Speed to lead: answer fast, or someone else will
An inquiry that waits goes cold fast. How much response time matters according to the research, and how to answer faster without living in your inbox.
Someone fills in the form on your website. Maybe they want a quote for a job, maybe they just want to know if you can help. What you don’t see is that the same person has often sent the same request to two or three other companies. Whoever gets back to them first has a head start that’s hard to catch.
That sounds like common sense, and it is. But there are also numbers on how big the difference is, and it’s bigger than most people think.
What the research shows
Two studies come up almost every time people talk about response time. Both are American and a few years old, but they were done properly and point the same way.
| What was measured | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The chance of a real conversation with a decision maker if you get back within an hour | Nearly 7 times higher than waiting just one more hour, and over 60 times higher than waiting a day | Harvard Business Review, 2011 |
| How fast 2,241 companies answered an inquiry sent through their website | 37% answered within an hour, 24% took more than a day and 23% never answered | Harvard Business Review, 2011 |
| The chance of reaching the lead if you call within 5 minutes instead of after 30 | 100 times higher to reach them and 21 times higher to qualify them | MIT and InsideSales, 2007 |
The Harvard Business Review study, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, is based on 1.25 million inquiries at 42 US companies. The researchers counted a lead as qualified when the salesperson had a real conversation with someone who makes decisions. The same article describes a test where 2,241 companies received an inquiry through their website. Nearly one in four never replied, and among those who did, the average wait was 42 hours.
The MIT and InsideSales study went through more than 15,000 inquiries and more than 100,000 calls at six companies. It’s about phone calls, and the gap between five minutes and half an hour was bigger than anyone expected.
Why it works like this
An inquiry is at its warmest the moment it’s sent. The customer has the problem right in front of them, has time to talk and hasn’t found anyone else yet. An hour later they’re in a meeting. The next day a competitor has already called, and you’re second in line.
Whoever answers first also gets to set the frame. You’re the one asking the questions, suggesting the next step and deciding what the quote gets compared with. That doesn’t show up in any table, but most people who have sold anything recognize it.
It works the other way too. A reply after two days says something about how the rest of the job will be handled, however good the reply itself is.
Numbers you see everywhere that don’t hold up
Search for response time and you’ll find two claims on almost every page. One is that a lead loses 80 percent of its value after five minutes, credited to Harvard Business Review. The other is that 78 percent of customers buy from the company that responds first.
Both studies can be read in the original, and neither claim is in them. There may be other sources, but the ones usually cited don’t say that. And it doesn’t matter. The real numbers make the point just fine.
How to answer faster without living in your inbox
The point isn’t to drop everything every time your phone pings. That doesn’t work in a small business, and it shouldn’t have to. Most of it can be solved with a few simple steps.
Reply right away, automatically. An automatic reply that confirms the inquiry arrived, and says when the customer can expect to hear from you, beats silence by a mile. The customer knows someone has it, and you buy yourself a little time.
Make sure the right person hears about it. Inquiries that land in a shared inbox tend to sit there. A notification on the phone of whoever should answer usually makes a big difference.
Let AI write the first draft. AI can read the inquiry, pull out what matters and suggest a reply you only need to adjust. You still have the final word, but the road there gets shorter. More on what that can look like on the page about AI for business.
Measure your own response time. Send yourself an inquiry through your own website on an ordinary Tuesday. How long until someone replies? Most people are surprised, one way or the other.
None of this needs a big project. Often it’s enough to connect the form, the email and the phone the right way, and that’s exactly the kind of automation I build. If you want to see how to think about a whole flow, I’ve written about it on the page about process automation.
How fast do you answer today? Get in touch and we’ll look at where your inquiries get stuck. No strings attached.
Sources
- Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, Harvard Business Review, March 2011.
- Oldroyd and InsideSales.com, “Lead Response Management Study”, 2007.