The speed-to-lead stats everyone cites are from 2011. Here is what still holds, and how to measure your own.

By the Search Converts team · October 19, 2026

Where the numbers come from

Trace the citations and almost all of them collapse to two documents.

The Harvard Business Review article, March 2011. “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, reported on an audit of 2,241 US companies and a study of 1.25 million leads. The findings people still quote: companies that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even an hour longer, and more than sixty times as likely as those that waited 24 hours or more. Average response time among companies that responded within 30 days was 42 hours. Only 37% responded within an hour.

The vendor white paper. The “391% improvement when you call within one minute” and the “21 times more likely in five minutes” figures are usually attributed to a lead-management software company’s internal data, published as marketing material. The dataset has never been released, the methodology is not described, and the company has changed hands since. Treat it as a claim, not a finding.

Since then: nothing of comparable scale from an independent source. Vendors publish their own benchmarks every year, usually from their own customers, which selects for businesses that already bought response-time software. The 2011 study remains the only primary, peer-reviewed-adjacent source, and it is fifteen years old.

What has changed since 2011

• The lead is less patient. In 2011 a web lead was a form. In 2026 it is a form, a text, a chat, a Google Business Profile message, a booking request, or an AI agent making the inquiry on a customer’s behalf. Google’s own AI can now call businesses for availability and book local services, which means the first response is sometimes to software, and software does not wait 42 hours.
• The comparison set is bigger. Your lead probably submitted to three businesses from the same search result. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found 19% of consumers expect a same-day reply to a review, up from 6% the year before; expectations for an inquiry are tighter than for a review.
• The channels are measurable. In 2011 response time was a guess. Today every form, call and message is timestamped, which is why the right move is to stop quoting 2011 and start reading your own clock.

What still holds

Two things, and they are enough to act on.

1. Faster is better, with a steep curve at the start. The 2011 data showed the biggest drop in qualification odds happening inside the first hour. Every vendor dataset since, whatever its flaws, shows the same shape. There is no serious evidence that waiting helps.
2. Most businesses are slow. The 42-hour average and the 37%-within-an-hour figure were the real headline in 2011, and in our own audits of service businesses the median first response to a weekend web form is still measured in days. The competitive bar is low.

Measure your own in an afternoon

1. Pull 30 days of inbound leads from every channel: forms, calls, texts, chats, profile messages. Most tools export timestamps.
2. Record first human response time for each. Not the auto-reply; the first real answer.
3. Split by day and hour. Weekday business hours, evenings, weekends. The weekend number is usually the one that hurts.
4. Match to outcome. Which leads booked, quoted, or went quiet. Thirty days is small, but you will see the shape.
5. Put your numbers in the calculator. The speed-to-lead calculator turns your response times and close rates into the revenue a faster reply would recover, using your figures rather than 2011’s.

What to fix first

Almost always the same three things: an instant confirmation that tells the lead what happens next, a phone that rings somewhere a human picks up during listed hours, and a weekend rule (who answers, by when). The leaks guide covers the follow-up step, and the search-side version of this, written for owners who track calls, is the Eye To Ad Media piece on lead response time.

Keep the slide if you like it. Just change the number on it to yours.

Sources: Harvard Business Review, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (March 2011); BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026; Google, Search at I/O 2026 (AI calling and booking for local services).