Tools · calculator
What a slow reply costs you a month, by the studies’ own numbers, and your real median from last month’s rows.
Example rows are in the box · replace them with yours · nothing is sent
This mode needs JavaScript, which the page runs in your browser. Without it, do the exercise on paper: two columns, last month’s leads, when each arrived and when a person first replied. Sort the gaps; the middle one is your median. Then count the rows with no reply at all. That second number is usually the surprise.
Your median reply · from 0 leads
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That median sits at on the study’s stops.
Rows I could not read
Your close rate at a fast reply becomes odds. Thirty percent is three wins to seven losses, or 0.43. The Lead Response Management study, three years of data from six companies and more than 15,000 leads, found the odds of qualifying a lead fall fourfold when the reply stretches from five minutes to ten, and 21-fold from five to thirty. So the calculator divides your odds by 4 at ten minutes and by 21 at thirty, then turns the odds back into a close rate. That is the honest way to apply an odds ratio. Multiplying a percentage by 21 gives numbers past a hundred, which is why the calculators that do it quietly cap them.
Past thirty minutes the study changes its baseline. It compares the whole first hour with what follows, and finds the odds of reaching a lead ten times lower and the odds of qualifying more than six times lower. Those figures cannot be stacked on the thirty-minute one without inventing a curve, so the calculator holds the thirty-minute multiple for an hour, a day and a week, and says so. The true number past an hour is likely worse.
Leads that never hear back close at zero, and they come off the top before the multiple is applied. The jobs you win now, against the jobs you would win at a five-minute reply, is the gap. The gap times your job value is the month.
What the calculator does not claim. The study measured sales teams phoning people who had filled in a web form, and it measured qualifying, not closing. I have not run a controlled test tying a trade’s close rate to its reply time, and I would not trust a page that says it has. That is what the three chips are for: halve the effect, or quarter it, and watch the direction hold while the number softens.
| Study | Sample | Found |
|---|---|---|
| Lead Response Management study, James Oldroyd and InsideSales.com2007 | six companies, three years, more than 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts | the odds of qualifying a lead fall fourfold from a five-minute reply to a ten-minute one, and 21-fold from five minutes to thirty; after the first hour the odds of reaching the lead are ten times lower |
| The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, as quoted in XANT’s 2014 reportMarch 2011 | 2,241 US companies audited | 37 percent replied to a web lead within an hour; 24 percent took over 24 hours; the average among those that replied within a month was 42 hours |
| Annual Lead Response Report, XANT (then InsideSales.com)2014 | 9,538 companies sent a web lead during 2013 | 47 percent never replied; the median first phone reply was 3 hours 8 minutes; companies of 1 to 300 people replied in 48 minutes by any means and 2 hours 22 minutes by phone |
| Small business owners don’t answer 62 percent of phone calls, 411 LocalsJanuary 2016 | 85 small businesses in 58 industries, 30 days of calls | 37.8 percent of calls answered, 37.8 to voicemail, 24.3 to nothing; 70 percent of the owners answered fewer than half |
| Lead response time study of 1,000 B2B websites, RevenueHeroJuly 2022 | 1,000 websites sent an enquiry | 365 replied, and the average reply took a day, five hours and 17 minutes |
| B2B lead response times from 114 companies, WorkatoMarch 2026 | 114 companies sent a demo request | one emailed within five minutes and none called; nearly one in five never emailed; 3 hours 32 minutes with routing software against nearly 13 hours without |
| 2026 Consumer Texting Behavior Report, EZ TextingApril 2026 | 959 US consumers | 72 percent read a business text within five minutes, 82 percent reply within 15, and 70 percent expect a reply from a business within an hour |
The small-company line from 2014 is the one to hold your median against: 48 minutes. I hold myself to the same measure. My own desk records the time from a message landing to my first reply and reports the median against a promise of one working day, and the routing hub I built assigns a lead in 2.4 seconds median and reroutes an ignored one in 15 minutes.
If the median is hours, the fix is a text-back with a name and a time. A form post or a missed call triggers a text within seconds: this is Haseeb at Norvahl, I have your message about the garage, and I will call you at 8:15 tomorrow. One trigger, one action, no AI, an afternoon to set up. It is the first of the four things that should happen in the first five minutes.
If more than one person could take a lead, the fix is routing with a claim window. The hub on my homepage scores the crews, assigns one in 2.4 seconds median, texts the customer the crew’s name and distance, and gives the crew 15 minutes to claim the lead before the next crew gets the same email. Send a lead through it with your own zip and watch.
If the never column fills up at night, the fix is something that answers at 11 pm. An inbox that drafts replies from your own pages, your hours, your area, what you install over, and wakes you only for a refund, a complaint or a promise. It never quotes a price your calculator did not produce. The long version is the guide on one inbox for every channel.
If most of your leads ring rather than type, the delay is only half of what you lose. The missed call cost calculator prices the calls that nobody picked up, from your calls a week and the share that went unanswered. Add the two totals together only when the phone leads and the form leads are different people, or you will count the same job twice.
Whichever of the three fixes it is, half an hour is enough for me to tell you which. Book the call: thirty minutes, free, and bring the median you just worked out. The other calculators are on the tools page.
Take the moment a lead arrived and the moment a person, not an autoresponder, first replied, and subtract. Do it for every lead in a month, sort the gaps, and take the middle one. That middle value is the median, and it is the number this page asks for.
Under five minutes to acknowledge with something specific, under an hour for a named person, and never past the same working day. The studies behind those three lines are in the guide on how fast a small business should reply to a lead.
It was measured on sales teams phoning web leads at six companies, so I hold the exact multiple loosely and the direction firmly. EZ Texting’s 2026 survey found 70 percent of consumers expect a reply from a business within an hour, and the customer holding the phone is already looking at the next result. Use the chips to halve the effect and see whether the answer changes.
Count last month’s quotes and the jobs that came from them. Ten quotes and three jobs is 30 percent. If you cannot count them, that is the first thing to fix, and the routing desk on my homepage shows what a pipeline does for you.
No. It is a receipt, and one that promises to be slow. A reply names a person, says something specific about the enquiry, and gives a time the customer can hold you to. Count the reply, not the receipt, when you measure.
One Monday reply to a Friday lead makes the average look worse than your week, and one instant reply makes it look better. The median is the middle row, and neither can move it. The 2014 audit reported both for the same companies: a median of 3 hours and an average of 61.
No, while the page’s script is running. The maths runs in your browser, and the rows you paste are never sent anywhere. The only thing that carries your numbers is the link you copy, which holds the six fields of the cost mode and nothing else, so that whoever opens it sees the same result. With JavaScript turned off the page still works, and then the fields do travel to my server in the address, the same way a link you copy does.
The same measurement with a sales team’s name on it: how fast a new lead gets its first reply from a person. The studies on this page are the ones that phrase gets quoted from, usually with the numbers changed on the way.
The studies, what a slow reply costs, why owners miss the window even when they care, and how to reply after hours without staying up.
How fast should a small business reply to a leadFive minutes is the number the studies agree on, and almost nobody hits it by hand. What the window is, what closes it, and how a system holds it at 11 pm.Read the guide →Next step · Norvahl, one designer-engineer, both tradesTaking on projects
Tell me your median and how a lead reaches you today. I read it myself and reply within a working day.
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