Speed to lead: what the research actually says

In March 2011, Harvard Business Review published “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. It reported two pieces of work.

First, an audit of 2,241 US companies, each sent a test enquiry through its website. 37% responded within an hour, 16% within one to 24 hours, and 24% took more than 24 hours. 23% never responded at all. Among companies that responded within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours.

Second, an analysis of 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 business-to-consumer and 13 business-to-business companies in the US. Firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it, which the authors defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker, as firms that tried an hour later. They were more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or longer.

The figures most often repeated in sales and marketing content come from an earlier piece of work: the Lead Response Management Study, presented in October 2007 by Dave Elkington, chief executive of InsideSales.com, and Dr James Oldroyd, then at MIT's Sloan School of Management, at a marketing conference.

It drew on three years of data from six companies: more than fifteen thousand leads and more than one hundred thousand call attempts. It reported that the odds of contacting a lead called within five minutes, rather than thirty, were 100 times higher, and the odds of qualifying it 21 times higher.

Two cautions. These are odds ratios from six companies, and they are often restated loosely as “21 times more likely to buy”, which the study did not measure: it says plainly that it did not address close rates. And the figures are frequently credited to Harvard Business Review, which published different ones.

Both studies used US data from before messaging apps and smartphones changed how people get in touch. A vendor of sales software was involved in both. The samples were six companies in one case and 42 in the other, not a random cross-section of business. And the results show an association between speed and success, not proof that speed alone causes it: firms that respond fast may also be better organised in other ways.

We looked for credible, recent UK data on enquiry response times and did not find any with a published method. We would rather say that than quote a number we cannot check.

The direction of the finding has not been seriously challenged: interest fades quickly, and the business that replies first with something useful has an advantage. The HBR audit's other finding may matter more. Nearly a quarter of companies never replied at all. The causes the authors gave were organisational, not technical: leads pulled from systems once a day, teams focused elsewhere, and rules for who handles what.

That is where we start with clients. Before anything is automated, every enquiry needs an owner, a response rule and a way to see what happened to it. Then fast, accurate first replies, drafted by AI and approved by a person where it matters, become possible without promising a multiplier nobody can verify.