Speed to lead: where the 100x stat comes from, and what holds up

You’ve probably seen it on a slide: call a new lead within five minutes and you’re 100 times more likely to reach them, and 21 times more likely to qualify them. It shows up in sales trainings, agency pitches and software demos.

We went back to the source. The 100 is real, but it measures a drop in the odds of contact at six companies in 2007, not how much more likely you are to reach a lead.

The source

The figures come from “The InsideSales.com/MIT Lead Response Management Study.” It was first presented at a MarketingSherpa summit on October 16, 2007, by Dr. James Oldroyd and Dave Elkington, the CEO of InsideSales.com, a company that sells sales software.

What the 2007 study measured

Data	Three years of calls from six companies
Leads	More than 15,000 web leads
Call attempts	More than 100,000
Channel	Phone only
What counted as a contact	A live call of a set length, defined by each company
What counted as qualified	Defined by each company
What it reported	Changes in the odds of contact and qualification
Peer reviewed	No

Here’s the line everyone borrows: “The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times.” For qualifying a lead, the odds “drop 21 times.”

Three things the slide version gets wrong

1. Odds aren’t “times more likely”

Odds compare the calls that connect with the calls that don’t. A chance compares the calls that connect with all the calls. When connecting is common, the two numbers move very differently.

Odds versus chance, an illustration

	At 5 minutes	At 30 minutes	Change
Calls that connect	9 in 10	About 1 in 12
Chance of connecting	90%	About 8%	About 11 times lower
Odds of connecting	9 to 1	About 1 to 11	About 100 times lower

So nobody can turn the study’s 100 into “100 times more likely.” The two numbers only come close when few calls connect even at five minutes.

2. The company’s own blog told a different story

On November 26, 2007, the company’s blog described the same comparison as “10 times more likely to contact a lead, and 6 times more likely to qualify a lead than by waiting even 30 minutes.” The study’s write-up uses 10 and 6 for something else: how much the odds fall across the whole first hour.

3. Six companies, phone only, 2007

The companies aren’t named, the data isn’t public and the study wasn’t peer reviewed. It was co-presented by the CEO of a company that sells the fix. None of that makes it wrong, but it’s thin support for a precise number everyone repeats.

What holds up

The direction does. In March 2011, Harvard Business Review published “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. It reported two separate findings.

The first was an audit: the authors sent a web lead to 2,241 U.S. companies and timed each reply.

How 2,241 U.S. companies replied to a web lead

How 2,241 U.S. companies replied to a web lead

Reply time	Companies
Within an hour	37%
1 to 24 hours	16%
More than 24 hours	24%
Never replied	23%

The second was a separate study of 1.25 million leads received by 42 U.S. companies. Firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were “nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead,” which the authors defined as “having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker,” as firms that tried “even an hour later.”

Two caveats. Elkington ran the same software company, and the article doesn’t say how the seven-times comparison was made. Nothing suggests a controlled test, so the faster firms may have differed in other ways too.

What to do with your own numbers

The direction is real: the sooner someone reaches a new lead, the better the chance of a real conversation. The exact multiplier isn’t worth putting on a slide. Your own reply times are worth counting.

For two weeks:

1. Log every call and web form that comes in, and how long until someone replied.
2. Mark which ones turned into a quote or a job.
3. Compare the fast replies with the slow ones.

Example: a two-week reply-time count

Came in	Channel	First reply	Minutes	Quote or job?
Mon 9:12 am	Call	9:14 am	2	Yes
Mon 1:47 pm	Form	4:05 pm	138	No
Tue 6:30 pm	Call	Missed	missed	No
Wed 8:03 am	Text	8:20 am	17	Yes
Thu 11:55 am	Form	Fri 9:10 am	1,275	No
Sat 10:20 am	Call	Missed	missed	No