Software as a service
For B2B SaaS: what a company read before it bought, and how long it took.
B2B SaaS sells to companies whose buyers research for weeks, ask for a demo or a trial, then pay a monthly plan or an annual invoice. Tally keeps the whole path from the first visit to the payment, so you can see which pages and sources start the deals that close.
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01How they sell
- SubscriptionPer-seat or tiered plans billed monthly or annually; annual contracts often start on an invoice with net terms rather than a card at checkout.
- UsageA platform fee plus usage above an allowance, so an account's revenue moves each month and the biggest customers aren't always the earliest.
- FreemiumA self-serve tier brings in teams who later move to a sales-assisted plan, the upgrade landing as a new invoice for the same customer.
02Payments it reads
- StripeCheckout for self-serve plans and Stripe Invoicing for annual contracts with net terms; both are read, with renewals and refunds.
- PaddleUsed as merchant of record by companies selling to businesses in many countries, so tax on cross-border invoices is handled; transactions and adjustments are read.
What Tally can't read
- Contracts paid by bank wire against a PDF invoice, outside Stripe or Paddle, aren't read.
- Purchases through a cloud marketplace are billed by the cloud provider rather than your account, so Tally never sees them.
- Pipeline stages, call notes and deal values in your CRM aren't read; here, only payments are revenue.
- Tally doesn't name the company behind an anonymous visit; a visitor becomes a known buyer only through a payment or an identify call.
03Where buyers come from
- Review directoriesBuyers building a shortlist read reviews on G2 or Capterra and click through; the referrer and its revenue show whether a listing earns its upkeep.
- LinkedInPosts by your team and your customers reach people in the role you sell to; they tend to return later by search or a typed address, so the first visit matters as much as the credited one.
- WebinarsRegistrants identified at sign-up can link a later invoice by email, which is how a webinar's deals get counted at all.
- SearchProblem-led and comparison queries bring people early in their research, so expect several visits before a demo request.
- Partner integration listingsA listing in a partner's integration directory sends teams who already use that partner and are ready to try.
04What Tally answers
How long do companies take from first visit to first payment?
Path to purchase gives the median days and visits between a buyer's first visit and their first payment, with a histogram of the spread. If self-serve plans and annual deals take very different times, the histogram shows it.
Path to purchaseWhich pages lead to a demo request?
Mark the demo button as a goal and build a funnel from pricing to the demo form; the goals view gives each step's completions, converting visitors and the revenue of visitors who finished it.
Goals and funnelsDid the webinar bring the annual contract we closed last month?
The contract's receipt shows the method that linked it, such as an email match with the webinar sign-up, its confidence and the visits before it. If nothing linked it, it says unlinked rather than handing the webinar the credit.
ReceiptsWhich source brings the accounts that expand?
Lifetime value by first source totals every invoice an account has paid, upgrades and renewals included, so a channel whose customers start small and grow is ranked by what they became.
Lifetime valueIs a review-site listing worth what we pay to be on it?
The referrer breakdown puts the revenue of the buyers each directory was credited with beside its visitors; set that against what the listing costs you. Buyers who saw the listing first but returned another way show in their journeys.
Sources with revenue
05Numbers worth watching
- Median time to buy
- The median time from first visit to first payment, the closest thing to a sales cycle measured from the buyer's side.
- Goal conversion
- The share of visitors who request a demo or start a trial, by source, which tells marketing what to send to sales.
- Lifetime value by first source
- Lifetime revenue per account by first source, the figure that settles whether an expensive channel pays off over a contract term.
- Coverage
- Hand-sold invoices can leave a share of revenue unlinked; keep an eye on it before comparing channels.
06An example
Path to purchase
Last 30 days · 105 of 124 new sales, the ones linked to a visitor
Median time to buy
3days
from their first visit
Median visits
3visits
the one they paid in included
Bought on the first visit
12%
13 of 105
Pages before buying
11
median pages viewed
Where buyers came from, and who closed the sale
105 new sales: where each buyer first came from, and the source credited with the sale.
50% of new sales were credited to the source that first brought the buyer in. Hover or focus a flow for its numbers.
- Googlecredited toGoogle26
- x.comcredited tox.com10
- Other (3 sources)credited toOther (3 sources)10
- Directcredited toOther (3 sources)9
- ChatGPTcredited toChatGPT9
- Other (3 sources)credited toNewsletter9
- Redditcredited toReddit8
- Googlecredited toNewsletter6
6 smaller flows in the table below.
Show the flows as a table
| Brought them in | Credited with the sale | New sales | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 26 | 25% | ||
| x.com | x.com | 10 | 10% |
| Other (3 sources) | Other (3 sources) | 10 | 10% |
| Direct | Other (3 sources) | 9 | 9% |
| ChatGPT | ChatGPT | 9 | 9% |
| Other (3 sources) | Newsletter | 9 | 9% |
| 8 | 8% | ||
| Newsletter | 6 | 6% | |
| Direct | 5 | 5% | |
| x.com | 5 | 5% | |
| 3 | 3% | ||
| Direct | 2 | 2% | |
| ChatGPT | 2 | 2% | |
| Other (3 sources) | ChatGPT | 1 | <1% |
Time from first visit to purchase
- 13Same visit: 13 sales (12%), bought in their first visit
- 13Same day: 13 sales (12%), a later visit, under 24 hours after the first
- 301–3 days: 30 sales (29%), 1 to 3 days after the first visit
- 194–7 days: 19 sales (18%), 4 to 7 days after the first visit
- 151–2 weeks: 15 sales (14%), 8 to 14 days after the first visit
- 102–4 weeks: 10 sales (10%), 15 to 28 days after the first visit
- 51–3 months: 5 sales (5%), 29 to 90 days after the first visit
- 03+ months: 0 sales (0%), 91 days or more after the first visit
Pages buyers saw before paying
Share of the 105 buyers who viewed each page before paying
- /pricing96%, 101 of 105 buyers
- /71%, 75 of 105 buyers
- /signup63%, 67 of 105 buyers
- /docs38%, 40 of 105 buyers
- /blog/stripe-fees26%, 28 of 105 buyers
- /compare21%, 23 of 105 buyers
- /changelog8%, 9 of 105 buyers
- /blog/launch-week5%, 6 of 105 buyers
Only new sales count here. Renewals and upgrades belong to the visit that won the subscription, so counting them would count that journey again.
07Setting up
- Any HTML sitePut the tag in the head of the marketing site, the docs and the sign-up pages, so research visits and the trial sign-up are counted together.
- StripeInvoices sent by sales link by email: call tally('identify', { email }) when a visitor fills the demo or trial form.
- Mark the demo button and the trial form with data-fast-goal, so each is a goal with its own conversion.
- Cookie mode keeps a buyer who researches over weeks as one returning visitor; in the EU and UK pair it with your consent banner, or use consent-first and call tally('consent', true) when they accept.
08Questions
Do annual contracts paid by invoice count as revenue?
When the invoice is issued and paid in Stripe or Paddle, yes, in US dollars without tax at that day's ECB rate. An invoice paid by wire outside them isn't read at all.
Several people from one company visited. Who gets the credit?
The visitor whose browser or email is linked to the payment, at their last visit that didn't come direct. Colleagues' visits aren't merged into theirs: Tally doesn't group visitors by company.
Can sales see the source of a new customer as soon as they pay?
Yes. A sale alert to Slack, email or a webhook carries the credited source once the payment links, usually seconds after the payment.