The Substribe Guide to B2B Subscription Performance
Benchmarks, how to measure them from your ARR data, and why direction of travel is more important than a metric. How alignment amplifies, but only if the whole system is genuinely centred…
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GRR vs NRR: what’s the difference, and which matters more?
GRR measures what you keep from existing customers. NRR adds expansion on top. GRR matters more, and the order matters: protect the base before you grow it.
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What GRR and NRR should a B2B media or intelligence company target?
An established B2B media or intelligence company should target GRR of 90%+ and NRR above 100%. Substribe’s benchmark medians are 88% GRR and 106% NRR. But the right target follows maturity and strategy, not a sector table.
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What is a good NRR for a B2B data or subscription business?
For an established B2B data or subscription business, NRR above 100% is strong. Substribe’s benchmark research puts the median at 106%. What’s driving it matters more than the number.
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What is a good gross retention rate for a B2B information business?
For an established B2B information business, GRR of 90% or above is strong, 80-90% signals pressure, below 80% is a problem anywhere. Substribe’s benchmark research puts the median at 88%.
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You Got Claude, But Are You All Right?
Why AI can’t make the customer discovery breakthrough for you, and what a Star Wars trench run taught Andy Burden about trusting 28 years of pattern recognition.
Aspermont: from seat pricing to enterprise decision infrastructure
Aspermont is shifting from multi-brand, seat-based subscriptions to enterprise decision infrastructure. A Substribe discovery sprint found that a single subscription seat already reaches 5.4 internal functions on average, and that finding led Aspermont’s June 2026 ASX update and its move to enterprise agreements.
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A NRR growth mandate
A PE-backed B2B information business had been through a pricing consultancy exercise under its first owner, done to prime the business for sale. By the time it changed hands to a second…
Financial Services Forum: connecting positioning, packaging and pricing to audience needs
At Incisive Media, Andy Burden worked on the Financial Services Forum – reshaping its pricing strategy by connecting positioning, packaging and pricing directly to what the audience actually needed. Pricing hadn’t been…
One leader, three companies: why the same person keeps calling Substribe back in
One relationship, four brands, three companies. This isn’t a Substribe origin story about one lucky client – it’s a pattern worth naming, because it says more about how discovery-led work earns trust…
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Computing (Delta): testing a new product at Incisive Media
Before Substribe, Andy Burden worked with Computing, one of Incisive Media’s technology titles, to test Delta – a new market-intelligence product. Delta needed to prove itself with a new audience before Computing…
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Real Deals Media: finding the framework already inside the subscription
Real Deals Media’s CEO called Substribe in – the latest chapter in a relationship that goes back years. He has brought Andy Burden in at every company he’s led: Computing at Incisive…
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PEI Group: from events to membership engine
How a Substribe discovery sprint created the blueprint for a recurring revenue model Triple Revenue. Quadruple EBITDA. Moved to a flagship buyout fund. PEI has a long history of relationships with the…
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AgriConnect: Long Term Impact Of Customer Discovery
When Farmers Guardian was acquired in 2021, it needed a reboot. Investing time in understanding your customers’ situation compounds growth. AgriConnect recently told ‘A Media Operator’ that the business is “on course…
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NRR may stunt your growth
The £20-30M business intelligence company where high growth was hiding a crisis (this Substribe case study is on a NDA). Executive Summary The Impact: Improvement in revenue stability (GRR: 71% → 91%)…
Seat based selling is killing your value
Your customers don’t believe the value of a subscription depends on the number of seats they use. After years of speaking with people who buy information for their organisations, here’s what I…
10 Home Truths about B2B Subscriptions and Memberships
A home truth is an uncomfortable fact someone needed to hear but wasn’t being told. Not an opinion. Not a perspective. A thing that is true, that you may have been avoiding,…
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Build your solution around a decision. Or someone else’s AI will.
Someone told me recently that B2B information businesses need to work on their visibility problem. More brand. Make sure you’re seen. I reckon you can be wearing high-vis vests holding signs saying…
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Trusted Networks: creating must-have b2b insights
When data is no longer asymmetrical enough to be valued in its own right, and artificial intelligence is in every nook and corner, what is the edge you promise to create for…
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Why Your Happiest Customers Might Be About to Leave
The Churn Signal NPS And Satisfaction Scores Fail To Detect. You may or may not use customer sentiment to keep an eye on the road ahead and what might be lurking around…
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What If Europe Fractures – And Your B2B Intelligence Is Not Ready?
How rising US versus EU tensions spelled out clearly in the US ‘2025 National Security Strategy,’ create market moving scenarios – and what global B2B information buyers and vendors should do about…
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Why Expensive Pricing Strategy Divided A Company
And What To Do To Avoid It Happening To You. Your leadership team has repositioned your value proposition to the market. You’ve moved from promising “operational efficiency” to “strategic competitive advantage.” The…
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Why Pricing Revolutions Fail (And What Actually Works)
You bring in the expensive pricing consultants. The analysis looks bulletproof. Market data. Competitive benchmarking. Willingness-to-pay studies. The PowerPoint deck gets board approval. Six months later? Your renewal rates are soft. Sales…
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Why New Customer Wins Create Churn Problems
Do strong retention rates hide your biggest growth problem? “Our retention rates for mature accounts is good. When we reach the three year mark they’re keepers. It’s the new customers that are…
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Real Interviews First, AI Second
Why the order matters when you mix real customer conversations with AI research. AI research tools promise to replace the customer interview. They can’t do the job properly, and it’s worth being…
Subscription growing pains
Sarah returned back to the office from her well deserved holiday. She stared at the dashboard. Revenue up 32% year-over-year. Her team was crushing it. So why did her stomach feel like…
The four phases of B2B subscription success
B2B subscription businesses live or die by the quality of their lifecycle management. The Substribe Customer Lifecycle Framework maps the entire journey into four phases with clear metrics. Like all of the…
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The Value Trap of Legacy Subscription Metrics
Value and Volume Renewal Rates are the markers of legacy B2B subscription metrics. Substribe argues they risk creating a smoke screen around performance issues, holding back long term growth and risking revenue.…
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Three Elements To Transform Your Subscription Business
The True Cost of a disconnected System Sustaining growth in B2B subscriptions is about balance. My premise is there are three interconnected elements of B2B subscriptions: Results | Solution | Team The…
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The Value Gap: act now before you struggle to grow
The Hidden Challenge in Every B2B solution It is easy to overlook the single biggest challenge facing B2B subscription brands. The reason why it is so hard to find useful examples for…
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Regulatory Warfare: B2B Information Companies as Strategic Allies
“Regulatory warfare” is the defining challenge today, say Substribe. And B2B information providers can be strategic allies, equipping clients with the tools to navigate, anticipate, and profit from this new reality. Success…
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The Science Behind The Art: High Value B2B Subscriptions
Every successful B2B subscription business reaches a critical moment of truth. Despite strong growth, rising sales, and healthy acquisition numbers, something feels off. The warning signs are subtle at first: a few…
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Transforming Subscription Businesses: A Systems Thinking Approach
Does subscription acumen permeate your organisation? From your board, to your SLT and into your teams? This article is about the Substribe approach to transforming your subscription brand. The Challenge: Bridging Technical…
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Do your commercial teams fight over crumbs?
Building High Performance Teams in Premium B2B Subscription Settings is about the team not the individual. It’s about using metrics that matter, not “me-tricks” to flatter. I don’t care how many leads…
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Better Performance Today. Stronger Growth Tomorrow.
High performing subscription brands get forensic about their best customers to inject growth into the engine. They explore success patterns across teams, to build momentum, progress solutions, and compound value. For their…
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The rise of the marketing rainmaker
When it comes to subscriptions, we all want the same thing – the holy grail of predictable, growing recurring revenue. There are different agendas, from investors, to boards, to leadership to teams,…
