There is a number that almost every marketing team reports every Monday morning. It sits on dashboards, gets shared in board decks, and sparks arguments between marketing and sales more reliably than almost any other metric. And yet, most teams are measuring it wrong, comparing it against the wrong benchmarks, and optimizing for it in a way that quietly hurts revenue. That number is cost per lead. And the reason it causes so much confusion is that a "good" cost per lead in 20