Explore tiles: the Sales & Marketing metric catalog

What the Explore row is

Every section in Verinode ends its home page with an Explore row: a horizontal strip of tiles that let you jump straight into a benchmark instead of hunting through a menu. On Sales & Marketing, that row holds six benchmark metrics covering the two halves of your growth engine, what it costs to get a lead and how well you turn leads into jobs, plus a seventh tile, Speed to Lead, built from your own logged lead activity rather than the benchmark catalog. This article covers the six benchmark metrics: what each one measures, what the tile shows, and which tab of the deck it opens when you tap it.

Verinode does not create these numbers from nothing. It reads the marketing spend, leads, and jobs already flowing into your account, computes your own figure once you have enough of it, and lines it up against operators like you so you can see where you stand. You decide what to do with the gap. Verinode never makes that call for you.

Where to find it

Open Sales & Marketing from the sidebar, under the Revenue group, at /growth. Scroll past the hero panel and the Take Action row to the Explore row near the bottom of the page. It is a horizontal scroll of tiles, drag or use the arrows to see all of them.

Each tile in the row is built on the same tile shape used across the platform: a small uppercase label at the top, a big number in the middle, a short caption underneath, and (once a peer comparison exists) a colored delta line showing how you compare. Tap any tile and Verinode opens the swipeable card deck for the section, landing on the tab that matches that tile's cluster.

The six benchmark metrics

1. Average Job Value

What it measures. What the average job sells for, once it closes. This is your deal-size number, the anchor most of your revenue math runs from.

What the tile shows. A dollar figure, rounded to the nearest whole dollar (for example "$8,450"). The caption underneath reads "What the average job sells for."

Which tab it opens. Winning the Work, the tab covering conversion and deal value.

2. Close Rate

What it measures. How many of your leads turn into actual jobs. This is the conversion half of the funnel, the number that tells you whether the leads coming in are actually landing.

What the tile shows. A percentage, to one decimal place (for example "34.2%"). The caption reads "How many leads turn into jobs."

Which tab it opens. Winning the Work.

3. Marketing % of Revenue

What it measures. The share of your revenue you are spending on marketing. There is no universal "right" direction here, spending more can be a growth investment or a sign of inefficiency depending on what it is buying you, so this metric has no good/bad coloring the way the others do. It is a comparison point, not a score.

What the tile shows. A percentage, to one decimal place. The caption reads "Share of revenue you spend on marketing."

Which tab it opens. Getting Leads, the tab covering acquisition economics.

4. Cost per Job

What it measures. What it costs you, in marketing spend, to win one job. Lower is better here, a rising cost per job with a flat close rate is usually the first sign that a lead source or campaign has stopped pulling its weight.

What the tile shows. A dollar figure, rounded to the nearest whole dollar. The caption reads "What it costs you to win one job."

Which tab it opens. Getting Leads.

5. Return on Marketing $

What it measures. Revenue earned for every marketing dollar spent, a return-on-ad-spend style ratio. Unlike the other dollar metrics on the row, this one is shown as a ratio (for example "$4.25"), read as "$4.25 in revenue for every $1 spent."

What the tile shows. A ratio formatted as a dollar figure to two decimal places. The caption reads "Revenue earned for every marketing dollar."

Which tab it opens. Getting Leads.

6. Referral Share

What it measures. The share of your leads that come in through referrals rather than paid channels, cold outreach, or other sources. A strong referral share is usually a sign of reputation doing real acquisition work for you at close to zero marginal cost.

What the tile shows. A percentage, to one decimal place. The caption reads "Share of leads that come from referrals."

Which tab it opens. Getting Leads.

How the two clusters split

The six metrics sit in two clusters, and the cluster is what decides which deck tab a tile opens on:

• Getting Leads (Marketing % of Revenue, Cost per Job, Return on Marketing $, Referral Share): the acquisition side, what it costs you to bring in work.
• Winning the Work (Average Job Value, Close Rate): the conversion side, how often you win the work and what it sells for once you do.

Inside each deck tab, every metric in that cluster is listed as its own block: the metric's label and caption on the left, its headline value and source (your own value, a peer median, or an industry-typical figure) on the right. Below the number, where a peer distribution exists, a quartile bar shows where the cohort's 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile sit, with a dot marking your own value against that spread when you have one. A short intro line at the top of each tab explains the cluster in plain language and, if no peer cohort has formed yet for any metric in that cluster, an honest note that "The peer cohort is still forming for these metrics" appears instead of a number.

The deck also carries two tabs outside the metric catalog:

• Findings, the section's decision feed, the same findings grid used across every section.
• Pipeline, an at-a-glance summary of every lead you have captured, by stage (New, Quoted, Won, Lost), with a button through to the full working list at /growth/leads.

Reading the "sub" line under each tile

Under the big number on every Explore tile, a short line tells you where that number came from:

• "Your number", your own value is populated. This is always shown first when it exists, Verinode never buries your real figure behind a peer median.
• "Peer median · [n] operators", no value of your own yet, so the tile is showing the median across operators like you, sized to a cohort large enough to be meaningful.
• "Industry typical", neither your own value nor a peer median exists yet, so Verinode falls back to a published industry reference figure.

Once you have your own value AND a peer comparison exists, some tiles also carry a peer delta line: a short colored phrase showing how your number compares to the cohort, in green when you are ahead by the direction that matters for that metric, in red when you are behind, and neutral where the metric (like Marketing % of Revenue) has no inherent good or bad direction.

Speed to Lead: the seventh tile

The Explore row carries one more tile that is not part of the six-metric benchmark catalog: Speed to Lead. It is mined from your own logged lead responses, specifically the gap between when a lead comes in and when someone first responds to it, and shows as a median number of days. It sits in this row because it is the pace half of the same funnel the Pipeline tile tracks the volume of, and tapping it opens the Getting Leads tab as well. Until you have logged enough in-order lead responses to mine a pattern, the tile reads "Log lead responses to map your speed to lead" instead of a number.

Cold-start honesty

None of these six tiles ever show a synthetic "coming soon" placeholder. Verinode either has a real value to show, your own, a peer median, or an industry figure, or it leaves the tile out of the row. As your marketing spend, leads, and closed jobs flow in, more tiles populate with your own number, and as more operators like you contribute their own data, the peer comparisons sharpen from "industry typical" to an actual cohort median. Verinode never sells your data to carriers or anyone else. Every anonymized contribution you make to the peer cohort is what makes these benchmarks trustworthy for you to lean on.

Related articles

• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• Benchmarks overview
• The decision workspace
• Understanding your margin
• Clients and carriers
• Forwarding documents
• Connecting your data