Median first response on a trades enquiry, against the same enquiry answered automatically.
Every trade business we have mapped has the same hole in it, and it is almost never the one they expect. It is not the marketing, the pricing or the quality of the work. It is the gap between an enquiry landing and somebody answering it.
The enquiry that arrives at 9:14 on a Tuesday night is not a bad lead. It is a good lead that goes cold while everyone is asleep.
What the research actually says
The often-quoted figure is that replying within five minutes makes you a hundred times more likely to make contact than replying after thirty. The number gets thrown around without much care, so it is worth being precise about what it measures.
It is about contact rate, not close rate. Reply fast and you reach the person while they are still at their laptop with the problem in front of them. Reply later and you are ringing someone who has moved on with their day and has already had two other businesses call them back.
The second finding matters more and gets quoted less: the decay is not gradual. Most of the damage happens inside the first hour, and the curve is close to flat after that. Replying in four hours is barely better than replying the next morning.
There is no prize for being the second business to reply. Whoever answers first usually sets the appointment, and the rest are quoting against someone who has already been to the house.
Why it happens to good businesses
Nobody decides to ignore enquiries. It happens because the person who can answer is the same person who is on the tools, and the enquiry arrives while their hands are full.
- The enquiry lands on a phone that is in a pocket, on a site, with no signal.
- It arrives at 9pm, when replying feels like it can wait until morning.
- It comes through a channel nobody checks daily — a Facebook message, a form that emails an address the office stopped monitoring.
- It gets seen, mentally filed as "I will do that after this job", and never resurfaces.
Every one of those is a scheduling problem, not an attitude problem. Which is precisely why it can be solved by a system rather than by trying harder.
The business that wins the job is not usually the best one. It is the one that was available at the moment the customer was ready.
What a fast reply has to do
Speed on its own is not enough. An instant reply that says "thanks for your enquiry, we will be in touch" buys you nothing — the customer still has to wait, and now they have been told to wait.
A reply that actually holds the job does three things:
- It answers the question they asked. If they asked about ducted air conditioning, the reply mentions ducted air conditioning.
- It offers two real times. Not "when suits you" — two slots that exist in your calendar, so the next step is a yes or a no rather than another round of messages.
- It hands you the conversation once it is warm. The system opens the door; you are the one who walks through it.
What it costs to leave it alone
Run your own numbers rather than ours. Count the enquiries you got last month, and be honest about how many were answered inside an hour. Multiply the gap by your average job value, then by twelve.
For most of the businesses we work with, the annual figure is larger than the cost of fixing it by an order of magnitude. That is not a sales line — it is arithmetic, and you can do it yourself in about five minutes.
Where to start
You do not need to automate the whole business to fix this. You need one thing: every enquiry channel landing in one place, with an answer going out in minutes whether anyone is at a desk or not.
That is the entire premise of Speed to Lead. If you want to see what it feels like from the customer’s side, send yourself an enquiry and time the reply.