Lead Response Time: Why 5 Minutes Makes or Breaks the Sale

Your lead just submitted a form. The clock is ticking. In five minutes, your odds of closing that deal will drop dramatically. In 30 minutes, they’ll be 21 times worse than if you’d responded immediately.

This isn’t speculation. It’s backed by research from MIT, Harvard Business Review, and millions of analyzed sales interactions.

The MIT Study That Changed Everything

In one of the most cited sales studies ever conducted, researchers at MIT analyzed over 100,000 call attempts across 3 years of data. They wanted to answer a simple question: when should you call a web lead?

The findings were stark:

Response Time	Contact Rate	Qualification Rate
Under 5 minutes	Baseline	Baseline
30 minutes	100x worse	21x worse
1 hour	10x worse	6x worse
24+ hours	Near zero	Near zero

That “21x worse” number deserves emphasis. A lead you call back in 30 minutes is 21 times less likely to become a qualified opportunity than one you call in 5 minutes.

Not 21% worse. Twenty-one times worse.

Why Speed Matters So Much

Three things happen when you respond slowly:

1. The customer moves on. When someone submits a quote request or calls about a service, they’re in buying mode. That motivation fades. They get distracted. Life happens. The urgency that made them reach out dissipates.

2. Competitors respond first. Research shows 78% of customers buy from the company that responds first. Not the cheapest, not the most qualified. The first responder. Every minute you wait is a chance for your competitor to pick up the phone.

3. Your credibility drops. Slow response signals poor service. If it takes you 3 hours to return a simple inquiry, what happens when there’s an actual problem? Customers make inferences about your entire business based on that first interaction.

The Response Time Decay Curve

The MIT study mapped exactly how lead quality decays over time:

Response Time	Relative Conversion Potential
Under 1 minute	100%
5 minutes	78%
15 minutes	36%
30 minutes	21%
1 hour	10%
3+ hours	4%
Next day	2%

By the time you’re returning calls the next morning, you’re working with leads that have just 2% of the potential they had when they first reached out. Most of that effort is wasted.

The Home Services Gap

Here’s where it gets worse for contractors and home service businesses.

The average B2B company takes 42 hours to respond to a lead. That’s nearly two full business days. And 55% of companies take five or more days.

But in home services, the problem is structural. You’re not sitting at a desk waiting for inquiries. You’re:

• Under a sink fixing a leak
• On a roof in the summer heat
• Driving between job sites
• Already on another call

According to industry data, 62% of calls to contractors go unanswered when crews are on job sites. And 78% of those callers won’t leave a voicemail. They just dial the next number.

You’re losing leads before you even know they existed.

The Math of Slow Response

Let’s put real numbers on this.

A typical home service business gets 100 leads per month with a 20% conversion rate at current response times (let’s say 30 minutes average). That’s 20 jobs at $500 average, or $10,000/month.

Now consider: that 20% conversion rate reflects your 30-minute response. According to the decay curve, you’re operating at 21% of potential.

If you responded in 5 minutes (78% of potential), your effective conversion rate would be closer to 74%. Even accounting for diminishing returns, you’d likely see 40+ conversions instead of 20.

That’s $10,000 in additional monthly revenue from leads you’re already generating.

What “Fast Response” Actually Looks Like

The research is clear: 5 minutes is the target. Not 10, not 15. Five.

That’s not “pretty fast” for most businesses. That’s essentially impossible if you’re doing the work yourself.

Here’s what fast response requires:

Option 1: Dedicated staff. Someone whose only job is answering calls and responding to inquiries. Works for larger operations. Costs $35,000-50,000/year. Still doesn’t solve after-hours.

Option 2: Call forwarding. Every call goes to your cell. You answer between hammer swings. Stressful, error-prone, and you still miss calls when you’re hands-deep in a water heater.

Option 3: Virtual receptionists. Human answering services that pick up on your behalf. Cost $200-500/month for reasonable volume. Better, but expensive at scale.

Option 4: AI answering. AI receptionists that answer instantly, 24/7, capture caller information, and can book appointments directly. Cost $50-100/month. Never misses a call.

The trade-off is always the same: speed costs money, or it costs you leads. Pick one.

Why AI Changes the Equation

Traditional solutions made you choose between speed and cost. AI breaks that trade-off.

An AI receptionist answers in under a second. Every call. 3 AM on Christmas? Answered. Three calls at once? All answered. You’re on a job site? Still answered.

It captures the caller’s name, number, problem description, and urgency level. It can answer common questions (“Do you service my area?” “What are your hours?”). It can book appointments directly to your calendar.

And it costs less than a single lost job per month.

The 5-minute rule becomes the 1-second rule. Your leads never experience a delay.

Getting Started

If you’re losing leads to slow response, here’s the path forward:

Step 1: Measure your current response time. Check your call logs. When did inquiries come in? When did you respond? Be honest.

Step 2: Calculate what it’s costing you. Use our Lead Response Calculator to see the revenue impact of your current response time.

Step 3: Decide on a solution. Based on your volume and budget, pick the approach that gets you to 5-minute response without breaking the bank.

Step 4: Test and measure. Track your conversion rate before and after. The data will tell you if it’s working.

The Bottom Line

The 5-minute rule isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between capturing 78% of your leads’ potential versus 21% or less.

Every hour you wait costs you qualified opportunities. Every day costs you revenue. The customers who could be yours are hiring your competitors simply because someone else picked up the phone first.

Speed doesn’t just win deals. It’s the only thing that qualifies you to compete for them.