What GRR and NRR should a B2B media or intelligence company target?

An established B2B media, data or intelligence company should target GRR of 90% or above and NRR above 100%. Substribe’s benchmark research across B2B information brands puts the medians at 88% GRR and 106% NRR. But a target borrowed from a benchmark is someone else’s number. The right target for your business follows from two things: how mature the base is, and what strategy you’re running. Both change over time, and the target should change with them.

Why most benchmark tables mislead.

Most articles on this topic give a table of ranges by sector and leave you to find your row. That framing encourages businesses to chase a number rather than understand their own. What actually determines your target is maturity and strategy, not a sector label.

Maturity. A young product, or a base that’s recently had pricing corrected, can run NRR well above 120% alongside a GRR still settling, and that’s fine. A mature business with an established base should expect GRR to hold at 90% or above, with NRR sitting at a level that reflects genuine expansion rather than first-year noise.

Strategy. A business pushing hard on land-and-expand, adding seats and products into every account, should target NRR meaningfully above 100%, provided GRR holds. A business running a defend-and-hold strategy, protecting a mature base rather than pushing expansion, can have a perfectly healthy target at 100 to 105% NRR. Neither is wrong. What’s wrong is applying one business’s target to the other’s strategy.

The universal floor doesn’t move. GRR below 80% is a problem in any context, any strategy, any maturity. The dividers worth knowing: 90% GRR and 100% NRR mark the line between a base under pressure and a base holding or growing.

Set your target with a quarterly discipline behind it. Product, pricing and customer facing teams review the evidence together, agree the next intervention, and execute before the next quarter closes. That rhythm, sustained over years, is what separates businesses that grow the base from businesses that chase the base.

The businesses at the top of these ranges did not get there by targeting the metric. They got there by knowing, account by account, why customers renew.

Metric definitions in this article follow the SaaS Metrics Standards Board standards for Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) and Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Version 1.0.

This article combines operator experience with AI-assisted retrieval from the Substribe B2B subscription model, built through years of research with cross-functional leaders across B2B information, data and subscription brands. The model is used with Substribe clients and is developed daily.

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Related reading: What is a good GRR for a B2B information business? · What is a good NRR for a B2B data business? · GRR vs NRR: which matters more?