How fast should you reply to a new lead?

A form comes in at 10:40 on a Tuesday. The rep who handles new enquiries is in a meeting until noon, then at lunch, then catching up on the morning. The reply goes out at 2:15. It's a good reply. By then the lead has filled in two other forms, and one of those companies called them back before 11.

You won't see that in your pipeline. The enquiry is marked as contacted, the rep did nothing wrong, and the deal just never progressed. Slow replies cost you quietly, one at a time, with nothing in the CRM to show it.

Why the first reply matters more than the quote

When someone sends an enquiry, they're in the middle of deciding. They have the problem in front of them, they've found you, and they've probably found two others. Whoever replies first gets to frame the conversation: what matters, what to ask, what good looks like. Everyone after that is answering questions the first reply raised.

The reply is also the first evidence of what working with you is like. A lead who waits a day for an acknowledgement assumes they'll wait a day for everything. A lead who hears back in ten minutes assumes the opposite, and that assumption survives a higher price.

What fast means in a working day

During working hours, fast means minutes. Not because a buyer times you with a stopwatch, but because minutes is the window in which they're still at their desk, still thinking about the problem, and haven't yet moved on to the next tab. Outside working hours, fast means an immediate reply that says when a person will be in touch, followed by that person being in touch first thing.

The honest way to know where you stand is to look at the last twenty enquiries. Each one has two timestamps: when it arrived, and when the first reply went out. The gap between them, across a normal month, is your speed of first response. If you've never measured it, expect the number to be larger than you'd guess.

What a first reply has to do

A fast reply is only possible if it's a small reply. The quote, the proposal and the full answer are later. The first reply has four jobs.

• Confirm the enquiry landed, with enough detail that they know a person or a system has read it rather than only received it.
• Ask for the one or two things you need before anyone can help: the size of the job, the deadline, the system they use.
• Say what happens next and when: who will call, or what they'll receive, and roughly how soon.
• Give them something to do in the meantime, such as a short page that answers the questions most people ask at this stage.

That reply can be written once, well, and sent in minutes for the rest of the year. The version that goes out at 2:15 is usually a worse reply anyway, because it was written in a hurry between two other things.

Why replies are slow today

It's rarely laziness. Enquiries arrive in a shared inbox that three people can see and nobody owns. The web form sends to one person's email, and that person is on holiday. The rep wants to look the company up, check whether you've spoken to them before and find the right price list before writing, so a five-minute reply becomes a half-hour task that waits for a free half hour. Each of those is reasonable, and together they add up to the next morning.

Notice that most of the delay is in the work around the reply, not the reply itself. Looking up the company, checking the CRM, gathering the details from the form: that is exactly the kind of work that can run before a person ever sees the enquiry.

How to get there without a rep watching the inbox

The approach we build in Revenue Growth starts from the channels, not the people. Every enquiry, whether it comes from the website form, the shared inbox or a reply to a campaign, is captured the moment it arrives. The system then gathers what a rep would have gathered: the company, its size, any previous contact in your CRM, and what the enquiry is actually asking for.

With that in hand, it checks the enquiry against the criteria your sales team already uses and drafts the first reply. Some businesses let the system send it. Others want a person to glance at it first, and the rep gets a notification with the draft and the record, so sending takes a minute instead of thirty. Either way, the lead hears back while they're still at their desk, and the rep starts the real conversation with the details already gathered. How the criteria work is covered in qualifying leads automatically, and who gets which enquiry in routing enquiries to the right person.

What doesn't change is the conversation itself. A fast first reply earns the right to a proper call with a person who knows the product. It doesn't replace that call.

The same Tuesday, with the system in place

Go back to the form that arrived at 10:40. This time it's captured the moment it lands. By 10:41 the system has looked up the company, found that someone from it downloaded a guide last year, put its size in a range and read the message: they want a quote for a new site and they've mentioned a deadline. It checks that against your criteria, drafts a reply that confirms the enquiry, asks for the site address and the number of users, and offers two slots for a call.

If you've chosen to let the system send, the reply goes at 10:42. If you'd rather a person glances at it first, the rep gets a notification with the draft and the record and sends it between meetings at 10:50. Either way the lead hears back while they're still looking at your website. They answer the two questions at 11:05. The rep sees the answers and the record together, and calls at 11:30 knowing the company, the history, the site and the deadline. The conversation starts in the middle instead of at the beginning.

Nothing about the rep's day got harder. The meeting at 10:40 still happened. What changed is that the thirty minutes of looking things up and writing from scratch happened without them, and the lead never found out how busy Tuesday was.

What to measure

Two numbers tell you whether this is working. The first is speed of first response: the gap between the enquiry's timestamp and the first reply's, averaged over a month and looked at by channel. The second is enquiries that progress to a conversation: of everything that came in, how many ended up on a call or in a meeting. Take both readings before anything changes, so there's a before to compare against.

What to do this week

1. Pull the last twenty enquiries and write down the gap between arrival and first reply for each.
2. List every channel an enquiry can arrive through, and who sees each one.
3. Write the first reply you'd be happy to send to any of them in the first ten minutes.
4. Note what a rep looks up before replying today. That list is what a system should gather for them.
5. Pick the channel with the slowest replies and fix that one first.

If you'd like to talk through what you find, bring the twenty enquiries to a call with us. We'll tell you where the time is going and what we'd change first.