Speed to Lead Statistics: What the Research Actually Shows, and Which Famous Numbers Are Misquoted

What does speed to lead mean?

Speed to lead is the time between a person asking for contact, usually by filling in a web form, and the first attempt by a person at your business to reach them. It is a measure of your own process, so you can calculate it from your own data without any study. The studies matter because they are the evidence people use to argue that the number should be small.

Where do the famous speed-to-lead numbers come from?

What did the 2007 Lead Response Management study measure?

The summary we read is titled the InsideSales.com / MIT Lead Response Management Study, by InsideSales.com and Dr James Oldroyd, and it was presented at a MarketingSherpa B2B demand generation summit on 16 October 2007. It says it examined three years of data across six companies, from over fifteen thousand web-form leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts, and that it asked one question: when should companies call web-generated leads for the best contact and qualification ratios?

It defines its terms. A contact is a call that connects with a live person and lasts a set length, which the summary says differed by company. A lead qualifies when it is willing to enter the sales process, in some cases by setting an appointment, and each company had its own way to mark that. The summary also says the study did not address close ratios, meaning how many of those leads became customers.

Its headline result is the one everyone quotes. The study (MIT / InsideSales, 2007) reports that the odds of contacting a lead called within 5 minutes, versus 30 minutes, are 100 times higher, and the odds of qualifying that lead are 21 times higher. It adds that from 5 minutes to 10 minutes the odds of contact fall by 5 times and the odds of qualifying by 4 times, and that across the first hour the odds of contact fall by more than 10 times and the odds of qualifying by more than 6 times.

What else did the study find that people leave out?

• Day of the week: Wednesday and Thursday were the best days to contact and qualify. The summary puts Thursday 49.7% better than the worst day, Tuesday, for contact.
• Time of day: 4 to 6pm was the best block for making contact, and 8 to 9am and 4 to 5pm the best for qualifying.
• After 20 hours: the summary says every extra dial hurts the chance of making contact to qualify a lead, then says the authors do not know why and asks whether another channel would warm the lead up. This is a finding about calling, so it bears on how many tries to make. Our post on retries and hand-over picks it up.

What are the limits of the 2007 study?

• It is a vendor summary. The copy we read is a web page printed in July 2008, with a copyright line naming Dr Oldroyd and InsideSales.com, a company that sells lead response software. It is the only version we read, and it cites no paper.
• The sample is six unnamed companies. The summary does not say which companies, which countries or which industries.
• It counts phone calls only. It does not test WhatsApp, email or text.
• It reports multiples, not rates. The summary (MIT / InsideSales, 2007) gives odds ratios of 100 times and 21 times, and we did not find the underlying contact or qualification rates on the page. An odds ratio is not the same as a chance that many times higher.
• It stops at qualification. It says nothing about whether a faster call produces a sale.
• It is old and not from the UAE. The data was collected before 2007. We know of no equivalent study for the UAE, and we do not publish a UAE number.

What about the Harvard Business Review study?

"The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington appeared in March 2011. The readable part of the page says most companies are not responding nearly fast enough. The figures that other sites report for it, and that we have not checked, are an audit of 2,241 US companies, 37% responding within an hour, an average reply time of 42 hours among those that replied, and 23% never replying. Secondary summaries add a separate dataset of 1.25 million leads from 42 companies in which responding within an hour made a lead nearly seven times as likely to qualify as responding an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as responding after 24 hours or more. We repeat these only as reported, not as verified.

The common mistake is mixing the two studies. The 100 times and 21 times figures belong to the 2007 study (MIT / InsideSales, 2007), and pages that credit them to the 2011 article are wrong on the attribution. We found no source for an 80% drop after five minutes in the 2007 summary, and we could not check the 2011 article for it, so we do not use it. Our lead response time benchmarks for UAE businesses post applies this to the UAE and says what it cannot show.

Which speed-to-lead numbers can you trust?

Practice. Trust the direction, not the decimal. The 2007 summary reports that contact and qualification fall as response time grows, and the 2011 article, by reports we have not checked, says the same. Nothing we read argues the opposite. Do not quote a multiple without the study, the year and what was measured, and do not quote the 78% and 391% figures at all until someone publishes the original. The reliable number is your own: the time from lead arrival to first attempt, in seconds, for each source. MAJ Leads shows speed to first reply on its Analytics page, and a first call due for the assigned rep within about 30 seconds is the target we build for. What we tested: in our own build, 10 of 10 test leads from each of 3 sources got a first task due within 30 seconds, inside working hours. These were leads we sent ourselves, not customer results.

What does this mean for MAJ Leads?

We have no customer response-time data to add to this research, and we do not claim a conversion uplift. What the product does is shorten the gap you control. See speed to lead in the UAE: the thirty-second standard, the five-attempt follow-up cadence and how it works.