Speed to lead in plain English
A lead is a customer with their hand up. Speed to lead is how long they keep it up before someone at your company responds.
For an emergency, the window is short. A homeowner with water on the floor fills in three contact forms and calls two numbers. The first contractor who answers with a real time slot usually gets the job, and the others paid for a lead they never had a chance to win.
Example: a water heater replacement form arrives at 7:42 p.m. on a Tuesday. One shop texts back at 7:46 with two appointment windows for the next morning. Another calls at 8:15 a.m. Wednesday. Same lead, same price, very different odds.
How do you measure speed to lead?
Formula
The definition only works if both timestamps are honest.
| Decision | Recommended rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Start time | When the lead reached any of your systems | Not when someone noticed it |
| What counts as a reply | A person, or a reply that can book (real times offered) | A generic "we got it" doesn't move the job forward |
| Calls answered live | Count as 0 minutes | They were answered |
| Missed calls | Start at the missed call, stop at the callback or booking-capable text | The caller is waiting just like a form |
| Average or median | Median | One overnight lead skews an average |
| Business hours or clock time | Report both | After-hours leads are where most minutes are lost |
Worked example
Example numbers for one week of web and marketplace leads at a plumbing company:
| Source | Leads | Median first reply | Answered within 5 min | Never answered | Booked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Website form | 31 | 9 min | 42% | 1 | 17 |
| Lead marketplace | 24 | 26 min | 17% | 3 | 6 |
| Missed calls | 18 | 4 min | 61% | 0 | 10 |
| All | 73 | 11 min | 38% | 4 | 33 |
The marketplace is slowest and books worst, which is the expected pattern when leads are shared with competitors. Before blaming the source, fix the reply time and see what happens to its booking rate.
What does the research say?
The best-known study is a 2011 Harvard Business Review article by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. An audit of 2,241 US companies found 37% responded to a web inquiry within an hour, 24% took more than 24 hours and 23% never responded; among those that answered within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours. A companion analysis of 1.25 million leads found that companies that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even an hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited 24 hours or more.12
~7×
more likely to qualify a lead when contact is attempted within an hour vs. an hour later
Caveats matter: the study covered online leads across many industries, not home services, and one author was the CEO of a sales software company. The research and its limits are unpacked in speed to lead: the research and how to measure yours.
Speed to lead and Google Local Services Ads
Speed has a second price on Google. Local Services Ads ranking depends partly on how likely your ad is to produce a lead, which includes "your responsiveness to customer inquiries", and profile quality includes your average response time.3 On top of that, a missed call during business hours where the caller stayed on more than 20 seconds can still be a charged lead.4 Slow answering can cost you the job, the lead fee and future placement. See Google Local Services Ads.
Speed to lead vs response time vs booking rate
| Speed to lead | Booking rate | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Minutes to the first real reply | Share of leads that become booked jobs |
| Type | Leading indicator: you control it today | Outcome: what the speed was for |
| Report by | Source and hour of day | Source and response-time band |
| A good week looks like | Median in single-digit minutes, zero unanswered | Rising, especially on marketplace and after-hours leads |
Response time is often used for service tickets from existing customers; speed to lead is specifically about new inquiries. Pair it with booking rate by response band to see what minutes are worth in your own business.
What improves speed to lead?
The usual fixes, cheapest first
- Route every lead source into one inbox instead of five email accounts
- Name an owner for new leads for every hour, including evenings and weekends
- Text missed callers immediately, with consent rules respected
- Reply to forms with real appointment windows, not just a receipt
- Cover after-hours with an answering option that can book or escalate
- Review median speed and unanswered leads by source every week
Automatic texts to new leads need the right consent and carrier registration; the rules are covered in missed-call text-back.
Speed to lead in TradesWork
The TradesWork lead inbox shows, on every lead, the time to the first reply that actually went out, or a live timer while it waits, and the sidebar shows median speed and booked rate by source for the last 30 days. Missed callers get a text right away, one per number every 12 hours and never to anyone who replied STOP. An optional AI text agent can reply to new leads and offer real arrival windows, handing emergencies, complaints and opt-outs to a person; the AI receptionist for calls is in early access.
Footnotes
-
James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011. ↩
-
BYU ScholarsArchive, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, publication record. ↩
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Google Local Services Help, About ad rankings. ↩
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Google Local Services Help, How leads work. ↩
