Sales & Marketing benchmarks row

What this row is

The Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row is the third row on the Sales & Marketing home page: a strip of tiles, one per growth metric, that reads your network's own median against a single industry reference line. It is the fast read on whether the network as a whole is winning work at the rate, cost, and value the wider restoration market is winning it at, before you ever open the full Benchmarks page.

This is a network intelligence row, not a job-management, LMS, CRM, or accounting screen. Verinode never opens a single office's leads, invoices, or marketing spend to build these tiles. What crosses the boundary from a franchisee's private data into this row is the rollup only: a network median, a count of contributing offices, never the underlying jobs or leads themselves. Franchisees own their data; HQ sees the network's position against the market.

Verinode does not decide anything here. The row surfaces where the network's growth numbers sit relative to the industry. Your leadership team reads the pattern (a metric trailing the market, a metric ahead of it) and decides what to do with it.

Where to find it

Open Sales & Marketing from the HQ sidebar, under the Revenue group, at hq.verinode.ai/sales-marketing. The page is a single scrolling home built from four rows: the hero, Top Job Value, Sales & Marketing Benchmarks, and Network Lead Response. This article covers the third row. For the rest of the page, see HQ Sales & Marketing: section overview.

The six metrics

The row can show up to six growth metrics, always in this fixed order:

| Metric | Unit | Favorable direction | |---|---|---| | Average Job Value | dollars | Higher | | Close Rate | percent | Higher | | Marketing % of Revenue | percent | Higher (the network's direction convention reads a higher marketing-spend share as favorable here, consistent with how this metric reads on an operator's own IQ Growth page) | | Cost per Job | dollars | Lower | | Return on Marketing $ | a plain number | Higher | | Referral Share | percent | Higher |

A metric only appears in the row once at least three of your own offices have a value for it. Below that, a single office's number isn't a distribution, it's just one number, so the metric is left out of the row entirely rather than shown as a thin or empty tile. As more offices start reporting lead and marketing-spend data, metrics light up on their own; there is nothing to turn on.

Average Job Value is built purely from job-billing data, so it is typically the first metric to show a network median. Close Rate, Marketing % of Revenue, Cost per Job, Return on Marketing $, and Referral Share all depend on lead intake and marketing-spend data flowing in from your offices, and fill in over time as more offices connect those sources on their own IQ accounts.

Reading a tile

Each tile in the row shows four things:

• Label: the metric's name (Average Job Value, Close Rate, and so on), in small uppercase type.
• Headline: your network's own median value on that metric, in its native unit. A dollar metric reads as a rounded dollar figure with thousands separated by commas, for example $3,450. A percent metric reads with one decimal place, for example 24.3%. Return on Marketing $ reads as a plain decimal, for example 3.2, meaning $3.20 of revenue for every marketing dollar spent.
• Sub-line: "Industry [value]", the industry reference median for that same metric, in the same format as the headline. If no industry reference has published yet for that metric, the sub-line reads "Industry, ".
• Meta line: "N office[s] contributing", the count of your own network's offices whose data feeds the headline median. This is always your own offices, never a count of outside operators.

Tiles in this row do not carry a colored delta figure the way the Network Lead Response tiles below them do ("+3d vs Industry", for example). The only signal for how your network compares to the industry is the tile's accent color.

The accent color logic

Every tile is colored one of three ways, driven by comparing your network's median against the industry reference median:

• Green (the expand accent): your network's median sits on the favorable side of the industry reference. For a metric where higher is better (Average Job Value, Close Rate, Marketing % of Revenue, Return on Marketing $, Referral Share), green means your network's median is at or above the industry figure. For Cost per Job, where lower is better, green means your network's median is at or below the industry figure.
• Red (the analyse accent): your network's median sits on the unfavorable side of the industry reference, the mirror image of the green case for each metric's own direction.
• Neutral gray: there is no industry reference to compare against yet for that metric. The tile still shows your network's real median as its headline, it simply has nothing published to be colored against, so the sub-line reads "Industry, " and the accent stays neutral rather than defaulting to either color.

The color is always driven by the comparison to the industry line, never by whether the number itself looks "good" in isolation. A high Average Job Value only reads green if it is at or above what the wider industry is achieving; the same number would read gray if no industry figure exists yet to compare it to.

Contributing office counts

The "N office[s] contributing" line on each tile counts only your own network's offices, the ones inside your franchise or association system that have a reported value for that specific metric. It is not the same as the count behind the industry reference line, and it does not include any operator outside your network.

Because each of the six metrics depends on a different data source (job billing for Average Job Value, lead records for Close Rate and Referral Share, marketing-spend ingestion for Marketing % of Revenue, Cost per Job, and Return on Marketing $), the contributing-office count can differ from one tile to the next in the same row. An office fully reporting its books can still be absent from the Close Rate tile if it hasn't connected lead data yet.

The industry reference line

The "Industry [value]" figure on each tile is the median for that metric among operators outside your network, restoration operators across the wider Verinode base. It is a single reference line, not a second network to compete against, the same "quiet comparison" framing every HQ benchmark uses.

That reference line only publishes once enough outside operators exist behind it to protect any single contributor's identity. Verinode does not disclose how many peers sit behind a published industry figure, only that the floor to protect anonymity has been cleared. Below that floor, the tile shows "Industry, " rather than a thin, identifiable comparison, and the accent stays neutral until a real reference line exists.

Tapping a tile

Tapping any tile in the Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row takes you to the Benchmarks page at hq.verinode.ai/benchmarks. That page opens directly on the Benchmarks tab (the first of its seven tabs: Benchmarks, Carriers & TPAs, Materials, Industry Data, Ratings, Analyst Reports, Industry News), which lists every benchmark category as its own section in one scrolling read: Profitability, Cash Velocity, Cost Structure, Sales & Marketing, Service Speed, Productivity, and the rest.

Sales & Marketing is one of those sections. It carries the same six metrics you just saw in the row, but with the full instrument behind each one: your network's own p25-to-median-to-p75 spread across your offices, the industry median marked on the same strip, and a drill-in overlay per metric with every one of your offices named and ranked, best to worst, against that one number. That deeper detail is more than a summary tile is built to hold, which is why the row deep-links out rather than expanding in place. See Network benchmarks: how the section works for how to read that page, including the office-by-office drill-in.

Every tile in the row opens the same Benchmarks page. Tapping does not jump you to the Sales & Marketing section specifically or isolate it from the rest, you land on the Benchmarks tab and scroll to it like any other category on that page.

Empty states

• No growth metric has cleared the three-office floor yet. The whole row is replaced with a single line of text: "Network benchmarks appear as members share their books, jobs, and leads." This is expected while a network is new or still onboarding its offices onto lead and marketing-spend ingestion, not a broken row.
• Some metrics show, others don't. A metric that hasn't cleared the floor is simply omitted from the row, not shown as an empty or dashed-out tile. If you only see two or three tiles instead of six, the rest are still ramping up, not missing data.
• A tile shows a headline but "Industry, ". The network side of that metric has real data (enough offices report it to appear at all), but the industry side hasn't cleared its own anonymity floor yet. The tile stays neutral gray until it does.

How to use it

1. 1Scan the row for any tile reading red against industry. That's a metric where the network as a whole, not just one office, is behind the wider market.
2. 2Check the "N offices contributing" line before reacting to a red tile. A metric fed by only a handful of your offices is an early read, not yet a network-wide verdict, more offices reporting will move the median.
3. 3Tap the tile to open the full Benchmarks page, scroll to Sales & Marketing, and drill into that one metric. The office-by-office ranking there tells you which specific offices are pulling the network average down, and which are already ahead of the industry.
4. 4Read Cost per Job and Return on Marketing $ together with Average Job Value, not in isolation. An office winning bigger jobs at a higher acquisition cost is a different conversation from one that's simply behind on all three.

Related help

• HQ Sales & Marketing: section overview: the full page this row lives on, including the hero, Top Job Value ranking, and Network Lead Response row.
• Network benchmarks: how the section works: the full Sales & Marketing category, distribution strips, and the per-office drill-in that every tile in this row deep-links into.
• The office leaderboard and composite ranking: the network-wide composite ranking these same growth metrics feed into alongside every other benchmark.
• Network Flow: how work moves through the network: the Network Lead Response row on the same page, covering how fast a lead moves through your network rather than what it costs or returns.

Data sources