Getting Leads: acquisition-economics benchmark card

What the Getting Leads tab shows

Getting Leads is one of the four tabs inside the Sales & Marketing benchmark deck. It answers a single question: what does it cost you to bring work in the door, and how does that compare to operators like you? Four numbers make up the card, always in this order:

1. Marketing % of Revenue, the share of revenue you spend on marketing.
2. Cost per Job, what it costs you to win one job.
3. Return on Marketing $, revenue earned for every marketing dollar.
4. Referral Share, the share of your leads that come from referrals.

Verinode does not run your marketing or place your ads. It reads the marketing spend already sitting in your normalized profit and loss statement and the lead sources already logged in your pipeline, holds each figure up against anonymized operators like you (or a published industry figure when a peer cohort has not formed yet), and lays the comparison out plainly. Because Verinode is an independent data trust and never sells operator data to carriers, that peer comparison is one carriers can't buy their way into and operators can trust. You decide what, if anything, to change about your marketing.

Where to find it

Open Sales & Marketing from the sidebar under Revenue, at iq.verinode.ai/growth. The home page opens with a hero panel (Average Job Value, Close Rate, Cost / Job, Lead Volume), a Take Action row, a Pipeline tile once leads exist, and an Explore row of metric tiles at the bottom. See the Sales & Marketing overview for the full page tour and the Explore tiles article for what each home-page tile shows on its own.

Three of the Explore tiles open straight onto Getting Leads:

• Marketing % of Revenue
• Cost / Job
• Return on Marketing $
• Referral Share
• Speed to Lead also opens onto this tab, since it is the pace half of the same lead funnel Getting Leads covers the cost of, even though its own number is not one of the four cards on this tab (Speed to Lead reads from your own logged lead responses, not the peer benchmark catalog).

Tap any of those tiles and the deck pops open as a glass overlay on top of the home page, animating out from the point you tapped, landed directly on the Getting Leads tab. A capsule tab bar across the top of the deck reads Findings · Pipeline · Getting Leads · Winning the Work, with Getting Leads underlined in teal. Tap any other tab, swipe, or use the arrow keys to move between them without closing the deck. Click outside the card or press Escape to close it and return to the home page underneath.

The Add Data button in the page header (top right, next to the section title) opens the same capture panel used across Verinode, upload, photo, paste, voice, or forward an email, so your marketing spend and lead data can flow in without leaving the page.

The four metrics, one by one

Each metric renders as a block: a label and a plain-language caption on the left, a headline number on the right, and a peer comparison bar underneath once there is anything to compare against. Blocks are separated by a hairline rule, not a card border.

1. Marketing % of Revenue

Caption: "Share of revenue you spend on marketing."

This reads the marketing line items in your latest normalized profit and loss period, digital advertising, broker or referral fees, and association dues, as a percentage of that same period's revenue. It uses your most recent usable P&L period rather than an average across periods, so it reflects what you are spending right now, not a stale blend.

There is no inherently good or bad direction on this one. Spending more on marketing than the peer median is not automatically wasteful, and spending less is not automatically disciplined, it depends on what the other three numbers on this tab say about the return you're getting for it. That is why this metric's comparison dot is always neutral copper rather than green or red: Verinode will not color-code a number that has no honest "better" direction on its own.

Your peer comparison for this one narrows by the size of your business and your state once both are on your company profile (Settings, Company Profile). Until then it compares you against the national cohort.

2. Cost per Job

Caption: "What it costs you to win one job."

Your annualized marketing spend divided by the number of jobs you billed in the trailing year. Lower is better here, winning jobs for less marketing spend is the win, so the comparison dot goes green when you are at or below the peer median and red when you are above it.

3. Return on Marketing $

Caption: "Revenue earned for every marketing dollar."

The flip side of Marketing % of Revenue: how much revenue comes back for every dollar you put into marketing. It is derived directly from your marketing percentage, so the two numbers always move together, spend a smaller share of revenue on marketing and this figure rises, spend a larger share and it falls. It shows as a dollar figure (for example $4.25), not a multiple or a percentage. Higher is better, so the dot goes green when you're at or above the peer median.

4. Referral Share

Caption: "Share of leads that come from referrals."

The share of your logged leads that came in as a referral or a repeat customer, rather than a paid or organic channel. Higher is better, referral and repeat work is typically the cheapest lead you get, so the dot goes green when you are at or above the peer median.

Reading the headline number

Each metric leads with one number, sourced in this order of preference:

1. Your own value, once Verinode has it. The caption underneath reads "Your value."
2. The peer median, when your own number is not yet available. The caption reads "Peer median," and once Verinode can report how many operators back it, the count follows after a dot, for example "Peer median · 24 operators."
3. A published industry figure, when no peer cohort has formed yet either. The caption reads "Typical · industry." When this is the number carrying the headline, the same figure repeats a second time in a smaller note underneath the bar, "Typical (industry): $X", so it's unmistakable that this is a reference number, not your own or the network's.
4. Nothing at all yet. Both the headline number and its caption read "Warming up," and no comparison bar draws underneath.

Dollar figures in the headline are precise, for example $1,240, not rounded to the nearest thousand.

The peer comparison bar

Underneath the headline, once there is a peer distribution or your own value to show, a thin horizontal bar appears. It carries:

• A shaded band running from the 25th to the 75th percentile (P25 to P75), the "normal middle" of the peer market for that metric.
• A median tick at the center of the band.
• Your own value as a colored dot, positioned against the band, once you have one.

Below the bar, three labels read P25, Median, and P75, each with a compact dollar or percent figure (for example "$1.2k" or "42%", rounded shorter than the precise headline number above). This is the same distribution-and-dot mechanic used everywhere benchmarks appear in Verinode; the full explanation of how to read percentiles, the middle-half band, and the direction color lives in how to read a benchmark and the Benchmarks data room.

Cohort-forming and empty states

If none of the four metrics on this tab have a peer figure yet, a line appears above the metric list: "The peer cohort is still forming for these metrics. Each one fills in once enough operators like you contribute." This is not a broken tab, it means the anonymized peer group behind Getting Leads has not cleared Verinode's sample threshold yet for any of these four numbers.

The intro sentence above the metric list always reads: "What it costs you to bring in work, compared to operators like you. Your own numbers appear as your marketing spend and lead sources flow in."

A single metric can be in any state independent of its siblings, one might show your own value against a full peer distribution while another sits at "Warming up" with nothing at all. Nothing on this tab is ever invented or estimated to fill a gap; a metric with no data honestly says so.

Best-practice example

Say Cost per Job reads $1,240 as "Your value," with a red dot sitting past P75 on the comparison bar, footed "Peer median · 18 operators" at $860. Marketing % of Revenue reads 9.2%, a touch above the peer median of 7.5%, with a neutral copper dot (no direction here). Return on Marketing $ reads $10.87, below the peer median of $13.33, red, the two numbers moving together as expected: spend a heavier share on marketing and you get less back per dollar. Referral Share reads 12%, below a peer median of 22%, red. Read together, the story isn't "marketing is too expensive," it's that too little of the marketing dollar is landing as referral-quality leads, worth a look at which channels you're actually spending on before cutting the budget outright. Open the decision workspace from any related decision card on the Findings tab of this same deck to work the specifics.

Data sources