Speed to lead for contractors

Your speed to lead is a number you can pull from your own records this afternoon, and it will tell you more than any study. The studies are still worth knowing, mostly so you know what they don't say. This guide covers what the research actually measured, why a contractor's clock runs faster than a software company's, how to time calls, forms and marketplace leads separately, and how to turn your own leads into a booked-rate-by-response table that settles the staffing argument.

It sits in our lead generation guides. If you want the dollar model of a slow office, our earlier post on why the first five minutes beat your ad budget works one through. This page is about measurement.

What the research measured (and what it didn't)

Two pieces of research sit behind almost every speed-to-lead claim. Both are real, and both are narrower than the way they get quoted.

The 2007 Lead Response Management study. It was presented by InsideSales.com's CEO and James Oldroyd, then at MIT, at a business-to-business marketing summit. It used three years of call data from six companies, all from InsideSales.com's own system, and looked only at leads "captured through a web form" and called at least once.¹ Two definitions matter:

• A contact was a call that reached a live person and lasted a set length, which varied by company from 2 to 6 minutes.
• A qualified lead was whatever each company counted as qualified, in some cases an appointment with a salesperson. The study says plainly that it "did not address close ratios."¹

It also found that odds of contact fell more than tenfold within the first hour, and that after about 20 hours each extra dial lowered the chance of qualifying the lead.¹ The illustration at the end used mortgage and insurance lead providers that sold the same lead to several buyers. That last detail is the closest the study gets to a home-services marketplace.

The 2011 Harvard Business Review article. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington (InsideSales.com's CEO) audited how quickly U.S. companies answered web inquiries and analyzed lead data from a separate set of B2B and B2C companies.² It's the better-known source, and it measured response to online inquiries across many industries.

Why home services are harsher

A software buyer filling out a demo form can wait until tomorrow. A homeowner with water on the floor can't, and three things make the trade version of this problem worse.

• The need is urgent. No heat, no cooling, a backed-up drain. The customer isn't comparing features; they're looking for whoever can come.
• Marketplace leads are shared. Angi's own credit policy lists "the homeowner hires another pro first" among outcomes it won't credit, because that risk is already built into lead pricing.³ If you pay for a lead other pros also get, the first useful reply is most of what you bought.
• The next result is one tap away. A caller who reaches voicemail doesn't wait for a callback. They go back to the search results.

The three clocks: calls, forms and marketplace leads

Most offices track one response time. They need three, because the clock starts differently for each.

The targets are our suggestions, not industry benchmarks. One marketplace deadline is worth knowing on its own: Angi asks that you tried calling the homeowner within 24 hours of receiving the lead before it will consider a lead credit.³ Miss that, and a bad lead stays on your bill.

How to measure first response

Speed to lead is easy to measure badly. Set the definition before you look at a single number.

Then report the median, not the average. Here is why, with an example week of 12 leads and their first-response times in minutes:

These are example numbers. The 840-minute lead came in at 7 pm and got a reply at 9 the next morning. The average says the office is slow. The median says most leads are handled reasonably and one after-hours lead needs a different fix. Report both the median and the share within five minutes, then split them by channel, by lead source and by hour of day. After-hours leads deserve their own row so they don't hide inside the daytime number.

If TradesForce sends your website leads, it gets each lead's status back (contacted, booked or lost), so slow responses show up in the marketing report as well as the office's.

Booking rate by response band

This is the table that ends the debate about whether speed matters in your shop. Take a month of leads, sort them into response bands, and count how many in each band became booked jobs.

Every number in this table is an example. Run your own. In this example, the 40 leads in the two slowest bands booked 9 jobs. If they had booked at the 5-to-30-minute rate of 39%, that's about 16, so roughly 6 or 7 more jobs a month from leads the shop already paid for.

Getting faster without more staff

Most response-time problems are routing problems. Fix these before you post a job ad.

1. 1

   Put every lead in one inbox

   Calls, web forms, LSA messages and marketplace emails in one list with one timer. A lead nobody can see can't be answered.

2. 2

   Text back every missed call

   An immediate text tells the caller someone saw it and gives them a way to reply instead of dialing the next company. Our missed call text back guide covers setup and scripts.

3. 3

   Auto-reply to form leads, with consent

   Add a clear texting consent line to your web form, then send a reply that offers a real window, not a promise to call back.

4. 4

   Name an owner for every hour

   Lunch, shift change and late afternoon are where leads wait. Put a name on each hour, including Saturday if you take weekend leads.

5. 5

   Cover after hours on purpose

   Decide what happens to an 8 pm lead: an on-call person, an answering service or an AI receptionist, and measure it as its own band.

The missed call text back guide has the scripts. For nights and weekends, our comparison of an HVAC answering service, an AI receptionist and in-house coverage works through cost per booked job. The TradesWork AI receptionist is in early access, so confirm it's switched on for your account before you count on it.

Consent comes before speed

A fast text is only an asset if you were allowed to send it. CTIA, the wireless industry association, sorts business texts into three kinds.⁴

• Conversational: the customer texts first and you reply. No additional permission is expected.
• Informational: the customer gave you their number and asked to be contacted, such as a quote request. They should agree to texts for that purpose when they give the number.
• Promotional: anything with a sales offer. The customer should agree in writing first.

Under the FCC's TCPA rules, marketing calls and texts sent with automated tools need prior express written consent, and a customer can revoke consent by any reasonable means, including replies like "stop," "cancel" or "unsubscribe," which must be honored within ten business days.⁵ Our post on texting customers legally covers the rules in more depth. This isn't legal advice; check with your attorney for your forms.

A weekly speed-to-lead review

The speed to lead definition in the TradesWork glossary matches the one on this page. In TradesWork, the lead inbox shows time to the first reply that actually went out on each lead, and median speed and booked rate by source in the sidebar. If your leads mostly come from HVAC repair work, our guide to HVAC lead generation shows how to judge each source once the lead is answered, and the Angi leads guide covers that platform's credit rules.