“How many leads did we get?” is the first question in most marketing reviews, and it’s the wrong one. Lead volume is easy to inflate, blind to quality, and disconnected from revenue. A month of 80 leads can be worse than a month of 45 — and without better instrumentation, you’d celebrate the wrong one.
Here are the seven numbers that tell you what lead volume can’t, and what each lets you decide.
1. Qualified-opportunity rate
Of all inbound contacts, what share were real prospects — in your service area, for work you do? This one filter changes everything downstream. Channels look wildly different once it’s applied: a source delivering 30 leads at a 40% qualified rate is weaker than one delivering 20 at 75%.
Decision it unlocks: which channels deserve more budget, judged on reality instead of raw counts.
2. Cost per qualified opportunity, by channel
Spend divided by qualified opportunities — the honest price of a real at-bat, channel by channel. This is the number that makes vendor comparisons fair, since it punishes channels that pad reports with junk.
Decision it unlocks: where the next marginal dollar goes.
3. Answer rate and speed to first response
What share of calls get answered live, and how fast do form leads get a human response? These intake numbers are silent multipliers on everything upstream — and in most companies they’re both unmeasured and worse than anyone believes.
Decision it unlocks: whether to fix intake before spending another dollar on demand.
4. Booking rate on qualified opportunities
Real opportunities that became scheduled estimates. If this is low while call quality is high, the problem is the phone conversation, the response speed, or follow-up persistence — all cheaper to fix than any campaign.
Decision it unlocks: where sales coaching and process changes pay fastest.
5. Close rate and average job value, by source
Different sources sell differently. Storm leads close fast with insurance-dependent values; organic leads often arrive better-educated and close at higher rates; some paid sources produce estimates that never turn into contracts. Carrying source data through the CRM to the closed job exposes all of it.
Decision it unlocks: which channels produce revenue rather than activity — the final arbiter when two sources have similar lead costs.
6. Pipeline mix: job type and market
What share of opportunities are repairs versus replacements versus commercial? Which territories are producing, and which are quiet? Marketing that fills the schedule with $600 repairs when you built capacity for replacements is failing even when the lead count looks great.
Decision it unlocks: targeting changes — geographic and service-line — that steer the work you get toward the work you want.
7. Trailing-twelve-month trend, not month-over-month
Roofing seasonality makes single-month comparisons nearly meaningless. June beating February proves nothing; this June beating last June, at a lower cost per opportunity, proves the system is improving. Trailing twelve months is the honest baseline, with same-month-last-year as the comparison of record.
Decision it unlocks: whether the machine is genuinely getting better — and when a “bad month” is actually just a normal month with weather.
The report that runs the meeting
One page, monthly, by channel: qualified opportunities, cost per qualified opportunity, booking rate, booked estimates, and the same-month-last-year comparison. Below it, three sentences: what worked, what didn’t, what changes next month.
That’s the whole discipline. If your current reporting can’t populate that page, the gap isn’t analytical sophistication — it’s call tracking, call scoring, and a CRM that carries source to close. All of it is standard plumbing, and all of it pays for itself the first time it stops you from funding the wrong channel.