Most "speed to lead statistics" pages repeat numbers nobody can trace — the famous "78% of customers buy from the first responder" has no findable source. This page has only statistics you can open and read. If we can't trace it, it isn't here.
Response Time And Contact / Qualification Odds
| Finding | Source |
|---|---|
| Odds of contacting a lead drop 100× from 5 minutes to 30 minutes; odds of qualifying drop 21× | Lead Response Management Study, Dr. James Oldroyd (MIT) with InsideSales.com, 2007 — 6 companies, 15,000+ leads, 100,000+ call attempts |
| Odds of qualifying fall 4× from 5 minutes to 10 minutes | Same study |
| Within the first hour, odds of contact fall more than 10× and odds of qualifying more than 6× | Same study |
| Responding within an hour: nearly 7× as likely to qualify the lead as responding an hour later; more than 60× as likely as responding after 24 hours | Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," Harvard Business Review, March 2011 — 2,241 U.S. companies |
| Calling within 1 minute lifts conversion 391%; at 2 minutes 160%; at 3 minutes 98%; at 30 minutes 62% — the curve is steepest inside the first minute | Velocify, The Ultimate Contact Strategy — ~3.5M leads |
| No published study measures response time inside the first minute. Lead Dominator's founding members will produce the first sub-minute curve for home services, from timestamped lead logs | Lead Dominator, founding pilot (in progress) |
How Slow Businesses Are
| Finding | Source |
|---|---|
| Average response time to a new web lead: 42 hours | HBR, 2011 |
| 37% responded within an hour; 23% never responded | HBR, 2011 |
| Only 7% of 433 B2B companies responded within 5 minutes; 55% took 5+ business days | Drift Lead Response Survey, 2017 |
Home Services Specifically
| Finding | Source |
|---|---|
| 27% of calls to home service businesses go unanswered | Invoca call data, 2023–2024 |
| 78% of consumers have abandoned a business after an unanswered call | CallRail consumer survey (n=1,000), 2025 |
| 53% of homeowners are comfortable with AI handling their first inquiry | Housecall Pro Home Service Customer Service Report, 2025 |
| Google lists "your responsiveness to customer inquiries and requests" among Local Services Ads ranking factors; missed calls may hurt it | Google Local Services Help, "About ad rankings" |
Statistics We Don't Use
- "78% of customers buy from the first company that responds." Widely repeated; no original study can be found. We don't cite it.
- Any vendor's self-reported "100% response rate" or "2× revenue" without a method. Those are claims, not statistics.
Run your own numbers through the lost-revenue calculator — it applies these odds ratios to your close rate.
The Next Lead You Pay For Is Going To Someone. Make It You.
No card. No contract. Only 5 founding spots left — free until your new-job revenue goes up.