A Look Back at How COVID-19 Impacted Businesses in Q2 Since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic on March 11, businesses have had to reckon with its economic impact for over a full quarter. For the last several months, we've been publishing weekly cuts of data on core performance metrics, to provide business owners with useful benchmarks as they adapted to circumstances that were changing by the day. Now that businesses have closed the books on Q2, we wanted to take a step back and assess where our customers are, four months later. How does the state of business compare today to where it was in March? How have teams changed their behavior to adapt to the new economic climate? What's worked, and what hasn't? And what changes are here to stay? This retrospective takes a deep dive into buyer interest, marketing and sales outreach, and sales outcomes (spoiler alert: there's a lot of engaged prospects out there, but sales teams have work to do in capturing that interest). We examine how different industries, regions, and company sizes have been impacted by COVID-19, and offer suggestions for investments that make sense right now. HubSpot can't make predictions about what will happen, and nobody knows what the future looks like. But we hope this report from our customer base provides a helpful reference as businesses enter the next quarter, and that the insights are useful to you in some way. To explore the accompanying dataset on your own, you can...

Deals Closed Rise Significantly as May Comes to an End For the last few months, businesses around the world have had to rapidly adapt to the impact of COVID-19. In a time where it seems like things change every day, it can be difficult to gauge whether the challenges your business is facing are widespread. That's why we're publishing week-over-week benchmark data for core business metrics like website traffic, email send and open rates, sales engagements, close rates, and more. These core metrics are split by region, company size, and industry cuts, so you can explore data for companies most similar to yours. You can find the data, and more context on the dataset and sources, here. Because the data is aggregated from our customer base, please keep in mind that individual businesses, including HubSpot's, may differ based on their own markets, customer base, industry, geography, stage, and/or other factors. These insights are refreshed every Thursday morning ET, and will be accompanied by this short writeup. You can find past writeups using this timeline. We hope to establish useful benchmarks to measure your business against, and serve as an early indicator of when short- or long-term adjustments may be needed in your strategy. What We're Seeing Here are the three key takeaways from the most recent week's data: 1. Deals closed rise significantly as May comes to an end. Deal creation remains flat with NORTHAM experiencing a small setback. Last week, we were deeply concerned that the positive...

Deal Pipelines Gain Positive Momentum in Mid-May For the last few months, businesses around the world have had to rapidly adapt to the impact of COVID-19. In a time where it seems like things change every day, it can be difficult to gauge whether the challenges your business is facing are widespread. That's why we're publishing week-over-week benchmark data for core business metrics like website traffic, email send and open rates, sales engagements, close rates, and more. These core metrics are split by region, company size, and industry cuts, so you can explore data for companies most similar to yours. You can find the data, and more context on the dataset and sources, here. Because the data is aggregated from our customer base, please keep in mind that individual businesses, including HubSpot's, may differ based on their own markets, customer base, industry, geography, stage, and/or other factors. These insights are refreshed every Thursday morning ET, and will be accompanied by this short writeup. You can find past writeups using this timeline. We hope to establish useful benchmarks to measure your business against, and serve as an early indicator of when short- or long-term adjustments may be needed in your strategy. What We're Seeing Here are the three key takeaways from the most recent week's data: 1. Deals created and closed gain positive momentum as some industries and countries show encouraging performance towards mid-May. After a 6% increase during the week of May 4, global deals created rose...

Deal Pipelines Trending Upward in May’s Second Week For the last few months, businesses around the world have had to rapidly adapt to the impact of COVID-19. In a time where it seems like things change every day, it can be difficult to gauge whether the challenges your business is facing are widespread. That's why we're publishing week-over-week benchmark data for core business metrics like website traffic, email send and open rates, sales engagements, close rates and more. These core metrics are split by region, company size, and industry cuts so you can explore on your own to see data for companies most similar to your own. You can find the data, and more context on the dataset and sources, here. Because the data is aggregated from our customer base, please keep in mind that individual businesses, including HubSpot's, may differ based on their own markets, customer base, industry, geography, stage, and/or other factors. These insights are refreshed every Thursday morning ET, and will be accompanied by this short writeup. You can find past writeups using this timeline.We hope to establish useful benchmarks to measure your business against, and serve as an early indicator of when short- or long-term adjustments may be needed in your strategy. What We're Seeing Here are the three key takeaways from the most recent week's data: 1. New deal creation is trending positively week-over-week, with some countries and industries trending above global averages. The volume of new deals created globally increased 6% week-over-week....

4 Pivots Companies Are Making in Light of COVID-19 When HubSpot surveyed a handful of business leaders within our customer base, we discovered that most expect to see "somewhat slower" or "much slower" growth in the next year as a result of the global pandemic and economic climate. Data from our more-than 70,000 global customer base supports business slowdown predictions. In the first few weeks of the crisis, we saw that while sales outreach has increased, response rates and deal volume dropped to new lows. Although sales email engagement has rebounded greatly to new highs in recent days, the large and noticeable dip demonstrates the uncertainty and evolving metrics that brands are seeing right now.  Both Sales and Marketing metrics seem to be changing rapidly. For example, overall, HubSpot researchers found that the ratio of marketing email engagements to open rates has improved since around the start of the crisis. However, this rate did see its own dips in early April, as seen in the chart below,  Our data also revealed that customers are researching brands more heavily online and initiating more online interactions with businesses today than they were a year ago. Between February and March, this online behavior resulted in average monthly website traffic increasing by 13%. This interest in researching online brands might also be fueling an increase in customer-initiated conversations with sales reps. For a timeline of benchmark data updates and changes, click here to keep up with...

Deal Creation Bounces Back After Early April Lows The economic impact of COVID-19 is undeniable. Businesses all across the globe are learning how to adapt to these new circumstances and we're all learning how to operate in a "new normal" that's constantly changing. That's why we'll be publishing week-over-week trend data for core business metrics like website traffic, email send and open rates, sales engagements, close rates and more. We hope to establish useful benchmarks to measure your business against, and serve as an early indicator of when short- or long-term adjustments may be needed in your strategy. While this post focuses on the highlights of last week, you can explore all the data we're publishing here. About the Data These insights are based on aggregated data from over 70,000 HubSpot customers globally. The dataset includes weekly trend data for core business metrics in 2020, focusing on changes occurring during and after March 2020.* The data from HubSpot's customer base reflects benchmarks for companies that have invested in an online presence and use inbound as a key part of their growth strategy. This data *The spread of COVID-19 has had a different timeline in different regions, so we are using the World Health Organization's declaration of a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 as our "official" start date. NOTE: Because the data is aggregated from HubSpot customers' businesses, please keep in mind that individual businesses, including HubSpot's, may differ based on their own markets, customer...

Deal Volume and Sales Response Rates Drop to New Lows The economic impact of COVID-19 is undeniable. Businesses all across the globe are learning how to adapt to these new circumstances. We’re all learning how to operate in a “new normal” that’s constantly changing. That’s why from now until the end of June, we will be publishing week-over-week trend data for core business metrics including such as website traffic, email send and open rates, sales engagements, close rates and more. We plan to add additional cuts, like channel and region, over time. This week, we’ve added an additional dimension to our dataset -- company size. You can explore all the data we’re publishing here. About the Data These insights are based on aggregated data from over 70,000 HubSpot customers globally. The dataset includes weekly trend data for core business metrics in 2020, focusing on changes occurring during and after March 2020.* Charts in this post are measured against a  benchmark on the y-axis. The benchmark for each metric was calculated by taking weekly averages from January 20, 2020 through March 9, 2020.  The data from HubSpot’s customer base reflects benchmarks for companies that have invested in an online presence and use inbound as a key part of their growth strategy. *The spread of COVID-19 has had a different timeline in different regions, so we are using the World Health Organization's declaration of a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 as our “official” start date. NOTE:...