What is speed to lead?
Speed to lead is how quickly a seller responds after a buyer reaches out. It runs from the moment an inquiry arrives, by web form, phone or email, to the first real contact from a person. In commercial services, it covers quote requests, requests for a site walk, and emergency service calls from buyers who could become agreement customers.
Why it matters to a revenue leader
Buyer interest decays quickly. A 2011 Harvard Business Review article by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," reported that most companies respond to online inquiries far too slowly. For a revenue leader, speed to lead is one of the few demand metrics that is cheap to fix: it needs routing, coverage and someone watching the queue. A property manager with a failed inspection is often calling several contractors at once, and the first credible reply starts with an advantage.
How to calculate it
For each inbound inquiry, measure the time from arrival to the first contact by a person, then report the median and the share answered within your target window.
Common mistake: counting an automated acknowledgment email as a response.
Example
Fictitious numbersA mechanical services company reviews 200 web inquiries from one quarter. The median response time is 26 hours, and inquiries that arrive on Friday afternoon wait until Monday. After it assigns weekend coverage and routes inquiries to the branch that serves the site, the median falls under two hours the following quarter.
"What was our median response time to inbound quote requests last month, and who knew the answer before today?"
Sources
- The Short Life of Online Sales Leads (Harvard Business Review, March 2011) checked 9 Oct 2026