The six growth metrics on HQ Sales & Marketing

What this catalog is

The HQ Sales & Marketing page is built around a fixed set of six growth metrics: Average Job Value, Close Rate, Marketing % of Revenue, Cost per Job, Return on Marketing $, and Referral Share. Every tile in the hero, the Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row, and the Sales & Marketing category on the Benchmarks page reads from this same list, in the same order, with the same units and the same higher-is-better direction every time. This article is the reference for that list: what each metric actually measures, how Verinode builds it from your network's data, and the rule that governs when a metric is allowed to appear at all.

For the full tour of the Sales & Marketing page itself, the hero panel, the Top Job Value ranking, and the Network Lead Response row, see HQ Sales & Marketing: section overview. This article stays narrower: the six metrics themselves.

Where to find it

Open Sales & Marketing from the HQ sidebar, under the Revenue group, at hq.verinode.ai/sales-marketing. The six metrics also appear as their own category, Sales & Marketing, inside the Benchmarks tab at hq.verinode.ai/benchmarks, where each one gets its own deep-dive with the full office ranking. Any tile that reads a growth metric on either page is reading from this same catalog.

The six metrics, in display order

The metrics always appear in the same fixed order. Average Job Value leads because it is the headline number the hero panel is built around; the rest follow the shape of a funnel, from what a job is worth, to how often you win one, to what winning it cost.

| Order | Metric | Unit | Direction | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Average Job Value | Dollars | Higher is better | | 2 | Close Rate | Percent | Higher is better | | 3 | Marketing % of Revenue | Percent | Higher is better (see note below) | | 4 | Cost per Job | Dollars | Lower is better | | 5 | Return on Marketing $ | Plain number (a ratio) | Higher is better | | 6 | Referral Share | Percent | Higher is better |

1. Average Job Value

What it measures. The median billed amount across an office's sold jobs, the typical dollar size of a job that office closes. This is the one metric on the page built purely from job-billing records, no lead data or marketing-spend data required, which is why it is usually the first growth metric to show a network number as an office starts reporting.

How Verinode reads it. Each office's own median billed job value becomes its office-vs-office score. Your network's median across those office values is the headline number in the hero panel and the number this metric shows across the platform.

2. Close Rate

What it measures. The share of an office's leads that convert into a signed, won job. A higher close rate means more of the leads coming in the door turn into work.

How Verinode reads it. Each lead in an office's record carries a won/lost flag; Close Rate is the percentage of that office's leads flagged won. An office's rate only counts once it has logged enough individual leads for a rate to mean something, an office with just a couple of leads on record does not have a rate published, because a share built on that few data points is noise, not a signal. The rate is measured at each office's most recent reporting period.

3. Marketing % of Revenue

What it measures. How much of an office's revenue it spends on marketing, drawn from that office's normalized profit and loss statement. This is the one metric on the list that reads more as an investment level than a strict scorecard: spending more on marketing is not automatically "better" the way a higher close rate is, it depends on what that spend is buying.

How Verinode reads it. Higher-is-better is coded true for this metric so its accent color stays consistent with how the other five metrics render (and matches how the same metric appears on an operator's own IQ Growth page), but read it alongside Close Rate, Cost per Job, and Return on Marketing $ rather than in isolation: an office spending more on marketing and also winning more, more cheaply, is a different story than an office simply spending more.

Because this metric comes off the normalized P&L, the same plane as margin and other cost-structure figures, Verinode holds its industry reference line to the same stricter anonymity bar it uses for financial and cost-structure benchmarks elsewhere on HQ, rather than the standard bar used for operational metrics. See Coverage labels and the anonymity floor for what that distinction means and why.

4. Cost per Job

What it measures. An estimate of what it costs an office, in marketing dollars, to acquire the average job it wins. Lower is better here: a lower cost per job means the office is winning work more efficiently.

How Verinode reads it. This is a modeled figure, not a directly tracked per-lead ad spend: Verinode multiplies an office's average sold-job value by its marketing percent of revenue. It is a cross-reference between the job-billing plane and the normalized-P&L plane, not a line item pulled from a single source, so treat it as a directional estimate of acquisition cost rather than an exact per-campaign figure.

5. Return on Marketing $

What it measures. How much revenue an office generates for every marketing dollar it spends, expressed as a plain ratio rather than a dollar or percent figure. A value of "3.2" means roughly $3.20 of revenue per $1 of marketing spend. Higher is better.

How Verinode reads it. This is the inverse of Marketing % of Revenue (100 divided by the marketing-spend percentage), so it moves with the same underlying P&L data. It is shown unformatted as a number, not with a dollar sign, because it is a ratio, not a currency amount.

6. Referral Share

What it measures. The share of an office's leads that come from referrals or repeat customers, rather than from paid or cold marketing. A higher referral share generally means an office is winning more work on reputation and relationships, and less on ad spend.

How Verinode reads it. Each lead is checked against a referral flag or a repeat-customer flag; Referral Share is the percentage of that office's leads matching either one. Like Close Rate, an office's rate only counts once it has logged enough individual leads for the share to be meaningful rather than noise.

Reading a metric tile

Wherever one of the six metrics appears as a tile, on the Sales & Marketing hero, the Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row, or the Benchmarks page category, it carries the same four pieces of information:

• Label: the metric name from the table above.
• Headline: your network's median value on that metric, formatted in its native unit, a rounded dollar figure with a thousands separator for Average Job Value and Cost per Job, one decimal place with a percent sign for Close Rate, Marketing % of Revenue, and Referral Share, and one decimal place with no unit symbol for Return on Marketing $.
• Sub: "Industry [value]" when an industry reference line has cleared its own anonymity floor for that metric, or "Industry, " when it has not yet.
• Meta: "N office[s] contributing", the number of your own offices behind the network median shown.
• Accent color: green when your network's median sits on the favorable side of the industry reference for that metric's direction, red when it sits on the unfavorable side, neutral gray when there is no industry figure yet to compare against.

Clicking any growth-metric tile on the Sales & Marketing page opens the full Benchmarks page (hq.verinode.ai/benchmarks), landing on the Sales & Marketing category, where the same metric shows its full network distribution and its per-office ranked drill-down. See Benchmarks: how HQ reads the network for how that fuller view works, and The per-office benchmark engine for how the office ranking, the network's own spread, and the industry reference line are each built.

The office-floor rule: a metric is omitted, never shown empty

A benchmark built from one or two offices is not a distribution, it is a couple of numbers. Before any of the six growth metrics is allowed to appear anywhere on HQ, it has to have a real handful of your own offices contributing a value.

Here is the rule in practice: a growth metric that has not cleared that floor is left out of the row entirely. There is no placeholder tile, no grayed-out card, no "not enough data" message sitting in its place. The Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row, the hero's secondary tiles, and the Sales & Marketing category on the Benchmarks page simply render the metrics that have cleared the floor, in the same fixed order from the table above, and skip the ones that have not. As more of your offices report the underlying data, a metric that was absent starts appearing on its own; you do not need to do anything to unlock it.

This is a different gate from the industry reference line's own anonymity floor. The office-floor rule above governs whether Verinode has enough of your own network's data to publish a network-side number for a metric at all. The industry line's floor is separate: it governs how many operators outside your network have to be behind a reference figure before Verinode will show it, so that figure can never be traced back to one outside operator's real business. A metric can clear the office floor and still show "Industry, " if the outside cohort behind that metric has not cleared its own, higher bar yet. See Coverage labels and the anonymity floor for the full explanation of that second gate.

In practice, the six metrics tend to light up in a predictable order, because they draw on different underlying data:

• Average Job Value draws only on job-billing records, so it is typically the first growth metric with a network number.
• Marketing % of Revenue, Cost per Job, and Return on Marketing $ all draw on an office's normalized P&L, so they tend to appear together once enough offices have financials flowing in.
• Close Rate and Referral Share draw on lead-level records, so they wait on offices connecting a lead source, and each office additionally needs enough individual leads logged before its own rate is worth publishing.

How to use the catalog

1. 1Start with whichever metrics are currently visible in the Sales & Marketing Benchmarks row. Anything absent has not cleared the office floor yet, it is not a sign of a problem, just of coverage still building.
2. 2Read Average Job Value and Close Rate together first, they tell you the size and frequency of the work your network wins.
3. 3Read Marketing % of Revenue, Cost per Job, and Return on Marketing $ as a set. An office spending more but also converting more, at a lower cost per job, is a different story than an office simply spending more without the results to match.
4. 4Read Referral Share alongside the marketing-economics set. A network with a high referral share and a low marketing spend is winning work a different way than one leaning on paid acquisition, neither is automatically better, but the mix matters when you decide where to invest.
5. 5For any metric, click through to the Benchmarks page to see the full network distribution and which offices are driving it.

Related help

• HQ Sales & Marketing: section overview: the full page tour, the hero, Top Job Value, and Network Lead Response rows this catalog's metrics feed.
• Benchmarks: how HQ reads the network: the full Sales & Marketing benchmark category, distributions, and controls.
• The per-office benchmark engine: how the network median, the office ranking, and the industry reference line are each computed for every HQ metric, growth included.
• Coverage labels and the anonymity floor: the separate floor that governs when an industry reference line is allowed to appear.
• The office leaderboard and composite ranking: how these six metrics feed into the network-wide composite standing alongside every other HQ benchmark.
• Network Flow: how work moves through the network: the lead-response process-mining row that sits alongside these six metrics on the Sales & Marketing page but is not one of the six itself.

Data sources