Lead-Response Speed Calculator

It depends on your lead volume, your average job value, and how fast you actually respond, which is why this returns a range rather than a number. As an illustration, a business taking 38 inbound leads a month at an $800 average job value, responding in 45 minutes on average, is looking at roughly 4 to 6 additional jobs a month at a faster response, which is about $3,200 to $4,800. Those figures move entirely with your own inputs, and they are a directional estimate rather than a measurement.

The underlying work is a 2007 study by Dr. James Oldroyd, then a visiting research fellow at MIT, conducted with InsideSales.com. It found contact odds drop by roughly a factor of 100 between a 5-minute and a 30-minute response, and qualification odds by roughly a factor of 21 over the same window. Two limits matter. It is industry data rather than peer-reviewed research. And it measured contact and qualification odds only, never close rates and never revenue. So this tool does not apply those odds ratios as a conversion curve, which would be arithmetic the research cannot carry. It uses a labeled directional decay model whose shape is calibrated from the published research: highest in the first five minutes, dropping sharply through thirty, and levelling at a low floor by twenty-four hours.

Because every figure the tool produces scales directly off it, so it should be yours rather than ours. Thirty-five percent is a working assumption for home services on immediate contact, not a measured benchmark. If your real instant-contact close rate is twenty percent, halve everything the tool tells you.

Because a single figure would claim precision that is not available here. The direction and the rough magnitude are well-supported by the research; the exact number is not. A tool that overclaims on this is exactly the kind of thing a buyer distrusts on sight, and the range is the honest form of the answer.