Speed to lead, and the arithmetic nobody runs

Every pitch for lead response software quotes the same rule. Answer in five minutes or lose the lead. It is usually delivered with a percentage and no citation.

The research is real. It is also old, and the honest version is more useful than the slogan.

Where the number comes from

The two studies that everyone is quoting, whether they know it or not:

Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, 2007. A study of inbound web leads across a large set of US companies, which found the odds of qualifying a lead dropped sharply when contact was attempted after the first five minutes rather than within them. This is the origin of "the five minute rule".

"The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review, March 2011. An audit of 2,241 US companies measuring how long they actually took to respond to a web enquiry. The median was 42 hours. A large share never responded at all.

Read them if you are making a decision on this. Both are nearly two decades old, both are US B2B skewed, and neither was measuring a residential service business in Connecticut in 2026. Anybody presenting those percentages as current fact about your market is presenting something they have not checked.

What has almost certainly not changed is the direction. A buyer who contacts three firms tends to engage with whoever engages back.

Run it on your own numbers instead

You do not need anyone's study. You need four numbers you already have.

Your missed inbound. Pull last month's call log. Count the inbound calls that went unanswered or to voicemail, and add the form submissions that got no reply the same day.

Your average job value. What a booked job is worth to you.

Your close rate on answered enquiries. Of the ones you did speak to, how many became jobs.

Multiply. Missed contacts times job value times close rate.

That result is the annualised cost of your current response time, in your own currency, from your own records. It is usually the largest single number in a marketing conversation and it has nothing to do with ad spend.

If it comes out small, you have just saved yourself a purchase. That is a real outcome and worth ten minutes.

What actually breaks

In the accounts we look at, slow response is rarely a discipline problem. It is structural.

The phone rings while the owner is on a roof. The form goes to an inbox nobody has open on a job site. The enquiry arrives at 7pm on a Friday. Somebody does call back, on Monday, by which time the customer has booked the firm that answered on Friday evening.

Nobody in that story did anything wrong. The system had a gap where a person was supposed to be.

What a fix does and does not do

An automated first response answers the call or the form immediately, at any hour, confirms what the person asked for, and either books the slot or hands a real human a qualified summary. It closes the gap between the enquiry and the first human contact.

It does not sell anything. It does not improve your close rate on the calls you were already answering. And a badly written one is worse than voicemail, because a bad automated reply tells the customer you were not there and that you did not care enough to say so properly.

The automation is the cheap part. What it says is the work.

One thing to check before you buy anything

Call your own business number right now, from your mobile, outside working hours.

Whatever happens next is what happens to every lead your ads produce after 5pm. If you want to know what your speed-to-lead problem is worth, that call costs nothing and tells you more than any study will.

• speed to lead
• AI agents