What is speed to lead?

Why do the first few minutes matter so much?

Someone submitted an inquiry while looking at an ad for a project. Half an hour later they're scrolling through other projects, and a day later they don't remember where they left their number. That window is exactly what the research measured.

A 2011 Harvard Business Review analysis ("The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," 1.25 million leads, 42 companies) found the same thing on an hourly scale: companies that reached out within the first hour were nearly 7 times more likely to qualify the lead than those that waited an hour or more.

How should a developer measure speed to lead?

You need two timestamps in the CRM: when the lead came in and when the first contact happened. An automatic "thanks for your inquiry" doesn't count as contact. Look at the median, not the average: a couple of leads answered a week later will skew the average without showing the typical case.

• Track leads that arrive in the evening, overnight and on weekends separately. In our experience, that's where response times are worst.
• Compare salespeople against each other. Gaps of several times over are more common than you'd think.
• Check how many leads got no contact at all. According to InsideSales.com (8,742 companies, MarketingProfs, 2017), that figure was 39%.

Example: what a fast response is worth in money

The Acme project spends MX$300,000 a month on ads and gets 1,500 leads (CPL MX$200). First contact happened with 450 leads (30%), followed by 135 qualified leads, 40 meetings and 5 sales at an average price of MX$3.5M.

If an AI agent messages every lead on WhatsApp within the first minute and first contact reaches 60%, the same funnel produces about 10 sales. The ad budget stays the same.

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