Lead Friendly

Free tool

How fast do you really respond to a new lead?

Speed to lead is the time between a lead arriving — a form fill, a missed call, a listing inquiry — and your first contact attempt. The audited average is measured in days; the research window where contact odds peak is measured in minutes. Pick where you honestly sit and see how you compare.

How fast does a typical new lead get a first call or text from you?

Use your median, not your best save — and count nights and weekends, because leads do.

Inside the one-hour threshold

Responding within the hour puts you in the minority of firms — and leaves the biggest documented gains still on the table.

What the published research says at this speed

  • • HBR's analysis of 1.25 million leads found firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that tried an hour later. You clear that bar.
  • • But the Oldroyd study found the decay starts in minutes, not hours: from a five-minute to a thirty-minute response, contact odds fell 100 times — and an hour is past both.

Directional, not a forecast: Directionally, moving from about an hour to under five minutes moves you from "better than average" to where contact odds peak in the published research. Across your ~50 leads a month, that difference applies to every single first impression.

The research figures are odds ratios from studies of other companies, not a prediction about yours — your lead sources, industry, and measurement all differ. That is why this tool reports where you sit against the published thresholds instead of inventing a deals-recovered number. Sources and full context in the speed-to-lead guide.

Everything above runs in your browser. Your answers are never sent to us or stored — we only count, anonymously, that the tool was used — and there is no email gate.

The two studies behind the comparison

Everything this tool says comes from two pieces of published research, covered in depth in the speed-to-lead guide: the 2011 Harvard Business Review article by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington (an audit of 2,241 US companies, where the firms that replied within 30 days averaged 42 hours, plus an analysis of 1.25 million leads showing firms that tried within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify a lead as firms that tried an hour later), and the Lead Response Management study (Oldroyd, MIT/InsideSales, 2007), which found contact odds fell 100 times between a five-minute and a thirty-minute response. Both studied other companies — the tool reports thresholds, not predictions about your pipeline.

Speed alone doesn’t close — most web leads are not reached on the first attempt. Pair the fast first touch with a finite, polite cadence across call, text, and email, and stop immediately on any opt-out.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good speed to lead?
Under five minutes from lead arrival to first contact attempt, on every channel, at every hour the law allows. That number comes from response-management research showing contact and qualification odds fall off steeply within the first half hour. Most companies measure in hours or days, which is why a five-minute response is a genuine competitive advantage rather than table stakes.
Where do this tool's benchmark numbers come from?
Two published sources, both discussed with full context in our speed-to-lead guide. The 2011 Harvard Business Review article by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington audited 2,241 US companies (the firms that replied within 30 days averaged 42 hours; 23% never replied) and, in a separate analysis of 1.25 million leads, found firms trying within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify a lead as firms trying an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms waiting 24 hours. The Lead Response Management study (Oldroyd, MIT/InsideSales, 2007) found that from a five-minute to a thirty-minute response, contact odds fell 100 times and qualification odds 21 times. The tool adds no statistics of its own.
Why doesn't the tool tell me how many deals or dollars I'm losing?
Because it can't know, and pretending otherwise would be invented precision. The research figures are odds ratios measured across other companies — your industry, lead sources, and sales process all change how they translate to revenue. The tool reports where you sit against the published thresholds and labels every impact statement as directional. If you want a dollar figure built from your own numbers, the missed-call calculator does that honestly for phone traffic.
How should I measure my own speed to lead?
Take your last 50 inbound leads and compute the median time from lead creation to first outbound attempt, per channel — median rather than mean, because one weekend lead skews an average. Count nights and weekends; leads arrive then whether or not anyone is working. If you don't log first-attempt timestamps anywhere, that is finding number one.
Is anything I enter here stored?
No. The comparison runs entirely in your browser — your answers are never transmitted to a server or written to a database or a log, and there is no email gate or signup. The only thing we record is an anonymous, cookie-free count that the tool was used.

Read next

The only reliable way to hit five minutes is to automate it

Leads arrive when your team is busiest or closed. Lead Friendly watches every lead source and fires the first touch immediately — an AI call inside the legal window, a text-back on missed calls — and logs every attempt so your speed to lead is a number, not a guess.

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