The 63% Problem: Most Businesses Never Respond at All

It's easy to assume the real problem is speed — that businesses respond, just too slowly. The bigger issue is simpler than that. A 2024 study of more than 1,000 companies found that 63% never respond to a lead at all — not slowly, never.

That number has been climbing for over a decade. In the earliest version of this research, roughly a quarter of companies never followed up. Today it's closer to two-thirds.

For a local business, every one of those unanswered leads is a customer who took the time to reach out — and heard nothing back. That's not a marketing problem or a staffing problem. It's usually a systems problem: no one owns the follow-up, so it quietly doesn't happen. An automated response doesn't replace the personal follow-up call — it just makes sure the lead never falls through the crack in the first place.