How to Calculate Your Net Promoter Score

• Promoters are 9s and 10s
• Passives are 7s and 8s
• Detractors are anything 6 and below

Subtract the percentage who rated you 6 or below from the percentage of customers who rated you 9 or 10, and that’s your NPS. The result lands somewhere between -100 (every customer is a Detractor) and +100 (every customer is a Promoter). Most B2B companies sit between 0 and 50, though benchmarks vary widely by industry.

Fred Reichheld introduced the metric in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article, calling it the single most reliable indicator of company growth. It’s still the most widely tracked customer loyalty metric in B2B.

What Counts as a Good NPS?

A good Net Promoter Score depends on your industry and your peer set. The global average across industries sits around 32, with top-quartile companies landing at 72 or higher (SurveyMonkey benchmark data). That global average hides a lot of variation.

B2B companies typically run lower than B2C. A 2025 industry report puts median B2C NPS at 49 and median B2B at 38. That 11-point gap reflects the difficulty of consistent delivery across complex B2B relationships, where a single customer is really five stakeholders with different priorities. It’s not weaker performance on your end.

The number that matters most is whether your score is climbing against your own past benchmark. A B2B manufacturer holding a 35 NPS with a clear upward trend is in better shape than a SaaS company sitting flat on a 50.

Want more detail on industry-specific benchmarks? See our deep dive on what counts as a good NPS. Or run the math yourself with our NPS Calculator.

Where NPS Falls Short

The 0-to-10 scale misses the nuance of the customer experience. A customer who’s mildly disappointed ends up in the same category as one who’s actively telling colleagues to avoid you. In your data, this looks like the same data point, but it’s not.

The standard formula also treats every customer’s score as equal, but in B2B, a handful of accounts can drive half your revenue. We weight responses by various customer segments so your NPS truly maps to what’s most important to your goals.

The question itself isn’t always a fit either. If you sell specialty industrial equipment, asking a procurement officer whether they’d “recommend you to a friend” sounds off, because procurement officers aren’t recommending vendors to colleagues. They’re vetting them for their next plant build. We rework the question wording when it makes sense for your buyer.

For a worked example of NPS being misused for the wrong touchpoint, see our breakdown of Lowe’s NPS delivery survey.

Anonymous NPS Surveys Get More Honest Answers

The same customer base will give you a measurably different NPS depending on whether the survey is anonymous. We’ve documented this directly.

In one case, a B2B client moved from a non-anonymous internal survey to an anonymous third-party survey. Their NPS dropped 15 points, from +4 to -11. Respondents who specifically opted for anonymity produced an NPS of -22. Response rates went up 5 percent at the same time.

That gap was real customer sentiment surfacing for the first time. The +4 was politeness. The -11 was the truth, and the truth pointed leadership straight at operational issues nobody internally had been willing to flag.

This effect is sharpest in B2B, where customer lists are small and account relationships are personal. Customers worry about straining the relationship or triggering an awkward sales follow-up call. A third-party survey with clearly stated anonymity protocols removes both concerns, and the data finally reflects what your customers actually think.

We build anonymity into every NPS program where the client wants it, and we explain to respondents up front how their identity is handled.