The stat travels without its name: call a lead within five minutes instead of thirty and you are 100 times more likely to reach them. It comes from a 2007 study by InsideSales with James Oldroyd, then a faculty fellow at MIT, presented on October 16, 2007. It covered three years of data at six companies that generate and respond to web leads: more than 15,000 leads and more than 100,000 call attempts.
- Odds of contacting a lead, five minutes versus thirty: dropped 100 times
- Odds of qualifying a lead, five minutes versus thirty: dropped 21 times
- Close rates: not measured, by the study's own statement
"Contact" meant a call that reached a live person for a minimum length, the summary is vendor-published, the six companies are unnamed and the examples are mortgage and insurance lead providers. None of that makes the direction wrong. Harvard Business Review's 2011 audit of 2,241 companies found a different size of effect pointing the same way: within an hour was nearly seven times as likely to qualify a lead as an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as waiting a day.
So both studies agree that faster is better. The 100 times is one vendor's data on six companies' web leads from 2007, and the honest way to use it is with its name attached. A number quoted without its source is a number the owner cannot check, and a marketing claim built on it is a claim that fails the moment someone does.
What ProxMedia does about it: every number on this site carries its source, and the lead reply goes out in the first minute, because both studies agree on that much.
Sources: InsideSales and James Oldroyd (MIT), "The InsideSales / MIT Lead Response Management Study", presented October 16, 2007 (six companies, 15,000+ web leads, 100,000+ call attempts); Harvard Business Review, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", March 2011.