Speed-to-lead calculator.
Work out what slow first replies may cost in deals and revenue on your own assumption, see what the well-known speed-to-lead studies actually measured, and plan reply deadlines by lead band against your office hours.
- Your assumption, not the 100x stat
- Every study linked, with its limits
- Clock vs business-hours deadlines
From the form arriving to a real reply, not an autoresponder.
Leads that became customers, at today’s reply time.
200 leads a month · 2 days now · 4 h target
Replying in 4 h instead of 2 days could add about 6 deals and $18,000 a month: $216,000 a year.
An estimate on your own reply-speed assumption below, not a forecast. Change the curve and the numbers follow.
| Measure | Today · 2 days | Target · 4 h | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close rate | 15% | 18% | +3 pts |
| Deals a month | 30 | 36 | +6 |
| Revenue a month | $90,000 | $108,000 | +$18,000 |
| Deals a year | 360 | 432 | +72 |
| Revenue a year | $1,080,000 | $1,296,000 | +$216,000 |
The formula
Deals at target = leads × close rate today × (effect at target ÷ effect today), with the close rate stopping at 100%.
200 × 15% × (90 ÷ 75) = 36 deals a month
(36 − 30) × $3,000 × 12 = $216,000 a year
Every time in the table is local office time. Daylight-saving changes aren’t modelled.
Hot lead · 4h window · America/New York
3 of 7 example arrivals fall due on the clock before anyone is in.
LiftUp counts wall-clock time from the moment a lead arrives, with no pause for nights, weekends or holidays.
| Lead arrives | Due on the clock (LiftUp) | Office time before then | Due in business hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 08:00Your time | Mon 12:00 | 3 h | Mon 13:00 |
| Mon 09:15 | Mon 13:15 | 4 h | Mon 13:15 |
| Wed 13:00 | Wed 17:00 | 4 h | Wed 17:00 |
| Thu 16:45 | Thu 20:45outside office hours | 45 min | Fri 12:15 (+1 day) |
| Fri 17:30 | Fri 21:30outside office hours | 0 min | Mon 13:00 (+3 days) |
| Sat 10:00 | Sat 14:00outside office hours | 0 min | Mon 13:00 (+2 days) |
| Sun 21:00 | Mon 01:00 (+1 day)outside office hours | 0 min | Mon 13:00 (+1 day) |
“Office time before then” is how many working hours your team has before the clock deadline. 0 min means nobody is in before the lead is late, unless someone covers out of hours.
Free, no signup. Both tabs in one file.
Full report
Get the full speed-to-lead report.
An Excel workbook with your inputs, the results with live formulas, the reply-deadline table for every band, and every source with what it measured and its limits.
The short answer
How fast should you respond to a lead?
As fast as your team can reliably keep up, and within the hour where you can. In the best-known study (InsideSales.com and MIT, 2007), leads called within 5 minutes were 100 times more likely to be reached and 21 times more likely to qualify than leads called at 30 minutes. A 2011 Harvard Business Review study found leads contacted within an hour were nearly 7 times as likely to qualify as those contacted an hour later. Both measured phone contact and qualification, not closed deals, and both are more than ten years old. Set a deadline per lead band that your team can keep, then check your own close rate by reply time.
How it works
What the research found, and what the tool does with it.
01
The 5-minute figure is about phone calls
The 2007 study looked at 15,000+ web leads and 100,000+ call attempts at 6 companies. Calling within 5 minutes rather than 30 raised the odds of reaching the lead 100 times and of qualifying them 21 times. It says it “did not address close ratios”, and it was a conference presentation, not a peer-reviewed paper.
Source: Lead Response Management Study (PDF), checked 18 Oct 2026
02
Most companies reply in hours, not minutes
Harvard Business Review sent a test lead to 2,241 US companies. 37% replied within an hour, 24% took more than a day and 23% never replied. Among companies that replied within 30 days, the average was 42 hours.
Source: Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (paywalled), checked 18 Oct 2026
03
Qualifying fell with every hour of delay
Across 1.25 million leads at 42 US companies, firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly 7 times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited an hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day or more. Qualifying, not closing.
Source: SmartCompany, quoting the HBR study, checked 18 Oct 2026
04
Fast replies are still rare
Workato sent demo requests to 114 B2B companies. Only one sent a personalised email within 5 minutes and none called that fast. The average was 11 hours 54 minutes to an email and 14 hours 29 minutes to a call. The post is dated 2026, but the figures were on Workato’s site by 2021.
Source: Workato: B2B lead response times, checked 18 Oct 2026
05
“First wins” is about the buyer’s first call
In 6sense’s survey of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, the vendor the buyer contacted first won about 8 deals in 10. That is the vendor buyers chose to contact first, not the seller that replied fastest, so the calculator doesn’t use it.
Source: 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, checked 18 Oct 2026
06
LiftUp counts reply deadlines on the clock
Each new lead gets a deadline from its score when it arrives: Hot (70 and up) 4 hours, Warm (40 and up) 12 hours, the rest 24 hours. The clock runs through nights and weekends. The planner shows those times beside business-hours deadlines so you can see where cover is needed.
Source: LiftUp CRM, checked 18 Oct 2026
Worked example
200 leads a month, answered in 2 days.
- Reply-speed effect, 2 days vs 4 hours
- 75% vs 90%
- Close rate at a 4-hour reply
- 18%
- Deals a month
- 30 now, 36 at target
- Extra revenue a month
- $18,000
- Extra revenue a year
- $216,000
- Hot lead at Fri 17:30 is due
- Fri 21:30 on the clock
200 leads at a 15% close rate is 30 deals a month. The default curve puts a 4-hour reply at 90% of the 5-minute close rate and a 2-day reply at 75%, so the close rate becomes 15% × 90 ÷ 75 = 18%: 36 deals, 6 more a month at $3,000 each. In business hours (Mon to Fri, 09:00 to 17:30) the same Hot lead would not be due until Mon 13:00.
Good to know
What the calculator can’t tell you.
- How much reply speed matters for your leads. The default curve is a cautious guess; only your own data can replace it, by comparing close rates for leads answered fast and slow.
- The research ratios are about reaching and qualifying leads by phone. They are shown for context and never applied to revenue.
- The cost of replying faster, such as more people or out-of-hours cover.
- Reply quality. An autoresponder is not a first reply, and a fast reply that doesn’t help can do harm.
- Holidays and daylight-saving changes, which the deadline planner doesn’t model.
More free tools
Tools that go with this one.
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Qualify a deal against BANT, MEDDIC or CHAMP and see which questions are still open.
Sales pipeline template generator
Pick your stages and win rates, then download a pipeline sheet with live formulas.
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What is the 5-minute rule for leads?
The idea that you should reply to a new lead within 5 minutes. It comes from the 2007 InsideSales.com and MIT study, where leads called within 5 minutes were 100 times more likely to be reached and 21 times more likely to qualify than leads called at 30 minutes. That was phone calls at 6 companies, measuring contact and qualification rather than sales, and the study wasn’t peer-reviewed. It is a good direction, not a law: replying quickly helps, but how much it helps your close rate is something to measure in your own data.
Which speed-to-lead statistics have no source?
Several of the most repeated ones. “78% of customers buy from the first company to respond” is credited to “Lead Connect” with no study anyone has traced. “391% more conversions within a minute” is credited to Velocify, but quoted with different baselines and we found no original report. “Harvard found a 100x lift” mixes up the 2007 study with the 2011 HBR article, and “qualifying odds drop 400%” misreads the 2007 study’s “4 times”. The calculator uses none of them.
What is a good lead response time?
Faster than most of your competitors, which is not a high bar: in HBR’s test only 37% of companies replied within an hour, and in Workato’s the average email took almost 12 hours. A practical rule is a deadline per band: your best leads within a few hours, the rest within a working day. LiftUp uses 4 hours for Hot, 12 for Warm and 24 for the rest.
Does LiftUp count reply deadlines in business hours?
No. LiftUp sets each lead’s deadline on the clock from the moment it arrives, so a Hot lead at 17:30 on a Friday is due at 21:30 that evening. The hours are fixed at 4, 12 and 24 by score band. The clock stops when the lead’s status first moves out of New, and leads past their deadline show in the needs-attention queue on Starter and up. Use the planner to see which arrival times need someone on cover.
How do I find my own reply-speed effect?
Export your leads with the time each arrived, the time of the first real reply and whether it was won. Group them by reply time (under an hour, same day, next day, later), work out the close rate in each group, and divide each by the fastest group’s rate. Use groups with at least a few dozen leads, and remember that slow replies often go to weaker leads, which makes speed look more important than it is.
Put a deadline on every lead.
LiftUp scores each new lead from your forms and gives it a reply deadline by band: 4 hours for Hot, 12 for Warm, 24 for the rest. Free for 2 users.
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