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What slow follow-up costs you a year. Leads, reply time and close rate in. Customers and revenue left on the table out. Built on the same numbers the articles use. Nothing is stored; the address carries your inputs, so a result can be shared by copying the link.
Answer every lead within the hour and the same 30 leads a month produce about 13.8 customers instead of 7.4. That is 76 more customers a year (85% more), with no extra ad spend.
A conservative model on purpose. The research says the drop-off is steeper than this. Even so, the first-hour system is usually the cheapest growth in the building.
Want a hand building the follow-up that closes this gap?
Get in touchThe system that makes the first hour automatic, in five pieces: The First Hour.
How it works
- 01
Two things leak: the leads that never get a reply at all (nearly a quarter of companies never respond, in the Harvard Business Review audit), and the close rate lost to slow replies on the rest.
- 02
The model treats your stated close rate as the rate at your current reply speed, then scales it: a reply within the hour is the baseline (1.0), within five minutes slightly better (1.1), same day 0.72, next day 0.5, and two days or more 0.3. Those factors are deliberately conservative next to the research, which found a reply within the hour made a firm about seven times as likely to qualify a lead as waiting even an hour longer.
- 03
The first-hour scenario assumes every lead gets a reply and the close rate moves to the baseline. The revenue figure is the extra customers a year multiplied by first-year customer value. Nothing here spends another dollar on ads.
Questions
Within the first hour, and ideally within five minutes, because most inquiries go to whoever responds first. The research is old and has not been overturned: a reply within the hour made a firm about seven times as likely to qualify the lead as a reply an hour later, and more than sixty times as likely as a reply the next day.
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