Research · 5 min read

Speed to lead: what 2,241 companies' response times show

By BizDevHub · October 23, 2026

Most businesses believe they answer enquiries quickly. The data says otherwise, and the cost of being slow is measurable.

What the research found

In "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Harvard Business Review, March 2011), researchers audited 2,241 U.S. companies by sending each a web-generated test lead and timing the reply:

37% responded within an hour.
16% responded within one to 24 hours.
24% took more than 24 hours.
23% never responded at all.
The average response time, among those that replied within 30 days, was 42 hours.

A separate analysis of 1.25 million sales leads from 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies found that firms contacting a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it (defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as firms that waited even one more hour, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or longer.

Caveat: this study is from 2011 and measures qualification, not revenue. Channels have changed (SMS and chat matter more now), but we have not seen a newer study of this size that contradicts the direction of the result. Treat the multipliers as an indication of scale, not a forecast for your business.

Why businesses are slow

It's rarely negligence. Leads arrive when the owner is on a job site, in a meeting, or asleep. Replies depend on one person remembering. Forms land in an inbox nobody watches at 7 p.m. An always-on first response removes the dependency on attention.

What an automated first response must do

Reply within a minute, on the channel the lead used. A web form gets an email; an SMS gets an SMS.
Be honest that it's automated. Don't impersonate a person. Customers forgive a bot that's useful; they don't forgive one that lies.
Do one useful thing. Answer the common question, or offer real calendar slots. "We got your message" alone doesn't help.
Hand off cleanly. Pricing, complaints and anything unusual go to a human with the full transcript.
Log everything. Source, time received, time replied, outcome. You can't improve what you don't record.

Measure it properly: use p95, not the average

An average hides the slow tail. If 95 of 100 leads get a reply in 20 seconds and 5 wait overnight, the mean looks fine while five customers had a bad experience. Track the 95th percentile of time-to-first-response, and review the slowest leads by hand each month. This is why our monthly reports lead with p95.

-- time-to-first-response, p95, per week (SQLite / D1)
SELECT strftime('%Y-%W', received_at) AS week,
       COUNT(*)                        AS leads,
       -- 95th percentile via row ranking
       MAX(CASE WHEN rn <= CAST(0.95 * n AS INT) THEN secs END) AS p95_seconds
FROM (
  SELECT received_at,
         (julianday(first_reply_at) - julianday(received_at)) * 86400 AS secs,
         ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY strftime('%Y-%W', received_at)
                            ORDER BY (julianday(first_reply_at) - julianday(received_at))) AS rn,
         COUNT(*) OVER (PARTITION BY strftime('%Y-%W', received_at)) AS n
  FROM leads WHERE first_reply_at IS NOT NULL
)
GROUP BY week;

Where to start

Test yourself first. Submit your own contact form from a personal email at 8 p.m. on a Friday and time the reply. Our free discovery call starts with exactly this kind of audit.