The research on response time is unforgiving. Wait an hour to call a fresh lead and your odds of reaching them collapse. What the data says, and how to act on it.
Figures in this article describe the wider market and are drawn from the third-party sources listed at the end. They are not Lead Foundry results, and nothing here is a projection of what any individual broker will achieve.
Every broker knows they should call a new lead quickly. Almost none appreciate how steep the decay curve is, which is why "I called them the next morning" gets said without embarrassment.
Two pieces of research, both freely available, settle the question. Neither is about insurance or mortgages specifically, and both have been replicated in shape often enough that the mechanism is not seriously disputed.
The Lead Response Management study, run by Dr James Oldroyd at MIT Sloan in partnership with InsideSales.com, analysed three years of data from six companies, covering more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts.
Two headline findings. The odds of contacting a lead called at five minutes versus thirty minutes drop by a factor of 100. The odds of qualifying a lead across the same interval drop by a factor of 21.
Read the interval carefully: The collapse happens inside twenty five minutes. Not overnight, not over a weekend. The difference between calling at five past and calling at half past is most of the available advantage.
HBR audited 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker as those that tried an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or more.
The more useful part of that audit is what it found about behaviour rather than about outcomes.
| Responded within 1 hour | 37% |
|---|---|
| Responded in 1 to 24 hours | 16% |
| Took more than 24 hours | 24% |
| Never responded at all | 23% |
The average first response time across the audited firms was 42 hours. Nearly a quarter never responded at all. The benchmark is beatable because so few firms attempt it.
Source: Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later.
Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
Three mechanisms, and they compound.
Rarely unwillingness. Almost always one of two structural problems, and both are fixable without changing how hard anyone works.
If enquiries arrive by email or CSV, the clock starts when somebody notices an inbox. That is minutes on a good day and hours on a normal one. An automated push into the system you work from, creating an assigned task with a notification, removes the entire delay.
A diary with no calling blocks means new leads wait for a gap. Salesforce research puts the share of time sales professionals spend actively selling at around 40%, with the rest going to administration and internal work. Without protected blocks, new enquiries compete with that 60% and lose.
The diagnostic: Measure your median minutes from lead arrival to first attempt for last month. Most brokers who believe they call fast discover a median measured in hours, and the number is far more actionable than the belief was.
| Element | The rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery | Automated push into the CRM, not email | Removes the human noticing step entirely |
| Assignment | A named owner set automatically on arrival | An unowned lead is nobody's emergency |
| Notification | A push to the owner, not a row in a list | A list does not interrupt; a notification does |
| Calling blocks | Protected slots each day for new enquiries | Speed needs available time, not just intent |
| Fallback | A second person who covers when the owner is out | Leave and client meetings are the usual failure |
| Measurement | Median minutes to first attempt, reviewed weekly | It degrades before revenue does |
Then send something in five minutes and call as soon as you can. A short message that names the brand they enquired through and says when you will ring holds the context that would otherwise decay, and it converts an unknown number into an expected one.
The research on multi-channel contact supports this. Velocify's analysis across close to 3.5 million leads found prospects who are also emailed are 16% more likely to be reached by phone, and that 59% never receive a single email.
Within five minutes where possible. The MIT Sloan lead response study found the odds of contacting a lead drop by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response, and the odds of qualifying it drop by a factor of 21. Harvard Business Review found firms responding within an hour were 60 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation than firms waiting more than a day.
Under five minutes is the benchmark the research supports, and under an hour is where most of the HBR advantage sits. For context on how beatable that is, the HBR audit of 1.25 million leads found an average first response time of 42 hours, with 23% of firms never responding at all.
They are not competing, because speed decides whether the skill gets used. A broker who cannot reach the consumer has no opportunity to be good at the conversation. Since response time is a process variable and skill is a training variable, speed is usually the cheaper and faster of the two to fix.
Send a short message immediately that names the brand they enquired through and says when you will call, then call as soon as you can. It preserves the context that would otherwise decay. Velocify research across close to 3.5 million leads found prospects who are also emailed are 16% more likely to be reached by phone.