Beagle · LeadRescue
What does a slow reply actually cost you?
Four numbers you already know. One estimate, with every assumption printed on this page and the research named. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Your numbers
These are example figures, not yours. Change them.
Calls, forms, texts — anyone who asked for your work.
Revenue from one job, before costs.
Of every 100 enquiries, how many become a paying job?
Today you win about 12 jobs a month, or $172,800 a year, from enquiries.
This slider is the only number on the page we made up. The study was run on web form leads at companies much larger than a local service business, so we discount it to 25% by default. We have no evidence for 25%. Drag it to 0 and the estimate goes to zero, which is the honest floor.
Ceiling, not a forecast
$159,508
a year, at most, exposed by reply speed
That is $13,292 a month, or about 11 more jobs a month, if every assumption below holds for your business. Several of them probably do not. It is a ceiling on what speed could be worth, not a prediction of what you would collect.
For scale: that is 92% on top of the $172,800 a year you already make from enquiries. If that sounds too good to be true, it probably is — the published odds ratio is very large, and the slider above is how you argue with it.
The whole arithmetic, with your numbers in it
- 1.You get 60 enquiries a month and win 20% of them.
- 2.Your reply band is “Later the same day”. The study says a reply inside the hour is 7× more likely to produce a qualified conversation than that. "Nearly seven times as likely to qualify" for a reply within the hour versus one "even an hour later". We read your band as the "an hour later" side and use 7.
- 3.You accepted 25% of that effect, so we use 2.50× instead of 7×.
- 4.Applied to the odds of your close rate, not the percentage: 20% becomes 38%.
- 5.The difference, 18%, across 60 enquiries at $1,200 a job is $13,292 a month and $159,508 a year.
Where the number comes from
Does the arithmetic
The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, David Elkington · Harvard Business Review, March 2011
“Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later - and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.”
Sample: 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the U.S.
Quoted, deliberately not used
Lead Response Management Study (executive summary)
James Oldroyd (then MIT Sloan) and Dave Elkington, InsideSales.com · Presented at MarketingSherpa's B2B Demand Generation Summit, 16 October 2007
“The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.”
Sample: Three years of data from six companies: over fifteen thousand web leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts. The study states it did not address close ratios.
This is the only published figure we found that separates five minutes from the rest of the first hour, which is exactly what the five-minute idea rests on. We still kept it out of the arithmetic: its two qualification figures — “over 6 times in the 1st hour” and “21 times” between five and thirty minutes — cannot both sit on one smooth curve, so combining it with the HBR bands would mean inventing a reading the authors never published. It is here so you can weigh it yourself.
How common this is
“We audited 2,241 U.S. companies, measuring how long each took to respond to a web-generated test lead. Although 37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours - and 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.”
Same HBR article, a separate audit. Those were mostly large companies, not local service businesses, so read it as “this is normal”, not as a benchmark for you.
Every assumption behind that number
All of them, in the order they affect the answer. If one of these is wrong for your business, your number is wrong.
- 01The study counts a "qualified" lead as a meaningful conversation with a decision maker. We apply its odds ratio to your close rate instead, which assumes speed changes whether the conversation happens and not what happens after it. That is our assumption, not a finding.
- 02The study measured web form leads at companies in insurance, lending, cars, software and similar. It did not measure phone calls to a local service business, and nothing in it was measured at your size.
- 03Odds are not percentages. We convert the ratio in odds space, which is why the result never implies you win more than every enquiry you get.
- 04The discount on the slider is ours, not the study’s. We default it to 25% because we think the effect is smaller for a small local business than for the companies measured, and we have no evidence for that figure.
- 05Your enquiry count, close rate and average job value are taken as given, exactly as typed. No seasonality, no quoting mix, no bad months.
- 06It assumes you could actually service the extra work. If you are already at capacity, this number is not money you can collect by replying faster.
- 07It is the difference between two bands, not a count of jobs you lost. Enquiries you would have won anyway on a slow reply are already inside both sides of the subtraction.
- 08Everything you type stays in this browser tab. There is no server behind this page and nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
Two things. The study only counts enquiries that arrived — it says nothing about the people who called, got voicemail and never showed up in your records at all, so your real enquiry count may be higher than the number you typed. And the 2007 study quoted above suggests the first hour matters far more than the HBR bands can show, which would make our “within an hour” band too generous and our estimate too low for anyone replying in forty minutes.
The honest answer is: most of it. The effect was measured on web form leads at large companies in insurance, lending and software. A roofing enquiry is not an insurance quote form. We apply a qualification finding to a close rate. We hold job value and capacity fixed. Any one of those could mean the real figure is a small fraction of what this page shows — which is why the headline says ceiling, and why the slider starts at 25% instead of 100%.
Don’t. Check it. The two studies are linked above, the quotes are verbatim, and the five steps of arithmetic are printed with your own figures substituted in. If the slider sits at 0 the answer is zero — a tool built to flatter itself would not have that control on it at all.
If you want, see what an automatic reply inside five minutes would look like.
Optional, and after the fact — your estimate is already above, and nothing here is needed to read it.
What happens to this: nothing, until you send it yourself. This page has no server. Typing your address here stores it nowhere — the button opens your own email app with a message already written, and you decide whether to press send. If you do, Aditya at Beagle reads it and replies to you directly. It is not added to any list and not shared.
Rather not? Your estimate is above and it does not need this.