Network Lead Response (process mining)

What this row is

Network Lead Response is the last row on the Sales & Marketing home page, and it reads differently from everything above it. The other rows on that page are benchmarks: your network's median on a metric next to an industry reference line. This row is process mining: it measures how many days a lead actually sits at each stage on its way from arriving to becoming a signed job, mined straight from the timestamps your offices already log when they work a lead in their own IQ accounts.

It answers one question: is the network responding to leads fast, and is that speed holding up against the wider industry. Verinode does not read a single lead's file to build this row, and it never shows you which specific lead sat too long or who worked it. What crosses the boundary from an office's private data into this row is the aggregate only: a network median measured in days, and a same-or-slower/faster comparison against an industry figure. Franchisees own their lead records; HQ sees the pace.

Verinode does not decide anything here either. The row surfaces where the network's lead response time sits. Your leadership team reads it and decides what to do, whether that's a coaching conversation with a specific office or a standard set on the Process Standards page.

Where to find it

Open Sales & Marketing from the HQ sidebar, under the Revenue group (alongside Accounts and Reputation), at hq.verinode.ai/sales-marketing. Network Lead Response is the fourth and last row on that page, below the hero, Top Job Value, and Sales & Marketing Benchmarks. For the rest of the page, see HQ Sales & Marketing: section overview.

The row carries no card slider of its own. Clicking a tile takes you to a different page entirely, covered below.

The lead response process

Verinode mines three stages on every lead an office has worked:

1. Received, when the lead came in.
2. First response, when someone at the office first responded to it.
3. Converted, the moment the lead's linked job entered the office's book. This is not a timestamp typed anywhere on the lead itself; a won lead carries a link to the job it became, and Verinode reads that job's own start date (falling back to when the job record was created) as the honest moment of conversion. It is the same approach process mining uses elsewhere on the platform: a recruiting hire's "interviewed" stage is composed from a child table the same way, rather than trusting a single loosely-kept field.

There is deliberately no "Quoted" stage in between. Leads do carry a quoted status, but nothing in the schema records the moment a quote went out, and a stage with no real timestamp behind it would be a hollow milestone wearing a real one's label. Quote and loss outcomes still feed the funnel counts you see elsewhere on the Growth surfaces; they just don't produce a stage-timing tile here.

That leaves two measurable transitions, and the row can show a tile for either or both, independently:

• Received → First response
• First response → Converted

It is common to see the first transition light up before the second. Getting a network median for "how fast did someone pick up the lead" only needs a first-response timestamp on enough leads; getting one for "how fast did it become a job" needs the slower, rarer event of an actual conversion, so it typically takes longer for that second transition to clear a reporting floor.

Reading a tile

Each tile in the row is one transition, and it always shows:

• Label: "Lead response", the process name, on both tiles. It doesn't change between the two transitions, so the transition name below it is what tells them apart.
• Value: the network's median for that specific transition, in whole days (for example "2d" or "11d"). This is the network's own pooled median across every office's leads that have both ends of that transition dated, not an average of each office's own median. An office with a lot of lead volume weighs into it more than a low-volume office, the same pooling rule used everywhere else stage medians appear on the platform.
• Sub: the transition name, "Received → First response" or "First response → Converted".
• Comparison line, directly under the value, in one of three states:

- "On Pace With Industry", in neutral gray, when the network's median and the industry median for that transition are within half a day of each other. - "Xd vs Industry", in green, when the network is faster than the industry by half a day or more. - "Xd vs Industry", in red (the analyse tone), when the network is slower than the industry by half a day or more. - The comparison line is left off entirely when there's no published industry figure yet for that transition. In that case the tile still shows the network's real median, it simply has nothing to compare it against.

Both tiles keep the same base green accent color regardless of how the comparison reads. That's different from the Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row above it, where a tile's whole color shifts to red, green, or gray based on the industry comparison. Here, the accent stays fixed, and the industry comparison lives entirely in the colored text underneath the number. Read the delta line, not the tile's frame color, to see how a transition is doing against the market.

Slower always reads as worse

Every other metric on the Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row has its own favorable direction (higher is better for Average Job Value, lower is better for Cost per Job, and so on). Lead response only has one direction: faster is always better, at every stage, for every office. A lead sitting longer before someone responds, or longer before it turns into a job, is worse, full stop. There is no version of this metric where a bigger number is a good sign.

That's why the comparison logic is simpler here than on the benchmarks row: a positive gap against the industry (the network's median is more days than the industry's) always reads red. A negative gap (fewer days than the industry) always reads green. There's no metric-by-metric direction table to check, because there's only ever one direction.

Why the row can be hidden entirely

This row does not show a placeholder, a dash, or an empty card when there isn't yet a reliable number behind it. If neither transition has a reporting network median, the entire row, including its title, is left off the Sales & Marketing page. You won't see "Network Lead Response" with nothing under it; you simply won't see it at all until at least one transition clears the network's own reporting floor.

That floor exists because a median built on a handful of leads isn't a median you can act on, it's noise wearing a real number's label. The lead-response process on the network-level rollup is comparatively new, so a network that's still ramping up its lead ingestion may not see this row yet even if the rest of the Sales & Marketing page (hero, Top Job Value, Benchmarks) is already populated. As offices log more leads with real received-at and first-response timestamps in their own IQ accounts, the row appears on its own; there's nothing to turn on.

Clicking a tile

Clicking either tile does not open an overlay on the Sales & Marketing page itself. It takes you to Network on the HQ sidebar (hq.verinode.ai/network, sometimes labeled Locations or Franchisees depending on how your network is set up), and opens that page's process-mining slider directly on its Network Flow tab, scrolled and highlighted to the exact transition you clicked. Lead response is one of the flows mined into that same slider, alongside job lifecycle, supplement turnaround, recruiting pipeline, and incident follow-through, so the tile you clicked and the card you land on are reading the same underlying number, just with more of it visible.

Inside that card you get everything the home tile couldn't fit:

• The process label ("Lead response") and the transition name, same as the tile.
• The network median again, now with "Network Median · N leads" underneath it (or "1 lead" for a single case), spelling out how many in-order leads the pooled number is built on.
• "Industry median Xd across the anonymous peer cohort", when one is published for that specific transition. This line is left off entirely when no industry figure exists yet for that stage, rather than showing a blank.
• A per-office breakdown: every office that has enough of its own leads to report a reliable median on that transition, listed fastest to slowest, each with a small bar sized against the fastest and slowest office on that transition, its own median in days, and how many leads sit behind it.

An office only appears in that per-office list once it clears five in-order leads of its own on that specific transition. Below that, an office's data still contributes to the network-wide median above the list, it just doesn't get its own row yet. If no office on the network has cleared that floor, the list reads: "Per-office comparison appears once an office clears five in-order leads on this stage."

Whether an office's name appears as its real business name or as an anonymized label follows the same rule as every other per-location surface on HQ: same-entity, commonly owned networks see real location names; independent-operator franchise and association networks see a stable anonymized code per office instead, so a pattern is trackable over time without exposing which specific franchisee it belongs to. See Network Flow: how work moves through the network for the full detail on reading that drill-in, including how the office bar and the industry comparison work across every mined process, not just leads.

Best-practice example

Say the row shows one tile: Received → First response, network median 4d, with "6d vs Industry" in red underneath. The First response → Converted transition hasn't reported yet. That reading tells you the network is answering leads meaningfully slower than the wider industry once a lead comes in, before you even get to whether those leads close. Click the tile to open the Network Flow drill-in. The per-office list shows most offices clustered around 3 to 5 days, with two offices sitting well past that, each with a healthy lead count behind their number, not a thin sample. That's a coaching conversation with those two offices specifically, not a network-wide policy problem, and it's worth having before the second transition even has enough data to tell you whether the slow first response is also costing conversions.

How to use it

1. 1If the row doesn't appear at all, check whether Sales & Marketing Benchmarks above it is populated. If it is and Lead Response isn't, your offices need to log lead received-at and first-response timestamps more consistently before this row has anything reliable to show.
2. 2Read the comparison line first, not the median in isolation. "11d" with no industry line yet tells you less than "11d, 6d vs Industry" does; the second tells you exactly how far off the market you are.
3. 3Click a red-comparison tile to open the Network Flow drill-in. The per-office list tells you whether the slow network median is a broad pattern or a small number of specific offices pulling the average down.
4. 4If Received → First response is fast but First response → Converted is slow (or vice versa), that's two different conversations: a slow first response is a staffing or lead-routing problem; a slow conversion after a fast response is more likely a follow-up, quoting, or pricing conversation.

Empty states

• Neither transition has a reporting network median. The entire row, title included, is left off the Sales & Marketing page.
• One transition reports, the other doesn't. Only the reporting transition's tile shows; the other simply isn't in the row yet.
• A tile shows but has no industry figure yet. The tile still shows the network's real median and transition name; the comparison line underneath is left off rather than shown as a placeholder.
• The Network Flow drill-in's per-office list, when no office has cleared its own floor. Reads: "Per-office comparison appears once an office clears five in-order leads on this stage."

None of these are errors. They mean the network's own lead data hasn't caught up to a reliable number yet, not that leads aren't being worked.

Related help

• HQ Sales & Marketing: section overview: the full page this row lives on, including the hero, Top Job Value ranking, and Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row above it.
• Sales & Marketing benchmarks row: the row directly above this one, the growth-metric benchmarks that read differently from this process-mining row.
• Network Flow: how work moves through the network: the full Network Flow row and drill-in this tile deep-links into, covering every mined process, not just leads.
• Standards Conformance on the Network home: how a stage-time standard, once set, grades every office against a target the same way this row compares the network against the industry.
• Network Health: your network's overview: the page the drill-in lives on, and its other rows.
• Process standards and conformance: setting a stage-time target for lead response once it has enough network history.