Speed-to-lead is the most measured topic in sales, and the gap between what the research says and what almost every company does has not closed in fifteen years.
Here are the four figures worth knowing, with their methods, then the arithmetic for your own business.
What the research measured
Within an hour beats an hour later by about seven times
Researchers audited 2,241 US companies by submitting web enquiries and timing the responses. Firms that tried to make contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker as those who tried an hour later — and more than sixty times as likely as those who waited a day.
Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," Harvard Business Review, March 2011.
The average company took 42 hours, and 23% never replied
From the same audit: among companies that responded at all within thirty days, the average first response took 42 hours. Only 37% replied within an hour. 23% never responded. Nearly a quarter of businesses receiving a real enquiry did nothing with it.
Five minutes beats thirty minutes by about 21 times
A separate study tracked three years of data across six companies — more than 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts. Contacting a web lead within five minutes rather than thirty made it roughly 21 times more likely to qualify.
Oldroyd with InsideSales.com, Lead Response Management Study, 2007.
And in 2026, fewer than 1 in 100 manage five minutes
Researchers submitted demo requests to 114 B2B companies and measured the replies. The average email response took 11 hours and 54 minutes. More than 99% did not respond within five minutes. Nearly 20% never responded by email at all.
Workato, "B2B Lead Response Times: What We Learned from 114 Companies," March 2026.
Read those together and the conclusion is uncomfortable
The thing that works is known, it has been known since 2007, and almost nobody does it. That is not a market where you have to be excellent to win. Being merely quick puts you ahead of roughly ninety-nine companies out of a hundred.
Your own number, from your own records
You do not need our numbers. You need four of yours.
| Take | From |
|---|---|
| Leads received last month | Every source: form, phone, listing, social |
| How many got a real reply within an hour | Timestamps, not memory |
| Your average job value | Accounting |
| A conservative recovery rate | Your own assumption — use one in ten, not one in three |
Leads that waited, times job value, times your conservative rate. That is the annual cost of the gap, in your numbers, and it is usually larger than the marketing budget being considered to replace those leads.
The fix is structural, not motivational
Reminders do not work here, and it is worth being precise about why. A lead that arrives at 9:14pm competes with billable work the next morning, and billable work wins. That competition does not change because somebody set an alert; the alert just joins the queue.
The only version that survives a busy season is one where the first reply does not require a person to be free. Then the human effort goes into the conversation instead of into remembering to start one. We wrote the longer version of this in the lead follow-up guide.
If you would rather have somebody map this with you, the Architecture Assessment is 45 to 90 minutes and ends with a written report. It is $250, credited 100% toward any build — and if we find nothing worth building, we say so. Book it here.