10 September 2026 · 6 min read
There is one number in lead response that is repeated so often it has stopped meaning anything: "call a lead within five minutes and you are 21 times more likely to qualify them". It is worth knowing exactly what it measured, because the honest version still describes a Tuesday morning in a trade — just not in the way it is usually quoted.
The figure comes from the Lead Response Management Study that Dave Elkington of InsideSales.com and James Oldroyd, then at MIT, presented in October 2007. They looked at three years of data from six companies: more than 15,000 people who had filled in a web form, and more than 100,000 calls that sales reps made to them. When the first call went out within five minutes rather than thirty, the odds of reaching the person were 100 times higher, and the odds of qualifying them as a real prospect were 21 times higher.
Two things to know before you quote it. It measured sales reps calling back web-form enquiries, not a business answering its own phone: nobody in it rang a plumber. And it is one software company's customer data, summarised by that company, not a peer-reviewed paper. A later Harvard Business Review article by Oldroyd and two colleagues (March 2011), drawing on 1.25 million leads, found the same direction on a gentler scale: 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.
So the honest reading is not a precise multiplier for your phone. It is that interest cools in minutes, not days — and that was for people who had chosen to fill in a form and then gone on with their day.
Someone with a leaking pipe is not researching. They have a problem that is getting worse, a phone in their hand, and a list of four numbers from a search. They are going to ring them in order until somebody picks up, and then they are going to stop ringing.
That is the whole mechanism. It is not that a slow response annoys them. It is that by the time you call back, the problem is solved and they have no reason to take your call.
You already paid to make that phone ring. LocaliQ, which runs search advertising for local businesses, published what its own clients paid per lead from search ads between May 2020 and June 2021: a median of $48.91 in plumbing, $62.18 for heating and furnaces and $101.49 for roofing and gutters. Your own ad account will have a more recent figure. Either way, the money is spent before the phone rings — so a missed call is not a neutral event, it is a purchase you threw away.
We keep the sourced figures on one page, each with where it came from and when it was checked, if you want to check them or use them.
The text-back is worth dwelling on because it is nearly free and almost nobody does it. A caller who gets a text a minute after their call rings out has your number in their phone, knows they were heard, and has a reason not to dial the next name. It does not need to be clever. "Sorry we missed you — we're on a job. What's the address and what's it doing?" outperforms silence by a distance.
Answering fast only matters if what follows is fast too. A renovation enquiry answered in two minutes and quoted in nine days is still a lost job. If quoting is your bottleneck rather than answering, that is a different tool — Estiquik is estimating software built for exactly that, and it is the other half of this problem.
Speed is not one thing. It is answered fast, quoted fast, and confirmed fast, and a chain is only as quick as whichever link you have not fixed.
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