How fast should you respond to a new lead?

What is a good lead response time?

A number is only useful when you know why it is that number. Here is what we base ours on.

• Five minutes is the target. At five minutes the buyer is still on the same page and still remembers what they asked you.
• One hour is the hard limit. Harvard Business Review ("The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", 2011, 2,241 companies) found that replying within an hour produces seven times more qualified leads than replying an hour later, and sixty times more than replying a day later.
• Minutes matter inside that hour too. James Oldroyd at MIT Sloan found that cutting the wait from 30 minutes to 5 raises lead qualification roughly 21-fold.
• One standard for every channel. Web form, chat, missed call, marketplace message — same clock.
• A reply means a person answering the question. An automated "thanks for reaching out" looks great in a report and does nothing for the buyer.
• Speed alone does not close deals. Velocify, on roughly 3.5 million leads, found 93% of deals close by the sixth touch, while half of all leads never get a second call.

Why use the median instead of the average?

An average breaks in both directions. One lead you got to three days later drags the whole month up. Twenty auto-replies that fire in ten seconds drag it back down, and the number looks healthy again. The median tells you what a typical buyer actually experienced: half waited longer, half waited less. Keep two more numbers next to it — the share of leads answered after an hour, and the count of leads that were never answered at all.

A wide gap between your median and your average is not a math problem. It means a slice of your leads falls through regularly, and that slice is what you should read line by line.

How do you measure first response time?

This takes an afternoon and no new software.

1. 01

   Take a full month

   Not a good week. A month contains both the quiet days and the flooded ones.

2. 02

   Set the start point

   The moment the lead arrived: form submitted, call received, message delivered. Not the moment a rep opened it.

3. 03

   Set the end point

   The first real reply from a human to the buyer. Autoresponders and status changes do not count.

4. 04

   Pull every channel into one table

   Phone, email, forms, chat apps, marketplaces. A separate report per channel always looks better than the combined picture.

5. 05

   Calculate the median

   Then the share of leads answered after an hour. Those are the two numbers you will be moving from now on.

6. 06

   Split by rep and by hour of day

   The problem is rarely spread evenly. It usually lives with two people and in the evening hours.

7. 07

   List the leads with no reply at all

   They have no end point, so most reports quietly drop them. That is the worst part of your data.

What about leads that arrive at night or on weekends?

Leads ignore your schedule. Off-hours is where most standards quietly collapse.

• Every lead gets an owner the minute it lands, even if the answer comes in the morning. A lead nobody owns is a lead nobody counts.
• If nobody works at night, tell the buyer when they will hear back and put the follow-up first in the next shift's queue, not twentieth.
• A missed call at night becomes a morning task with a deadline, not a line in a call log.
• Weekends need a named person on rotation. One person with a phone beats "whoever sees it".
• Lunch counts too. If nobody is covering the desk at one o'clock, schedule the cover instead of hoping the buyer waits.
• Report off-hours leads as their own line, but keep them in the total. Dropping them makes the number prettier than reality.

What happens when a rep ignores a lead?

A standard holds up when someone is reminded at the right moment. That someone does not have to be a person.

1. 01

   Minute zero — an owner is assigned

   The lead goes to a specific rep based on the shift schedule. No shared pool, no "someone will grab it".

2. 02

   15 minutes of silence — a private nudge

   The rep gets a message with the buyer, the channel, and how long they have been waiting.

3. 03

   30 minutes — a second nudge

   Firmer, with the buyer named. Most cases end here.

4. 04

   One hour — the manager sees it

   Not a vague "we are slow" chart. One lead, one rep, one clock.

5. 05

   Then reassignment

   If the owner is unreachable, the lead moves to someone else instead of waiting for them to come back.

6. 06

   Evening — the daily wrap-up

   What was missed, what was closed, which promises went unkept. The morning plan is built from the same list.

Which mistakes wreck lead response time?

There are only a handful, and almost every sales team we start with has several.

• Reporting the average and feeling fine. The median in those teams is usually twice as bad.
• Measuring web forms during business hours only. Nights, weekends, and chat apps stay invisible.
• Counting an autoresponder as a reply. Seconds on the dashboard, silence for the buyer.
• Leaving leads unowned until someone picks them up. The clock runs, but no one is accountable.
• Winning the first reply and dropping the deal after one conversation. Half of all leads never get a second call.
• Mixing junk and spam into the numbers. It eats time and distorts every conversion rate you look at.
• Announcing the standard at a meeting and setting up no reminders. It lasts about two weeks.

What changes after Omnia Lab is rolled out?

Numbers from a working client, a premium car dealer. Measured before and after rollout.

Median first response

32 minutes → 6.5 minutes

Deals with a prepayment

4—7% → 13%

Revenue over 4 months

+33%, same headcount

Rollout

3—5 days, on top of the existing CRM

We do not name clients. During the audit we walk you through how the measurement was done so you can repeat it yourself.