Research · sources checked 20 October 2026

How fast should you reply to a web inquiry?

Probably faster than you do now. But many statistics quoted online are older or shakier than they look. Here’s what the studies measured, checked against their sources, and what to take from them.

The short answer

Send a useful first reply as soon as you can, and make personal contact the same day, ideally within an hour during working hours. An automatic acknowledgement can cover the first part. Only a person can do the second.

The study everyone quotes (2011)

Most “respond within the hour” advice traces back to research published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”. It had two parts:

  • An audit of 2,241 US companies, each sent a web inquiry. 37% responded within an hour and 16% within one to 24 hours; among those that responded within 30 days, the average response took 42 hours; and 23% never responded.
  • An analysis of 1.25 million leads received by 42 companies (29 B2C, 13 B2B). Firms that contacted a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited an hour or longer, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or more.

“Qualify” meant having a meaningful conversation with a decision-maker, not winning the sale. The figures are now 15 years old.

Home-service businesses (2018)

A secret-shopper study by the marketing firm Valve+Meter, reported by Pro Remodeler in December 2018, put service requests into 466 home-service companies. After five days, only 60% had responded, so about 40% never did. Companies that hadn’t replied within the first six hours had a 75% chance of not responding at all.

Recent data, from companies with something to sell

SeenOnMain, which sells lead-recovery software, audited 1,965 home-service websites and reported in September 2026 that 76.9% made no explicit promise about how fast they’d respond, 18.0% offered text messaging and 2.6% offered live chat.

Visionary Marketing analysed 28,400 B2B leads across 184 of its client accounts. Leads first contacted within 1–5 minutes qualified at 41.2%, against 1.9% for those contacted after 24 hours. Compared with contact at 30–60 minutes (18.6%), the advantage of a 1–5 minute response was about 2.2×, far smaller than the 21× headline.

What these studies don’t prove

  • Correlation, not cause. Fast responders may also be better organised in other ways.
  • Different settings. Much of the data comes from B2B companies with sales teams, not owner-run trades.
  • Vendor incentives. Several sources sell response-time products or services. So do we. Treat headline multipliers with care.
  • Age. The most-quoted figures are from 2011 and 2018, and are often repeated without a date.
The consistent finding: across very different studies, many businesses reply slowly or not at all, and faster contact is associated with better outcomes. That’s enough to act on, without relying on any single multiplier.

What to do about it

  1. Acknowledge every inquiry, including at night. Confirm it arrived, say when you’ll reply, and give urgent cases a phone number.
  2. Make personal contact the same day, most valuable and most urgent first.
  3. Follow up two or three times if there’s no answer, then stop. Make “no thanks” easy.
  4. Measure it. Record when each inquiry arrived and when you first replied.

Lead Desk handles steps 1 and 3, records when each inquiry arrived for step 4, and helps with step 2 through scoring and alerts. It doesn’t make the personal call for you. Try the demo.

Sources

Each figure above was checked against the linked page on 19–20 October 2026.