I can't speak for all companies, but many SaaS companies know that its hard for customers to see value from their product until you have some meaningful content in their system - data, users, etc. They could put you into an empty state product, but their own data may very well show that there's a much higher bounce/churn rate or lower conversion rate because its hard for customers to see value vs. when they provide the demo first and then provision access.

I think you'll find some of the MRR sales & customer-success related metrics also cross over into the ARR world: Sales metrics: - Length of sales cycle (# of days at each sales stage) - # leads / week - # of attempted calls / week - # of completed calls/demos / week - # of deals closed / week - # of lost deals / week - Close rate - Customer acquisition cost Customer success metrics: - Renewal rate - Upsell rate & value - Utilization rate - Lifetime value - NPS