

• Meetings booked: 38,751 (75.6%)
• Meetings not booked: 12,468 (24.4%)

This high booking rate suggests that once prospects reach the scheduling stage, they're likely to follow through and book.However, it does help to use a scheduling solution like Default that converts about 20% higher than other solutions on the market.

Part II: The UTM Surprise

One of the most surprising findings in our analysis is the low prevalence of UTM parameters:

• Only 4.8% of all demo requests (2,483 out of 51,219) have associated UTMs
• UTM-ed meetings convert worst: 67.3% booked vs. 32.7% not booked

Surprisingly, only 4% of demos are directly attributed to UTMs, which makes sense — buyers don’t request a demo on the first visit. Building a multi-touch marketing strategy should be a standard for all B2B software companies.The lower conversion rate for UTM-tagged meetings (67.3% vs. the overall 75.6%) is counterintuitive. This phenomenon might be explained by the context preceding the scheduler.UTM-tagged traffic often comes from specific campaigns or ads, where prospects might be earlier in their buying journey. In contrast, untagged traffic could be from direct visits or organic searches, indicating higher intent.

Part III: Channel Performance

When we look at where successful meetings are booked, we see a clear hierarchy of where UTM-tagged demos are coming from:

• Paid Search: 38.7%
• Email: 17.4%
• Partner: 15.9%
• Webinars: 5.2%
• LinkedIn: 5.0%
• Affiliate: 3.2%
• Product Tour: 2.7%
• Meta: 2.4%
• Paid LinkedIn: 2.4%
• Paid Meta: 2.1%
• Product Referral: 2.0%
• Review Sites: 0.7%

Email and partner channels follow, highlighting the importance of nurturing leads and leveraging strategic partnerships or campaigns like newsletter sponsorships.The dominance of paid search is clear, accounting for over a third of all booked meetings. This suggests that prospects who are actively searching for solutions are more likely to book a meeting on the same website visit.

Conclusion

Having a high-converting Scheduler like Default that can route, schedule, enrich, and automate lead follow-up is key to increasing the number of demos for your B2B software company.