Industry surveyPartnerStack, 2026

63% of B2B SaaS companies say affiliate partners help close active deals faster

Channel mix & planning

63%

of surveyed B2B SaaS leaders say partners play a significant role in accelerating deal closures

Reader Note:: Survey of 100 senior leaders at B2B SaaS companies ($50M+), run in summer 2025 by PartnerStack, which sells partner-program software, with Wynter. This is the share saying partners speed up active sales cycles, meaning deals already in progress. The report says this rises to 86% at companies with 1,001–5,000 employees, but that group is only 14% of respondents. This question is about the role partners play. It is separate from the 48% who say alignment between partnerships and other GTM teams shortens sales cycles. Deal speed was not measured.
Evidence:: Self-reported behaviour
Vendor interest:: High — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: Survey of 100 senior B2B SaaS leaders, including marketing executives, partnerships professionals, and revenue leaders; sampling method not clearly disclosed.

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A rough sense of size and direction, and deciding what to look at first.

Not for

Exact numbers, or saying that one thing caused another.
This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
The source never says how this number was measured.
This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

Paid media overtook martech as the largest slice of the marketing budget between 2018 and 2025, rising from 23.2% to 30.6% while martech fell from 29.2% to 22.4%

Change in marketing budget allocation by resource, 2018 to 2025
Resource	Change 2018 to 2025 (percentage points)
Paid media	7.4
Labor	-2.6
Agencies	-2.3
Martech	-6.8

33.8%

of US Fashion site visits now come from paid channels (Search + Social + Display), overtaking Direct traffic's 27.8% share for the first time in three years (Jul 2023–Jul 2026).

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Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

53.9% of US marketing leaders say marketing keeps influencing a customer for a year or longer, though the most common single answer is several months at 24.4% and the report's median is six months

Marketing Performance: Perceived marketing influence duration on customers, as reported by US CMOs in 2026
Duration	Percent (%)
An hour	0.6%
12 hours	0.6%
A day	1.3%
A week	2.6%
A month	6.4%
Several months	24.4%
6 months	10.3%
1 year	21.8%
2 years	18.6%
5 years	9%
7 years	0%
10 years or more	4.5%

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9.6%

of overall budget and company revenues go to marketing on average (2026 survey of US companies)

SEO, social, email, retail media and influencer all rank higher on impact than on the budget they receive

Marketing budgets ranged from 5.8% to 9.7% of company revenue across industries in 2025, with consumer products highest and IT and business services lowest

Marketing budget as a percent of total revenue by industry, 2025
Industry	2025 (%)
Consumer products	9.7%
Manufacturing	9.5%
Pharma	9%
Media	8%
Insurance	7.5%
Financial services	7.2%
Retail	7.1%
Tech services and products companies with over $250M revenue	7.1%
Travel and hospitality	6.7%
Healthcare	5.9%
IT and business services	5.8%

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63% of B2B SaaS companies say affiliate partners help close active deals faster

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