How fast should you respond to a new lead?

The direct answer

Respond to every new inquiry within five minutes, with a human. Per the MIT and InsideSales lead response study, contacting a lead inside 5 minutes makes you 21 times more likely to qualify them than contacting them at 30 minutes. Harvard Business Review's research across 1.25 million leads found responders within the first hour were 7 times more likely to qualify the lead than those who waited longer. And per Lead Connect data, 78% of customers end up buying from the business that responded first.

Now the uncomfortable part. Drift's response audits put the average business response time at 42 hours, and only about 7% of companies respond within five minutes. The window is wide open because almost nobody stands in it.

Why the window is so short

A person filling out a form or calling is in a deciding moment. They have a browser full of tabs, and you're one of them. Ten minutes later they've talked to whoever answered, and the moment is gone. You didn't lose to a better competitor. You lost to a faster one.

Phones make the same point louder. In healthcare, a study of 7,000 calls across 22 practices found 42% of business-hour calls go unanswered, and per Keona Health, 85% of callers won't call back after one unanswered attempt. Your industry's numbers will differ. The shape won't.

The math on your ad spend

Say a location spends $4,000 a month on ads and generates 80 inquiries. If slow response burns even a third of them before contact, roughly $1,300 of that spend bought nothing, every month, before anyone debates creative or targeting. Fixing speed is the highest-return marketing project most multi-location groups have available, and it usually costs process instead of budget.

How to actually hit five minutes

Route every form and call to a phone that's answered, in business hours and after. Give the first responder a script that books, never one that chats. Test yourself monthly: submit a lead to your own site on a Saturday, call your own front desk on a Monday at 8am, and time it. What gets tested gets fixed.