Lead Response Time Calculator
Model how a slower reply to new leads changes how many you reach and win. Enter your own numbers, pick how fast you reply today and how fast you could, and see the monthly and yearly difference. The delay assumptions are editable examples, not measured results.
How to use this tool
- Enter your lead numbersNew leads per month, average job value and your close rate when you reply promptly.
- Pick two response timesChoose how fast you reply today and how fast you could.
- Edit the assumptionsReplace the example reach and close values with your own, then read the monthly and yearly difference.
How we calculate it
- Leads reached = new leads × reached % for that response time
- Jobs won = leads reached × close rate when prompt × close-vs-prompt % for that response time
- Revenue per month = jobs won × average job value
- Difference = revenue at the faster time − revenue today. Per year = × 12
Example with the defaults: 40 leads × 35% = 14 reached; 14 × 40% × 80% = 4.5 jobs; × $450 = $2,016 per month. At 5 minutes: 40 × 80% = 32 reached; 32 × 40% × 100% = 12.8 jobs = $5,760. The values in the delay table are made-up examples for illustration. They are not results from the research below and are not a forecast for your business.
What the research says
Two widely cited studies measured how response speed affects reaching and qualifying web-form leads. We read the sources linked below. Neither measured home-service phone calls, and neither gives you a closing rate for your trade, which is why the table above is an assumption you set.
The Short Life of Online Sales Leads (Harvard Business Review, 2011)
By James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, Harvard Business Review, March 2011. HBR article page (the full text is behind a paywall, so the figures below are as quoted by SmartCompany, which reproduces the report text).
- The authors audited 2,241 US companies by sending each a web-generated test lead and timing the response. 37% responded within an hour. Among companies that responded within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours.
- In a separate analysis, firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were reported as nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even an hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or longer.
Limits: web-form leads and test inquiries sent to US companies, not phone calls to local service businesses. It is observational, so it shows an association between speed and qualification, not what faster replies would do for your business.
InsideSales.com / MIT Lead Response Management study (2007)
Presented by Dave Elkington (InsideSales.com) and Professor James Oldroyd (MIT Sloan) at MarketingSherpa's B2B Demand Generation Summit, October 2007. Sources: study summary (PDF copy of the original page) and InsideSales.com.
- Data: three years of data from six companies, over fifteen thousand web leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts.
- The study reports that the odds of contacting a lead if called within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times, and the odds of qualifying a lead drop 21 times. The odds of making contact fall by over 10 times in the first hour, and from 5 minutes to 10 minutes they fall about 5 times.
- The authors state that the study did not address close ratios.
Limits: six companies, web-form leads called by sales teams, results reported as odds ratios (not percentages of leads) and published by a vendor of lead-response software. The multipliers cannot be applied directly to your lead counts, which is why this tool does not use them.