Why the First Business to Respond Wins the Job

A widely cited Harvard Business Review study found that businesses that respond to a lead within an hour are far more likely to actually qualify it than those that wait even a little longer. An earlier MIT-affiliated study found something even more striking: reaching out within five minutes makes a business roughly 100 times more likely to actually connect with the lead than waiting half an hour.

And yet, response times have gotten worse, not better. A 2024 study of over 1,000 companies found the average lead response time now sits above 29 hours — and 63% of companies never respond at all.

For a local service business, that gap is the whole ballgame. A customer who fills out your form or calls and doesn't get an answer isn't waiting around — they're calling the next name on the list. Fixing response time isn't a nice-to-have. It's often the single highest-leverage thing a small business can do.