Speed to lead
How fast should you reply to an enquiry?
Within the hour, during working hours. That is the short answer, and the research behind it is unusually solid. The longer answer is what a realistic target looks like when you are the person doing the work.
Last updated
Reply within an hour and you are ahead of roughly two thirds of the businesses your customer contacted. Reply the next day and, on the numbers below, you have lost most of the advantage that being good at your job earned you.
That is the finding from the largest published audit of the question, and it is worth more than the usual marketing statistic because nobody was asked to estimate anything. Researchers sent 2,241 companies a real enquiry and timed what came back. Here is how those first replies were distributed.
How long the 2,241 first replies took:
37% replied within the hour
16% replied later the same day
24% took more than 24 hours
23% never replied at all
- 37% replied within the hour
- 16% replied later the same day
- 24% took more than 24 hours
- 23% never replied at all
The average among the companies that replied at all was 42 hours. That number is kinder than the truth, because it leaves out the 23% who never replied to a genuine enquiry from a stranger who wanted to buy something.
What "speed to lead" actually means
Speed to lead is the clock running from the moment a prospect makes contact to the moment a person sends them something useful back. Every figure on this page is measured that way, so both ends of it are worth being precise about.
It starts when the enquiry arrives, not when somebody opens it. A form submitted at ten past nine has been waiting since ten past nine, whatever time the inbox was next checked.
It stops on a human reply that answers something. That is where the measure parts company with the two things businesses more commonly count. The first is the service promise – we aim to respond within 24 hours – which describes an intention rather than a measurement, and tends to be generous to itself, because the enquiries anyone remembers are the ones that got answered. The second is the automatic acknowledgement, the ticket number and the confirmation that a message arrived. Worth sending, and not a reply. Most people have read hundreds of them and can tell at a glance that nobody has looked at theirs yet.
The reason the measurement lands on the first human reply, rather than on the quote or the proposal that follows it, is that the decision is usually made earlier than businesses expect. By the time a quote arrives, the customer has formed a view about whether you are the sort of firm that comes back to people. A good quote on day four is read by somebody who has already half-decided.
Where the five-minute rule comes from
Almost every other page on this subject will tell you to reply within five minutes. It is worth knowing where that number came from, because it is a real finding from real data and it is also not a target most small businesses should be holding themselves to.
It traces to one study: the Lead Response Management research run by Dr James Oldroyd at MIT Sloan with InsideSales.com in 2007, the same work behind the six-fold figure further down this page. It found a business was 21 times more likely to qualify a lead when it made contact within five minutes than when it waited thirty. The drop is real and it is steep.
What it measured matters as much as what it found. That study watched sales teams in US business-to-business companies telephoning people who had filled in a web form, across more than 100,000 call attempts. It did not measure a builder answering an email between jobs, or a clinic returning an enquiry at the end of a shift. The direction of the finding carries over to almost any business. The five-minute figure does not carry over to yours.
There is a practical cost to repeating it anyway. A target nobody can hit gets abandoned rather than approximated, and a sole trader told the standard is five minutes concludes, correctly, that the standard is not meant for them, and then changes nothing at all. An hour is achievable in working time and captures most of what the research says is available.
The version that survives contact with a real working week is two moves rather than one. Acknowledge fast, which genuinely can be near instant and is the part worth automating, so the enquiry stops being at risk. Then reply properly the same day, when you can think about it. That is a target you can hold in a busy week, which is the only kind worth setting.
What is a slow reply costing you?
Three numbers, two of which you already know. This is a rough model rather than a measurement, but it is your model, built from your figures.
What this does not count. Only the enquiries lost to speed. It does not count the ones that arrived, got a reply, and then went quiet: the quote nobody chased, the conversation that simply stopped. In most businesses that is the larger of the two numbers.
Estimated, recoverable
£7,875
a month. £94,500 a year, or 126 jobs
HBR found 16% of companies took between 1 and 24 hours. The average that did reply took 42 hours.
Assumes replying same day loses 40% of enquiries to a faster competitor, against 5% inside the hour. The gap is what is shown above.
Harvard Business Review, 2011 · 2,241 companies audited. Your trade will differ.
You estimated that reply time. It is the only one of the three we can measure for you.
Measure it freeWe send one enquiry you have written and approved, time the reply, and email you the result. No call.
A realistic target, by the shape of your business
Most advice on this says "reply in five minutes" and leaves it there, which is useless if you are up a ladder. These are the targets worth holding yourself to instead.
Sole trader, on the tools
Same day, and always before you sleep
You cannot answer at 11am from a loft. What you can do is make sure nothing sits overnight, because an enquiry that goes two days is usually gone. An acknowledgement inside the hour costs nothing and buys you until the evening.
Small team, one person on enquiries
Within the hour during working hours
Achievable, and the point at which the research says the odds change sharply. The risk here is not speed on a normal Tuesday. It is what happens in the week you are flat out, which is also the week the most enquiries arrive.
Anyone quoting against competitors
First, or as near as you can manage
Most people asking for a quote ask more than one business. Being first is worth more than being cheapest surprisingly often, because the first useful reply sets the standard the others get measured against.
Out of hours and weekends
An honest holding reply, not silence
A message saying when someone will actually come back to them holds a lead far better than nothing. What loses the work is not being closed on a Sunday. It is a Sunday enquiry answered on Wednesday.
Why it slips, and it is not discipline
Almost nobody loses an enquiry because they did not care about it. They lose it because the enquiry arrived while they were doing the work they were already paid for, landed in an inbox alongside a supplier statement and a newsletter, and then stopped being the most urgent thing on the screen.
The pattern is worse in a good week than a bad one. The weeks with the most enquiries are the weeks with the least time to answer them, so response times get worse exactly when there is most to lose. That is also why asking your team how fast you reply produces a number that is too good: everybody is remembering a normal Tuesday.
The fix that works is not trying harder. It is making sure the first reply does not depend on somebody being free at the moment an enquiry lands, and that anything unanswered comes back around instead of ageing out of view. We wrote up how that plays out in practice in why leads go cold, and the follow-up rhythm itself in the guide to chasing a quote.
Where these numbers come from
Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review, March 2011. Audited 2,241 US companies using a web-generated test enquiry, and separately analysed 1.25 million sales leads. Source of the response distribution above, the 42-hour average, and the 7× and 60× qualification multipliers.
Oldroyd (MIT Sloan) and InsideSales.com, Lead Response Management Study, 2007. Three years of data across six companies, more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts. Source of the finding that the odds of qualifying a lead fall by more than six times across the first hour alone, and of the 21-times-in-five-minutes figure that the rest of the internet quotes without saying it was measured on outbound phone calls to US business-to-business web leads.
Both studies looked at US business-to-business leads worked by telephone. The multipliers should not be read across directly to a UK trade or clinic answering email, and we do not present them as UK figures. What does carry over is the shape of the curve, which is why the honest next step is measuring your own business rather than adopting somebody else's percentage.
What we are seeing in UK response times so far
Everything above this line was measured on other people's businesses, in another country, more than a decade ago. That is the state of the published evidence on this question, which is why nearly every article about it cites the same two studies. This one included.
We are slowly building something better. The free response audit sends one real enquiry to a business's own address and times the first human reply, which is the same method the Harvard researchers used, applied to UK small businesses one at a time. Every audit produces one honest data point.
There are no figures in this section yet, because there is not yet enough data to publish one honestly. A median drawn from a handful of audits would be less reliable than the borrowed number it replaced, while looking more authoritative for being ours. This section will be filled in when the volume supports it, and not before.
What will appear here, once it can be said with a straight face:
- The median time to a first human reply, and how widely it spreads either side.
- How that differs by sector, where there are enough audits in one to say anything – trades, clinics, removals, agencies.
- The share answered inside the hour, inside a working day, past 24 hours and past 48.
- How many receive no reply at all, which we expect to be the least comfortable figure of the set.
Everything published here will be aggregated and anonymised. No business is named, and no individual audit result is ever published – the only person who sees a result is the business it belongs to. If you would like yours counted, the free audit is the same one described above, and the number comes back to you either way.
Questions people ask about response time
How quickly should you respond to a lead?
Within an hour of the enquiry arriving, during working hours. The Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies found that replying inside the hour made a company roughly seven times more likely to qualify the lead than waiting even one hour longer, and more than sixty times more likely than waiting a day. Outside working hours, an honest holding reply that says when someone will come back to them is enough to keep the enquiry alive.
Should you respond to a lead within 5 minutes?
If you can, yes, but it is the wrong target for most small businesses and it is worth knowing why. The five-minute figure comes from the 2007 Lead Response Management study, which found a business was 21 times more likely to qualify a lead when it made contact within five minutes rather than thirty. That study measured sales teams telephoning people who had filled in a web form at US business-to-business companies, across more than 100,000 call attempts. It did not measure a trade or a clinic answering email. The direction holds for any business; the specific number does not transfer. A realistic version is to acknowledge the enquiry quickly, which can be automated and near instant, then reply properly the same day.
What is the average lead response time?
In the largest published audit, the average among companies that replied at all was 42 hours. That figure flatters reality, because it excludes the 23% that never replied. Of the companies audited, 37% replied within the hour, 16% later the same day, and 24% took more than a day.
What does speed to lead mean?
Speed to lead is the time between an enquiry arriving and a real reply going back to the person who sent it. It is measured from their side, not yours: an automated acknowledgement is not a reply, and neither is an internal notification. The measurement that matters is how long the customer waited to hear something useful from a human.
How long should you take to reply to an enquiry?
Aim to be inside the hour in working time, and never let an enquiry sit overnight. For most small businesses the realistic version is an acknowledgement quickly, followed by a proper answer the same day. That combination holds nearly all of the advantage of an instant reply without requiring somebody to sit on the inbox.
Does replying faster actually win more work?
The evidence says yes, and it is unusually strong for a marketing claim because it comes from measured replies rather than surveys. The two studies most often cited both timed real enquiries rather than asking businesses to estimate their own speed. Both were run on US B2B leads worked by phone, so the exact multipliers will not transfer cleanly to a plumbing round or a physiotherapy practice. What transfers is the shape: nearly all of the loss happens in the first hour.
How do I find out my own lead response time?
Send a realistic enquiry to your own enquiry address and time the first reply. Asking your team produces the answer they think you want, and checking the sent folder only shows the enquiries somebody noticed. LoadOff runs this as a free audit: you write the message, we send it once, and you get the timing in writing about a week later.
Is it better to reply fast or reply well?
This is a false choice most of the time, because the enquiries that get a slow reply rarely get a better one. In practice the winning pattern is a fast, short, human acknowledgement that asks one useful question, then a considered answer once you have what you need. Speed gets you into the conversation. Quality wins it once you are there.
What counts as a reply if we are closed?
Anything that tells the sender a person has seen it and when they will hear back. What does not count is a generic auto-responder that says nothing specific, because the recipient has read hundreds and it reads as an absence rather than an answer. If you promise a time in that message, the promise has to be one you keep, or the reply is worse than silence.
The next step
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