Free tool
Lead Response Time Grader
How long a new inquiry waits before a human replies is the one number that predicts whether you win it, and almost nobody measures it. Grade yourself against the research in about fifteen seconds.
Be honest with these
Typical, not best. The number to enter is what happens on an ordinary Tuesday when two people are out and the van needs a tire, not what happens when you are watching.
Which windows are covered
Best in class
Your lead response grade
The next step up
Where these bands come from
The thresholds follow The Short Life of Online Sales Leads by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, published in the Harvard Business Review in March 2011. The study examined 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 business-to-consumer and 13 business-to-business companies.
Its two headline findings set the band edges used here: firms that contacted a lead within an hour were close to seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker as those that waited just one hour longer, and more than sixty times as likely as those that waited twenty-four hours or more.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. The study is from 2011 and covers sales organisations rather than trades specifically, so treat it as directional. And the five-minute band at the top reflects common practice in high-intent inbound rather than that paper. It is where we see the difference in the field, not a finding we can cite to it.
Nothing you enter leaves your device.
Worked example
An honest C, graded
Grade the Tuesday you actually have, not your best day. Here is a typical small operation and what the tool hands back.
The ideal way to fill it in
What comes back
Grade C · Average
A few hours is normal for a busy operation, and it is also where the quiet losses happen. The lead has usually contacted two or three others by the time you call.
The next step up is printed with the grade: get inside the hour. Usually a routing problem, not a staffing one.
Why speed beats polish
A rough reply in four minutes beats a perfect one at dinnertime.
The thing that makes response time unusual is that it is almost entirely within your control, costs nothing to change, and is invisible in every report you already look at. A lead that went cold while you were under a sink does not appear anywhere as a lost sale. It appears as marketing that is not working.
Acknowledge instantly, reply properly later
These are two different jobs and conflating them is why most operations are slow. An automatic message inside sixty seconds holds the lead. A real human reply within the hour wins it. You need both, and only one of them requires a person.
Give every channel an owner
Web form, phone, text, Facebook message, the inquiry that lands in a shared inbox nobody reads. Slow response is almost never laziness. It is an inquiry arriving somewhere with no name attached to it.
Measure the median, not the average
One inquiry that sat for a fortnight will drag an average into nonsense and hide a genuinely good operation. The median tells you what a typical customer experienced, which is the thing you are trying to improve.
Questions we get asked
Is a 2011 study still relevant?
Directionally, yes, and we would rather cite one real paper with its date on it than a round number from a marketing blog. What has changed since is that customer expectations have got faster, not slower, so if the finding is wrong today it is almost certainly wrong in the direction of understating the penalty. Treat the bands as a useful shape rather than a precise law, which is how the authors framed them too.
Does an automatic reply count as responding?
It counts for holding the lead, not for winning it. An instant acknowledgement stops someone dialling the next business, which is genuinely most of the battle in the first few minutes. But if the real reply then takes two days, you have bought yourself a slightly warmer corpse. Grade yourself on the human reply, and treat the automation as the thing that protects it.
We are a small team. Is under an hour realistic?
For a real human reply during working hours, usually yes, and it is more often a routing problem than a staffing one. The inquiry is arriving somewhere nobody is watching. Outside working hours it is genuinely hard without either a service or automation, which is precisely why the after-hours window is where most of the available ground is.
What if we reply fast but the lead still goes cold?
Then your problem is downstream of speed, and that is good news. Speed is the expensive thing to fix. Look at what the first reply actually says, whether it offers a specific time rather than asking an open question, and whether anyone chases the ones who do not answer. A fast first reply with no second touch is a common and fixable pattern.
Is my grade recorded anywhere?
No. The grading runs entirely in your browser, there is no form to submit, and nothing is stored or sent. The copy button puts the summary on your clipboard and nowhere else.
Who built this
Why we grade against a real study
A grade you cannot check is an opinion with a color scheme. The bands above come from a published study of 1.25 million leads, with the citation and its date printed where you can see them, and the caveats left in.
Founder Omar Ramos is a systems engineer and program manager with 16+ years of experience, and response time is the first thing we measure in an audit because it moves before anything else does. The system that holds a lead until a human is free is speed-to-lead follow-up. Where speed fits in the bigger picture is in What Can AI Actually Do for Your Business?, and the dollar size of your after-hours gap is one tool over in the Missed-Call Revenue Calculator. Or run every leak at once through the Lead Leak Self-Audit.
Built and maintained by Project Driver. Last reviewed August 2026.
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Find out what your real median is.
On the first call we measure it properly across every channel you have, and show you which window is costing you the most to leave open.