Sales & Marketing: section overview

What this section is

Sales & Marketing is where Verinode reads how work comes in the door and what it costs you to win it: how big the average job is, how often a lead turns into a signed job, what you spend to land one, and how your lead pipeline is moving. Verinode does not run your marketing or chase your leads for you. It reads the leads, jobs, and financials you already have (or that flow in as you connect your tools), holds your own numbers up against operators like you, and surfaces where the sales-and-marketing math is working and where it is not. You decide what to change.

The section title in the sidebar and the page header reads Sales & Marketing. It lives at iq.verinode.ai/growth.

The home-plus-overlay-deck structure

Every section on Verinode is built the same way, and Sales & Marketing is no exception: a home view that is always on screen, and an overlay deck that slides in on top of it when you tap something.

• The home is the page you land on at /growth. It never unmounts. Rows stack top to bottom: the hero, Take Action, Pipeline (when you have leads), and Explore.
• The overlay deck opens when you tap a MetricTile in Explore, the Lead Pipeline tile, or a decision tile. It slides in above the home (the home is still there underneath, just covered), showing one of four tabs: Findings, Pipeline, Getting Leads, or Winning the Work. Tapping outside the open card, or pressing Escape, closes the deck and drops you back on the home exactly where you left it.

This is the same "tap a tile, deck opens over the home" pattern used across the platform, including Jobs and Clients & Carriers. Nothing here navigates you away from /growth, the deck is a card stack layered on the same page.

The header

Top of the page: the Sales & Marketing title with the section's nav icon, and a Send data button on the right. Send data opens the same capture modal used everywhere on the platform, forward an email, upload a file, or connect a tool, and Verinode routes whatever you send to the right place.

The hero

The hero is the single dominant number at the top of the home: Average Job Value. Above it, an eyebrow line names the metric and where the number is coming from:

• "Your average" once your own sold-job data has flowed in.
• Peer median once your own number is not yet available but a peer comparison exists.
• Industry typical when neither of the above exists yet but a published industry reference does.
• Just "Average Job Value" with no source line, and a plain dash for the number, when none of the three exist.

Beside the headline, a pill reads "N Decision(s) Ready" in Ember Red whenever the section has open decisions waiting for you. No pill shows when there are none.

Below the headline, a line of context: once at least one of the three growth numbers has a real peer comparison behind it, it reads "How you win work, benchmarked against operators like you." Until then it reads "How you win work. Your peer comparison fills in as more operators your size join."

Three secondary numbers sit to the right of the headline:

• Close Rate (percent), how many leads turn into jobs, with the same "Your average / Peer median / Industry typical / Warming up" source line underneath.
• Cost / Job (dollars), what it costs you to win one job, same source-line logic.
• Lead Volume (a plain count), your own lead count for the trailing period, labeled "This month" when a value exists or "Warming up" when it doesn't. This is the one hero number with no peer fallback: it is always your own count or nothing.

Every one of these follows the same rule: Verinode leads with your own number the moment it exists, falls back to the peer median, then to a published industry reference, and only shows "Warming up" when none of the three are available. It never shows a peer number before you have any cohort backing it, and it never fabricates a number that looks like yours before your data has actually arrived.

Take Action

This row is where Verinode tells you what to do about the sales-and-marketing math, not just what the math is. What appears here depends on where you are:

• The activation tile. The first time you open the section (or until you've engaged with the agent here), a copper "album cover" tile reads "Start here" with the headline "Talk to IQ." Tapping it opens the AI Agent panel on a Sales & Marketing-specific conversation, IQ introduces itself around what it watches on this side of the business (job value, marketing spend as a share of revenue, cost to land a job, return on every marketing dollar) and asks what's on your mind. Once you've had a conversation here, or tapped through it, the tile retires and does not come back.
• The unlock tile. A second copper-bordered tile appears while the section's data is still cold or partial. Cold reads "Make Sales & Marketing Work" with the headline "Upload Your Data To Switch It On," and lists the specific exports it still needs, each tagged with which of your tools it comes from. Partial reads "Deepen Sales & Marketing" with a headline like "2 Of 4 Sources In. Add The Rest," a checklist of what's already in (✓, dimmed) against what's still missing (○, bold), and a button, Add Data (cold) or Add What's Missing (partial). Both buttons open the same capture modal as Send data in the header. Once every input is in, this tile disappears entirely.
• Decision tiles. Below the two setup tiles, up to ten Sales & Marketing decisions Verinode has open for you, each rendered as a tile with a Recommended eyebrow, a dollar-impact headline when the decision has one (or a Title-Cased metric name when it doesn't), and a short reason line underneath the dollar figure. Tap one to open the full decision detail. The first decision renders larger (a hero tile); the rest are standard size, and you can step between them from inside the opened decision.
• Empty state. If Verinode has no growth decisions open for you right now, the row reads: "No sales & marketing decisions yet. They appear as your data builds and peers contribute."

Decisions here come from the same decision workspace that powers every section: Verinode surfaces and recommends, you accept, adjust, or dismiss.

Pipeline

A single wide tile, Lead Pipeline, appears in its own row directly under Take Action, but only once you have at least one lead on file. Before that, this row is simply absent, there's no placeholder tile telling you leads haven't arrived yet.

• The headline is your trailing-year lead count, formatted as "N leads."
• The sub-line and accent color depend on whether anything needs attention: if open leads are stalled, the accent turns Ember Red and it reads "N need a follow-up. Tap for the overview." If nothing is stalled, the accent is copper and it reads "Every inquiry that came in. Tap for the overview."
• A small meta label reads "Needs attention" or "Open the overview."

Tapping the tile opens the overlay deck on the Pipeline tab (below).

Verinode flags a lead as needing attention when it's brand new with no first response logged after a few days, or when it's been quoted for roughly two weeks with no movement. These are read signals, not a manual status you set: they come from the lead records themselves as they age.

Explore

The bottom row of the home is a horizontal scroll of MetricTiles, the section's benchmarks. Each tile shows a single metric, its current value, and a short source label (Your number, Peer median · [cohort size] operators, or Industry typical), and tapping any tile opens the overlay deck on the matching tab, either Getting Leads or Winning the Work.

A tile only appears once it has a real value to show, your own number, a peer number, or an industry reference. A metric with none of the three is left off the row entirely rather than rendered as an empty placeholder, so an early-stage account sees a shorter, honest row instead of a wall of ghost tiles.

The metrics, in the order they appear:

| Tile | What it measures | Direction | Opens tab | |---|---|---|---| | Average Job Value | What the average job sells for. | Higher is better | Winning the Work | | Close Rate | How many leads turn into jobs. | Higher is better | Winning the Work | | Marketing % of Revenue | Share of revenue you spend on marketing. | Neutral, no "good" direction | Getting Leads | | Cost per Job | What it costs you to win one job. | Lower is better | Getting Leads | | Return on Marketing $ | Revenue earned for every marketing dollar, shown as a dollar ratio (e.g. "$4.20"). | Higher is better | Getting Leads | | Referral Share | Share of leads that come from referrals. | Higher is better | Getting Leads |

Last in the row is Speed to Lead, mined from your own lead timestamps rather than looked up from the benchmark table: the median days between a lead arriving and your first logged response. When Verinode has too few in-order cases to mine a real median, it reads "Log lead responses to map your speed to lead" instead of a number. Where the data supports it, this tile also shows a short trend preview and, if a peer path exists for this stage, how your pace compares.

The overlay deck

Tapping any Explore tile, the Pipeline tile, or a decision opens the deck. It has four tabs across the top: Findings, Pipeline, Getting Leads, and Winning the Work.

Findings

The shared findings grid, every open Sales & Marketing decision as a card. Tapping a card drills into that decision's full detail, with previous/next navigation across the set if you opened it from a list. This is the same decision engine that feeds the Take Action row, just laid out card-by-card instead of tile-by-tile.

Pipeline

The lead-pipeline overview. If you have no leads captured yet, it reads: "No leads captured yet. Inbound inquiries appear here as your lead sources flow in, then you can work them by stage."

Once leads exist, the card shows:

• Lead pipeline headline, "Every inquiry that came in, by stage," with your trailing-year lead count on the right, labeled "Leads · trailing year."
• Four stage counts side by side: New, Quoted, Won, Lost.
• Close rate, won leads divided by total leads, as a percentage.
• A follow-up line: either "N open lead(s) need a follow-up" in Ember Red, with a button, Work the leads that need attention, or, if nothing is stalled, "All open leads are being worked" with a button, Open the full pipeline. Either button takes you to the full working pipeline list at /growth/leads (filtered to the ones needing attention, if that's the state you're in), where you can filter and change lead status directly. The overlay card is the at-a-glance summary; the full working list lives on its own page.

Getting Leads

Acquisition-economics benchmark cards: Marketing % of Revenue, Cost per Job, Return on Marketing $, and Referral Share. An intro line 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." If none of these metrics has a peer number yet, an added line reads: "The peer cohort is still forming for these metrics. Each one fills in once enough operators like you contribute."

Each metric block shows:

• The metric's label and a plain-language caption (e.g. "What it costs you to win one job.").
• A headline value: your own number if you have one, otherwise the peer median, otherwise the industry-typical figure, with a source label underneath, "Your value," "Peer median · [cohort size] operators," or "Typical · industry."
• A peer quartile bar: a horizontal track marking the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile of the peer cohort, with your own value plotted as a dot if you have one. The dot colors green when your number sits on the favorable side of the median for that metric's direction, red when it sits on the unfavorable side, and copper when the metric has no inherent good/bad direction (like Marketing % of Revenue).
• Where a published industry figure exists separate from the peer cohort, a small line underneath: "Typical (industry): [value]."

Winning the Work

Same card layout as Getting Leads, covering Average Job Value and Close Rate, with the intro line: "How often you win the work and what it sells for, compared to operators like you. Your own numbers appear as your leads and won jobs flow in."

How the numbers get their source label

Across the hero, Explore tiles, and deck cards, every growth number follows the same resolution order and the same labels:

1. Your own value ("Your average" / "Your number" / "Your value") once your leads, sold jobs, or financials have produced it.
2. Peer median ("Peer median") once a peer cohort exists for that metric, sized to your operation and state where the metric supports it.
3. Industry typical ("Industry typical" / "Typical · industry") when neither of the above exists yet, drawn from a published industry reference rather than live peer data.
4. Warming up, when none of the three exist.

Close rate and referral share are calculated from your own trailing-year lead records once you have enough of them logged, below that volume they read as not-yet-available rather than showing a shaky number built on too few leads. Average job value, marketing spend share, cost per job, and return on marketing dollar need your job values and, for the marketing-spend metrics, your financials or connected books to resolve.

Best-practice example

Say your hero reads Average Job Value with a "Peer median" source line, your own number hasn't populated yet because your sold-job data isn't flowing in. Tap Talk to IQ on the activation tile and tell it you want to close that gap; it will walk you through forwarding your P&L or connecting your accounting tool. Meanwhile the Lead Pipeline tile flags leads needing a follow-up in red, tap it, and the Pipeline card shows exactly which stage they're stuck in and a one-tap button into the full working list. Once your own average job value and close rate start showing "Your average" instead of peer median, the Explore row and the Getting Leads / Winning the Work cards start plotting your own dot against the peer spread, and that's when the section starts telling you not just what operators like you look like, but where you stand next to them.

Related reading

• Reading a benchmark
• How benchmarks work
• Benchmarks: section overview
• The decision workspace
• Clients & Carriers
• Connecting your data
• Forwarding documents
• Understanding your margin