Speed-to-Lead Statistics: The Sourced Version

Almost every marketing agency, CRM vendor, and answering service in home services quotes the same handful of speed-to-lead numbers, and almost none of them say where those numbers came from. Some are real findings from serious research. Some are real findings being applied to a population they were never measured on. At least one appears to have no published source at all. This page separates the three, because a contractor deciding whether to pay for 24/7 answering deserves to know which category the number in the sales deck belongs to.

It found that most companies are slow, and it measured that in two separate ways. The article is The Short Life of Online Sales Leads by James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, published in the March 2011 issue. Its headline contribution is an audit, not a five-minute rule.

• 2,241 US companies were audited by sending each one a web-generated test lead and measuring how long it took them to respond - HBR, March 2011.
• 37% responded within one hour - HBR, 2011.
• 16% responded within one to 24 hours - HBR, 2011.
• 24% took more than 24 hours - HBR, 2011.
• 23% never responded at all - HBR, 2011.
• The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours - HBR, 2011.
• A separate analysis in the same research covered 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the US - HBR, 2011.
• In that analysis, firms attempting contact within an hour of a query were nearly 7x as likely to qualify the lead as firms attempting contact an hour later, and more than 60x as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or longer - HBR, 2011.
• Qualified was defined by the researchers as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker - HBR, 2011.

From a different study, four years earlier, by the same lead researcher. The InsideSales.com and MIT Lead Response Management study was conducted by Dr James Oldroyd while a Faculty Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and was first presented at MarketingSherpa's B2B Demand Generation Summit on October 16, 2007. It is the origin of every 5-minute statistic in circulation.

• The study examined three years of data across six companies that generate and respond to web leads, covering over 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts - InsideSales.com/MIT, 2007.
• The odds of contacting a lead called at 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop by 100 times - InsideSales.com/MIT, 2007.
• The odds of qualifying a lead called at 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop by 21 times - InsideSales.com/MIT, 2007.
• Between 5 minutes and 10 minutes alone, contact odds decrease by 5 times and qualification odds by 4 times - InsideSales.com/MIT, 2007.
• The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times across the first hour - InsideSales.com/MIT, 2007.
• The odds of calling to qualify a lead decrease by over 6 times across the first hour - InsideSales.com/MIT, 2007.
• After 20 hours, every additional dial made a statistically significant negative contribution to the ability to contact and qualify the lead - InsideSales.com/MIT, 2007.

The same 2007 study measured this, and the effects were smaller than the response-time effects but still substantial. These are B2B office-hours findings and should be treated with more caution than the speed findings, since a homeowner's availability pattern differs from a business buyer's.

That nobody knew the answer — which is why the behavioural study was commissioned. Before the MIT work, Oldroyd ran a survey while completing his PhD at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. Between June and September 2007 he collected 495 responses from companies driving web leads, across more than 40 industries, spanning every company size from under $10 million to over $1 billion in annual revenue, using 22 questions about when and how to follow up.

• 495 company responses across 40+ industries, June to September 2007 - Kellogg Lead Response Management Survey.
• The survey found no statistically significant answer to the question of when companies should call leads back - Kellogg, 2007.
• Its stated conclusion was that marketers and sales representatives do not know when or how efficiently to follow up on web-generated leads - Kellogg, 2007.
• Delayed responses and unproductive callback attempts correlated with lower qualification and close ratios, and companies showing both problems did worse than either problem alone would predict - Kellogg, 2007.
• Companies that split the sales process into specialities - lead generation, inside sales, outside sales - corresponded with higher qualification and close ratios - Kellogg, 2007.

This is the honest weak point of the entire field. The foundational studies are nearly two decades old, and modern replications at comparable scale are scarce. The best recent large-sample data point we could source is Chili Piper's form conversion benchmark report, which analysed nearly 4 million form submissions from across its customer base in 2024.

• Without scheduling tools at the form, 30% of qualified submissions converted to a booked meeting - Chili Piper, 2025 (nearly 4 million form submissions, 2024).
• With scheduling offered at the form itself, that rose to 66.7% - Chili Piper, 2025.
• With a live-call option at the form, it reached 69.2% - Chili Piper, 2025.
• The sample is predominantly B2B companies across multiple industries - Chili Piper, 2025.

Several of the most-repeated ones. We went looking for the original publication behind each and could not find it. They are listed here so you can recognise them, not so you can use them.

• That 78% of customers buy from the company that responds first. Usually credited to an organisation called Lead Connect. We could not locate any published study, sample size, or methodology behind it.
• That responding within the first minute increases conversions by 391%. Widely repeated, including inside otherwise-sourced reports, with no accessible original methodology.
• That lead quality drops 80% after the first five minutes. Frequently attributed to the HBR article, which contains no such figure.
• That the average business takes 42 hours to respond. This one is real but routinely misapplied — it is a 2011 audit of 2,241 US companies mostly outside home services, not a current benchmark for contractors.

The direction of the evidence is strong and consistent across two decades: responding faster produces more contacted, more qualified leads, and most businesses are far slower than they believe. What the evidence does not support is treating any specific multiple as a promise for a homeowner requesting a roof quote. Here is the defensible translation.

• Answer live during business hours. HBR's audit found 23% of companies never responded at all; simply being reachable puts you ahead of a quarter of your competition.
• Target minutes, not hours, for first contact — the mechanism the 2007 study identified is that leads are hardest to reach once they have moved on, and that mechanism plainly applies to homeowners with three tabs open.
• Remove the gap entirely where you can. The Chili Piper data supports booking at the point of enquiry rather than promising a callback.
• Stop dialling a stale lead relentlessly. The 20-hour finding suggests additional calls on a cold lead do harm, and switching channel — SMS, email — is better than another ring.
• Measure your own number. Every figure on this page is somebody else's sample. Your CRM knows your real median time-to-first-contact, and it is almost certainly worse than you think.

Take the timestamp on the form submission or missed call, take the timestamp on your first genuine outbound attempt, and look at the median across a full month rather than the average — one three-day outlier will hide a lot of good behaviour, and one exceptional day will hide a lot of bad. Split it by source, because form fills, phone calls and lead-marketplace leads behave differently, and split it by hour, because the gap almost always lives in evenings and weekends. Then compare the close rate of your fastest quartile against your slowest. That comparison, on your own data, is worth more than every study on this page.