Speed-to-lead: what a five-minute callback is worth

The Lead Response Management study, 2007, looked at inbound web leads and response timing against contact and qualification. The Harvard Business Review article The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, March 2011, audited company response times to web inquiries.

Those dates are the honest headline. The widely-repeated multiplier — that responding in five minutes beats responding in thirty by some enormous factor — traces to the 2007 work, and it has been restated so often that the citation disappears. It is not a current measurement, it was not conducted on local service businesses, and we are not going to repeat the number as folklore. What the two sources support is a direction, not a coefficient: response time matters, and the decay is steep early.

The 2011 article is linked. The 2007 study is a named reference with no link, because the original report is not reliably available online — a reader can find the reference, and nobody has to pretend a dead URL is a citation.

The honest modern statement of the mechanism needs no study at all. A homeowner with a leak contacts three contractors. The one who calls back first is talking to a buyer who has not yet spoken to anyone else; the one who calls back tomorrow is talking to someone with two quotes. That is a sequencing fact about competitive markets.

Instrument it. Record the timestamp a form arrives and the timestamp of the first outbound call. Without those two, speed-to-lead is a slogan.

Route after hours. Emergency inquiries do not keep business hours.

Call, do not email — an email reply to a phone-shaped problem is a slower no. And count the calls, so the callback has a record.

Measure your own version. Two weeks of timestamps gives you a figure about your business that no 2007 study can give you, and it is the only version of this number we would put on a page about your results.