What speed to lead means
It’s the gap between someone asking for a quote and someone from your business answering. Not the time until you visit, and not the time until you quote. The time until the first reply.
Few trade businesses measure it, because the honest answer is “whenever I got down off the roof”.
What the research says
The Harvard Business Review study
In 2011, James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington audited 2,241 companies in the United States to see how quickly they responded to an enquiry from their own website. 37% replied within an hour. 23% never replied at all. Among the companies that did respond within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours.
Their finding on results: firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker as firms that tried even an hour later.
The Lead Response Management study
In 2007, Dr James Oldroyd, then at MIT, analysed three years of data from six companies: more than 15,000 leads and more than 100,000 call attempts. The odds of making contact with a lead dropped 100 times between a call made within five minutes and one made after thirty. The odds of qualifying that lead dropped 21 times over the same gap.
A caution on both. These are studies of business-to-business sales in the United States, not of Irish or British homeowners ringing a roofer. Treat the exact multiples as a direction, not a forecast for your business. Both point the same way: the sooner you reply, the more likely you are to have the conversation at all.
Why it matters even more in the trades
- Homeowners ask more than one. Someone with a leak doesn’t send a single enquiry and wait patiently for a reply.
- The first voice sets the standard. Whoever rings first gets to ask the questions, book the visit and become the one everyone else is compared with.
- You’re unreachable by design. The better you are at the job, the more hours you spend somewhere you can’t answer a phone.
- Paid leads make delay expensive. If you paid for the enquiry, through ads or a lead site, every hour it sits there is money going cold.
How to measure yours
- Take your last twenty enquiries.
- For each, note when it arrived and when you first replied.
- Sort the gaps and take the middle one, so a single forgotten lead doesn’t skew it.
If the answer is measured in hours, you’ve found your cheapest win.
How to get your reply time under a minute
- Send an automatic first reply. A short message in your business name the moment the enquiry arrives: you’ve got it, and you’ll ring shortly. It doesn’t replace the call. It buys you the time to make it.
- Get the lead onto your phone, not into an inbox. A WhatsApp alert gets seen on site. An email waits until tonight.
- Ask the right questions up front. If the form already tells you the job, the area and the timing, your first call is shorter and better.
- Set a reminder for leads nobody has called. Busy days are when leads go missing.
- Follow up after the quote. Speed gets you the visit. Follow-up gets you the job.
If your enquiries come from Facebook lead ads, you can wire up the first two yourself: how to send Facebook lead ads to WhatsApp. Or we build and run the whole thing for you: WhatsApp lead follow-up.
What about missed call text back?
Missed call text back sends an automatic text when you can’t pick up. It’s the same principle applied to phone calls, and it’s worth having.
It covers one door, though. Enquiries from ad forms, missed calls and messages need the same treatment, or the leads you paid most for are the ones left waiting.
Sources
- Oldroyd, J., McElheran, K. and Elkington, D. (2011). The Short Life of Online Sales Leads. Harvard Business Review, March 2011. hbr.org
- Oldroyd, J. (2007). The Lead Response Management Study. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with InsideSales.com.