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Speed to lead statistics are quoted constantly in sales content, and most of them trace back to a small number of studies. This roundup lists the numbers that actually exist, what each one measured, and what it does and does not tell a local service business.
The short version
The famous speed-to-lead numbers measure phone contact and qualification after a web form, not booked jobs from service-business messages. They make a useful case for responding promptly, but they cannot tell a plumbing shop its likely close rate. If you only take one action from this article, time your own first meaningful replies for a month.
The 2011 Harvard Business Review audit
In 2011, Harvard Business Review published an audit of 2,241 US companies. Among the companies that responded to a web-form lead within 30 days, the average first response time was 42 hours. Twenty-three percent never responded at all.
The same article analyzed 1.25 million sales leads across 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies. It reported that companies which attempted contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as companies that waited even an hour longer, and more than sixty times as likely as companies that waited a full day.
Note the word qualify: it is a sales-pipeline outcome, not the same as closing a deal or booking a service visit. The hour-to-hour comparison is an association in the studied pipelines, not a promise that speeding up any one reply will multiply your bookings.
The 2007 five-minute rule
The often-quoted five-minute rule comes from a 2007 InsideSales.com study with Professor James Oldroyd, then at MIT. It covered three years of data across six companies, more than 15,000 web-generated leads, and over 100,000 outbound call attempts.
Its most cited finding: the odds of making contact with a lead were roughly 100 times higher when the first call went out within five minutes versus after 30 minutes, and the odds of qualifying the lead were roughly 21 times higher. Again, those are contact and qualification odds, not revenue figures. The researchers explicitly said the study did not address close ratios. It tested outbound calls to web-form leads, not the first written answer to a message lead.
What these numbers do not say
A few honest caveats before you put any of these numbers in a slide deck:
- Both data sets predate universal smartphones, modern messaging channels, and AI first-response tools.
- Both examined web-form leads in sales pipelines that look different from a plumbing shop getting a leaking-dishwasher message at 9 PM.
- Odds ratios are relative, not absolute. One hundred times more likely to make contact was measured against a specific comparison window; it does not mean one hundred times more revenue.
- None of the research says a fast but wrong or robotic reply beats a slower, thoughtful one.
What Google says about Local Services Ads
Google's Local Services Ads ranking guidance names responsiveness to customer inquiries and requests as one factor, alongside bids, profile quality and other signals. It also lists average response time among profile-quality factors. That is not a ranking formula or a guarantee: sending a faster reply alone will not necessarily move a listing. LSA message leads and phone leads are different workflows; a message responder does not automatically answer an incoming phone call. See the Google LSA integration page.
What this means for a local service business
The studies make a good case for avoiding long waits, but not for claiming a precise local booking lift. Pull the arrival time and first useful reply time from ten recent inquiries. Separate unanswered leads from answered ones: excluding the unanswered leads can make even a weak process look fast. Then measure the median and 75th percentile for 30 days, split by channel and business hours. Our speed to lead guide for local service businesses walks through that audit step by step.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good lead response time for a service business?
Under five minutes for standard inbound during business hours is one practical starting frame a small team might adopt. Your own measured median matters more than any benchmark — run a 30-day audit before committing to a number.
Does the five-minute rule still apply?
It comes from a 2007 B2B study of web leads and outbound calls, so treat it as directional rather than a law. The underlying pattern — much better contact odds when the first reply is fast — still holds as guidance for local service messaging.
Do faster replies improve Google LSA ranking?
Google names responsiveness and average response time among ranking considerations, but does not promise that any particular reply speed will change your rank. Handle message leads promptly without treating the old web-form call studies as an LSA ranking experiment.