Interactive

Speed-to-Lead Math for Owners

Three famous numbers from the research, in plain English — and exactly how to run them on your own business.

The research, without the jargon

There's one body of work nearly every "respond faster" stat traces back to: a study of 1.25 million inbound sales leads, first written up in Harvard Business Review as "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads." Three findings do most of the work:

• 21× — Reach out within five minutes and you're up to twenty-one times more likely to qualify the lead than if you wait thirty. Not 21% — 21 times.
• 50% — Roughly half of buyers go with the first company that meaningfully responds. Being first is half the battle, before anyone has compared quotes.
• 42 hours — The median first-response time across small services businesses in the data. Most leads never even get a second attempt.

The dataset isn't specific to any one trade, but the mechanism is human and universal: people buy from whoever shows up first and sounds competent.

Run it on your own numbers

You don't need a spreadsheet. Four numbers:

1. Inquiries you get in a typical week.
2. What one new customer or job is worth, on average.
3. The share of inquiries you currently answer within the first hour.
4. Your rough close rate on leads you do reach quickly.

The leads you don't reach in the first hour are where the money hides. Even recovering a fraction of them — being the first meaningful response instead of the third — moves a number most owners have never written down.

We turned this into a calculator

Rather than make you do the arithmetic, the homepage has a live version: move four sliders, watch the annual figure update, and open "show the math" to see every step. Nothing you type leaves your browser.

What to do with the number

If it's small, lovely — speed-to-lead isn't your biggest problem, and you just saved yourself a project. If it's large, you have two honest levers: respond faster with the people you have (process, shared inbox, on-call), or put an agent on the first response so "within the hour" becomes "within the minute, every time." Pick based on the size of the gap, not the size of the hype.