- Measure from timestamps. Everyone thinks they’re faster than they are.
- Count first real contact, not the automated text.
- Look at the slowest leads, not just the average.
- Delays cluster: after hours, weekends, one source, or one person.
Why the number matters
In Harvard Business Review’s 2011 study “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” firms that attempted contact inside the first hour were nearly 7× as likely to qualify the lead as firms that took longer.
It wasn’t a study of contractors, and it doesn’t predict your results. It does say the gap is worth measuring. Our speed-to-lead guide covers how fast to aim for. This page is about finding out where you really are.
What to count
Start the clock when the inquiry lands: form submitted, call missed, message received. Stop it at the first real two-way contact from someone on your team. An automated text is useful, but it doesn’t stop the clock.
- Arrival time of the inquiry
- Time of the first call or message from a person
- Time of the first actual conversation, if different
- Who owned the lead and what source it came from
Run a one-month audit
Pull every lead from the last 30 days from your CRM, form notifications, and call log. Write down the two timestamps for each. If you can’t find a first-contact time for a lead, that’s a finding too.
Look at the median, which shows a typical lead. Then look at the slowest quarter. A good median can hide a long tail of leads nobody touched until the next day.
Where the delays hide
When you sort the slow leads, they usually share something.
- They arrived after 5 p.m. or on a weekend
- They came from one source whose notifications nobody watches
- They landed in one person’s inbox while that person was on a job
- They were missed calls with no voicemail and no callback
Fix the pattern, then recheck
Each pattern has a matching fix: an after-hours text with a booking link, every source routed to one place, a named owner and backup per shift, and an instant text-back on missed calls. Make one change at a time and rerun the audit a month later to see whether the slow tail shrank.
