Five minutes. Then the enquiry belongs to someone else.
Almost every company thinks it replies quickly. Almost none has ever measured it. The gap between the two, when you finally look at the clock, is regularly a matter of hours.
Whoever contacts an enquiry within five minutes of its arrival is up to a hundred times more likely to make contact with that person than whoever waits thirty minutes. The figure comes from the InsideSales.com/MIT study led by James Oldroyd of the Sloan School of Management, presented in 2007: «The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times». It measures successful contact on call-backs, not the closed sale.
The delay doesn't come from people being slow. It comes from three structural things: the enquiry lands in a place nobody is watching at that moment, nobody knows it is theirs, and outside working hours there is no mechanism at all.
The indicator to keep is called time to first reply, that is, the minutes between an enquiry arriving and the first reply. It is measured without software: you take the last twenty enquiries and write next to each the time of arrival and the time of reply. It is an afternoon's work.
What that number really measures
It should be read precisely, because it is the kind of figure that gets cited worse than it is written. It doesn't say that replying in five minutes sells a hundred times more. It says it gets you into contact a hundred times more: managing to talk to the person who wrote, instead of finding a phone ringing out and an email that gets no reply.
Put like that it is less spectacular, and more useful. It describes one thing only: the attention of whoever has just written lasts very little. At that moment the person is at the screen, has the problem on their mind and, this is the point, has just written to two others as well. Thirty minutes later they are back at work, and your reply arrives at a moment when they are no longer thinking about you.
Why an SME replies late even when it is fast
The delay almost never comes from whoever replies being slow. It comes earlier, at three points that seem to have nothing to do with speed:
- The enquiry arrives in a place nobody is watching at that moment. The website form writes to a shared inbox; WhatsApp is on one person's phone; the missed call leaves no trace anywhere. There is no single point saying «something is waiting here».
- Nobody knows it is theirs. When an enquiry reaches three people, all three reasonably assume someone else will reply. It is the most common way an enquiry dies in an organised company.
- Outside working hours there is nothing. An enquiry arriving on Friday at 19:00 gets its first reply on Monday at 09:00: sixty-two hours, none of them attributable to a lazy person.
The problem isn't how fast people are, but where things land and who knows they have landed.
The indicator almost nobody keeps
Time to first reply, that is, the minutes between an enquiry arriving and the first reply (human or automatic), has the best ratio between impact and cost of measurement of any sales indicator. It doesn't require software: it requires someone to take the last twenty enquiries that arrived and write next to each the time of arrival and the time of the first reply.
It is an afternoon's work, done with a spreadsheet, and it produces the most uncomfortable and most useful number an SME can hold. Uncomfortable because in almost every case it is worse than the company expected. Useful because from that moment a baseline measurement exists, and without a baseline measurement no later improvement can be demonstrated, not even to yourself.
The study is from 2007 and measures call-back phone calls on enquiries generated online, in a US context: «3 years of data across six companies that generate and response to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts». An email isn't a phone call, so the number points to a direction and doesn't transfer as it is. Contact habits have changed: today part of demand goes through WhatsApp and direct messages, channels where the tolerated wait is even shorter, not longer.
The «hundred times» is a ratio between two very small probabilities, not a turnover multiplier, and it can't be transferred to your company as it is. What the figure solidly supports is the direction and the order of magnitude: the useful window is measured in minutes, not hours. What it is worth for you depends on how many enquiries you receive and what a customer is worth, and those are two numbers only you have.
What can be done without turning everything upside down
The instinctive answer, «we need to be more responsive», doesn't work, because it asks people to do better something they are already doing as best they can. What can be changed is the structure around them:
- A single collection point. Enquiries from the website, email, phone and messaging all arrive in the same place, with the same look. No automation is needed for this, order is needed, which is also the prerequisite for any later automation.
- An immediate assignee. Every enquiry has a name next to it from the first minute. The rule can be trivial (by rota, by sector, by time of day) as long as it exists.
- A first reply that goes out regardless. Not a fake reply pretending to be a person: a message that confirms receipt, says by when the real reply will arrive and, where the questions are always the same, answers those straight away. It closes the five-minute window even when the competent person is busy.
- The count, every week. A single number: the median time to first reply. If it doesn't get worse in summer or on Friday evening, the system holds.
It is deliberately unspectacular. None of these four points requires artificial intelligence, and three out of four don't even require new software. Most companies don't have them, and the reason isn't cost: nobody has ever looked at the number, so the problem has never become visible.
Questions and answers
How quickly should you reply to a sales enquiry?
The useful window is measured in minutes, not hours. Whoever contacts an enquiry within five minutes is up to a hundred times more likely to make contact with that person than whoever waits thirty minutes, according to the InsideSales.com/MIT study by James Oldroyd (Sloan School of Management), presented in 2007 on more than fifteen thousand enquiries and over one hundred thousand call attempts.
The reason is simple: at that moment the person is at the screen, has the problem on their mind and has just written to two others as well. Thirty minutes later they are back at work.
Where this weighs most is export, because a foreign enquiry almost always goes to several suppliers on the same day and whoever replies first becomes the yardstick by which the buyer reads all the other offers. The complete flow, from the email that arrives to the goods leaving, is in the guide to export operations for the small food producer.
What does the five-minute figure really measure?
It measures successful contact, not the sale. It doesn't say that replying in five minutes sells a hundred times more: it says it gets you talking to the person who wrote, instead of finding a phone ringing out.
The «hundred times» is also a ratio between two very small probabilities, not a turnover multiplier, and it can't be transferred to another company as it is. The analysis is from 2011 and concerns enquiries generated online in a mainly US context. What the figure solidly supports is the direction and the order of magnitude.
Why does a small business reply late even when it is fast?
For three causes that have nothing to do with how fast people are. The enquiry arrives in a place nobody is watching at that moment: the website form writes to a shared inbox, WhatsApp is on one person's phone, the missed call leaves no trace. Nobody knows it is theirs: when an enquiry reaches three people, all three assume someone else will reply. Outside working hours there is nothing: an enquiry on Friday at 19:00 gets a reply on Monday at 09:00, sixty-two hours later.
How do you measure time to first reply without buying software?
You take the last twenty enquiries that arrived and write next to each the time of arrival and the time of the first reply, human or automatic. It is an afternoon's work, done with a spreadsheet, and it produces a baseline measurement.
It matters because without a baseline measurement no later improvement can be demonstrated, not even to yourself. In almost every case the number turns out worse than the company expected.
Does the five-minute figure apply to emails too?
Not literally, and those who cite it almost never say so. The 2007 InsideSales.com/MIT study measures call attempts on enquiries collected from web forms: «over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts». A phone call and an email don't compete in the same way for the attention of whoever wrote.
What transfers is the mechanism, not the multiplier: whoever has just written is at the screen, has the problem on their mind and in all likelihood has written to others too. On that principle email behaves like a call. On the number, however, your case should be measured, not inherited.
Sources
- InsideSales.com/MIT Lead Response Management Study, James Oldroyd, PhD, Sloan School of Management, MIT, presented on 16 October 2007. The source of the comparison between contact within 5 minutes and after 30, quoted verbatim, and of the sample: three years of data across six companies, more than fifteen thousand enquiries and over one hundred thousand call attempts.
- Correction of 13 September 2026. This page attributed the figure to a 2011 Harvard Business Review article. The primary source of the «hundred times» is the 2007 study above, which is a different piece of work: the 2011 article reports other measurements. The original page leadresponsemanagement.com/mit_study.html no longer responds; the document cited is the PDF copy of the study, opened and read on 13 September 2026.
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