What is speed to lead?
Speed to lead is the time between a potential customer's inquiry and the business's first attempt to contact them. The inquiry can be a web form, a quote request, a text message, or a call the business missed. The clock starts when the inquiry arrives and stops at the first call, text, or email back.
It is one of the few lead-handling measures a business controls completely. The marketing that produced the inquiry is already paid for, and the customer is waiting.
What does research say about response time?
The most cited study is "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," published in Harvard Business Review by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, and David Elkington. It reported two findings:
- Response is slow. The authors audited 2,241 U.S. companies by sending each 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 replied within 30 days, was 42 hours.
- Leads go cold quickly. In a separate study of 1.25 million sales leads at 42 companies, firms that tried to contact a customer within an hour "were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead," meaning they had a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker, compared with firms that tried even an hour later. They were "more than 60 times as likely" as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.
The research wasn't specific to moving companies, but it measured the same kind of inquiry movers receive: a person asking a business to respond online.
Why does speed to lead matter for moving companies?
Two features of the moving business make response time important:
- Some leads go to several movers at once. Lead providers that sell shared leads deliver the same inquiry to more than one company, so the first useful response has the first chance to book the job. See shared vs. exclusive leads.
- Some platforms measure it. Google says responsiveness to customer inquiries affects how likely a Local Services ad is to result in a lead, which is part of how those ads are ranked. Google also says "having a consistently fast response time could improve your ad's ranking on search," and it can show an estimated message response time on the ad itself. See what are Local Services Ads.
Where does a moving company lose time?
The HBR authors named several causes of slow response, including retrieving leads from CRM systems "daily rather than continuously" and lead-distribution rules based on "geography and 'fairness.'" In a moving company, the same delays usually show up as:
- Inquiries that wait in an inbox until someone checks it.
- Forms that send an email but no alert to the person who calls customers back.
- Calls that go unanswered during jobs, lunch, or after hours, with no callback process.
- Leads assigned by rotation to an estimator who isn't available.
How do you measure speed to lead?
Compare two timestamps for each inquiry: when it arrived and when the first contact attempt was made. Most form tools, call tracking platforms, and CRMs record both. Useful views are:
- Median response time, which isn't skewed by a few very slow replies.
- Share of inquiries answered within an hour, the threshold the HBR research measured.
- Share never contacted, which in the HBR audit was nearly a quarter of companies.
- Response time by hour and day, to find the evenings and weekends where inquiries wait longest.
How can a moving company respond faster?
Shorten the path from inquiry to a person:
- Send every web inquiry to a phone, as a text or app alert, not only to an inbox.
- Assign coverage for every advertised hour, including who calls back missed calls.
- Send an immediate acknowledgment by text or email that says when the customer will hear from someone, then follow through.
- Track missed calls separately and return them in order.
- Review the numbers weekly against the measures above.
Speed doesn't replace a good conversation. The HBR findings tie faster first attempts to more qualified conversations.