# Lead response time for consulting firms: what to aim for

> Lead response time for consulting firms: what the research measured, why a same-day reply from a person is the target, and four steps to make it hold.

For a consulting, advisory, research or training firm of 8 to 30 people, a good lead response time is simple. A person replies on the same working day. If the enquiry arrives late, they reply by 11:00 the next working day. The five-minute rule that sales software firms quote comes from call-centre data, and you can set it aside. What you need is the system under the reply: every enquiry in one place, one owner for each, a few questions you ask every time, and a note of where it came from.

This guide is for founders and partners who win work through referrals and written proposals. It covers what the research on response time measured, then four steps you can put in place this week, with a reply you can copy and a checklist at the end.

## The short answer: a same-working-day reply from a person

Here is the target I'd set for an expert firm.

| Situation                               | Reply by                                        | Who replies                     |
| --------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------- |
| Enquiry arrives before mid-afternoon    | The same working day                            | The named owner, or their cover |
| Enquiry arrives late, or at the weekend | 11:00 the next working day                      | The named owner, or their cover |
| No answer to your first reply           | Three working days later, with something useful | The same owner                  |

An automatic "thanks, we'll be in touch" doesn't count. It tells the sender a machine got their email. A reply counts when it shows that a person read the enquiry and understood it, and two lines that offer a call are enough.

The five-minute race was built for a different buyer. Someone filling in a demo form for software may be talking to four vendors that afternoon. Someone choosing a firm to review their programme or train their managers is deciding who to trust for months. They want to hear back soon, and they want to see that you thought before you wrote.

The risk at the other end is bigger than it looks. In an expert firm, a slow reply rarely means two days. More often it means no reply at all, for reasons I'll come to.

## What the lead response time research actually measured

Search "lead response time statistics" and you'll find pages of numbers. Most come from firms that sell sales software, and many are copied from page to page with the source lost on the way. Several trace to no study at all. These are the studies I could read at the source.

### The 2011 Harvard Business Review audit

James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington wrote "[The Short Life of Online Sales Leads](https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads)" for Harvard Business Review in March 2011. The first two were business-school academics. The third ran InsideSales.com, a sales-software company. They sent test enquiries through the websites of 2,241 US companies and timed the replies.

- 37% replied within an hour.
- 23% never replied.
- Among firms that replied within 30 days, the average wait was 42 hours.

A second dataset in the same article covered 1.25 million enquiries at 42 US companies, 29 selling to consumers and 13 to businesses. Firms that tried to reach people within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to "qualify" them as firms that waited one more hour. Qualify meant a real conversation with someone who makes the decision.

Two caveats go with those numbers. The data is from 2011, and it covers US companies in general, mostly selling to consumers, not consulting firms. What it shows well is how common silence is: nearly a quarter of companies never answered someone who had asked to buy.

### Where the "five-minute rule" comes from

The five-minute rule is often credited to Harvard. It comes from an earlier study that Oldroyd presented with InsideSales.com in 2007. Its own report says it used [three years of data from six companies](https://25649.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na2.net/hub/25649/file-13535879-pdf/docs/mit_study.pdf), drawn from InsideSales.com's own system, on how fast sales staff phoned web enquiries. It says plainly that it "did not address close ratios", so it never measured who won the work.

That's a thin base for a rule about how a 15-person advisory firm should answer a client's email. I don't repeat its multipliers here, and I'd read any page that does with care.

### A software vendor's test from 2022

Chili Piper, which sells scheduling software, filled in demo request forms on software companies' websites and timed the answers. Its [Chili Insights report](https://www.chilipiper.com/article/chili-insights-vendor-response-time) (2022) doesn't say how many companies it tested. Nearly 30% never replied. Those that did took 4 hours 50 minutes on average.

The line I'd keep from it is this one: "If they didn't respond within one day, they didn't respond at all." Not one company in the test replied between 24 and 48 hours. These are software companies answering demo forms, so the numbers don't transfer to expert firms. The pattern is still worth noticing: an enquiry that missed its first day was never answered at all.

### What buyers of professional services say

The closest research to your buyers comes from Hinge Research Institute, the research arm of a marketing firm that serves professional-services firms. So it is vendor research too.

- In its 2022 study, [Inside the Buyer's Brain](https://hingemarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IBB-Webinar-2022.pdf), Hinge asked 1,914 buyers about their concerns when choosing a firm, with data from 2020 to 2022. "Poor customer experience/poor responsiveness" was named by 21.6%, beside overpromising (27.7%) and inexperienced staff (22.1%). These are concerns while choosing, not proven reasons a firm lost.
- In its 2015 study of [referral marketing](https://hingemarketing.com/uploads/hinge-research-referral-marketing.pdf), people at 523 professional-services firms answered as buyers. 51.9% said they had ruled out a referred firm before speaking to it. The top reason, given by 43.6%, was "I couldn't understand how they could help me or my firm." The data is dated.

The second finding adds something the speed studies miss. A referral can be lost before the first call when the reply, or the website behind it, doesn't make clear what you'd do about the problem.

### The research at a glance

| Source                                | Year | Sample                                                  | Measured                          | Vendor?                                | What it tells an expert firm                                  |
| ------------------------------------- | ---- | ------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------- | -------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, HBR | 2011 | 2,241 US companies                                      | Time to answer a test enquiry     | Two academics and a sales-software CEO | 23% never replied                                             |
| Same article, second dataset          | 2011 | 1.25 million enquiries at 42 companies, mostly consumer | Odds of reaching a decision maker | As above                               | Within the hour beat an hour later, mostly for consumer firms |
| InsideSales.com and Oldroyd           | 2007 | Six companies, three years                              | Phone contact by delay            | Vendor                                 | Source of the five-minute rule; never measured wins           |
| Chili Piper                           | 2022 | Software firms, count not given                         | Time to answer a demo request     | Vendor                                 | Firms that missed day one never replied                       |
| Hinge, Inside the Buyer's Brain       | 2022 | 1,914 buyers                                            | Concerns when choosing a firm     | Vendor                                 | Responsiveness is a common concern                            |
| Hinge, Referral Marketing             | 2015 | 523 firms                                               | Why referred firms were ruled out | Vendor                                 | Unclear help loses referrals early                            |

## Why enquiries go unanswered in a small firm

In more than ten years in business development, I found that what cost us work was rarely the writing. It was the timing: the tender found late, the reply that waited, the renewal nobody chased. Nobody was lazy in any of those cases. Each one had sat where nobody was looking.

A late reply to an enquiry is the same failure, and in a firm your size it usually comes down to where the enquiry lands.

- They arrive in personal inboxes. New work in expert firms tends to come through people, so the enquiries that matter come as an email to a partner, an introduction from a client, a LinkedIn message or a call.
- Everyone assumes someone else replied. A shared address with three people on it is an easy place for an email to sit. Chili Piper's [2022 report](https://www.chilipiper.com/article/chili-insights-vendor-response-time) quotes one of its own sales reps on why vendors were slow: reps "might assume someone else will take the lead, or are unsure who the lead should belong to".
- The person it reached is busy. The partner who got the introduction is on site all week, so the email waits for Friday, then Monday.
- Nobody checks. If you can't count last quarter's unanswered enquiries, you can't know whether there were any.

The HBR authors pointed to causes of the same kind in sales teams: enquiries pulled from a system once a day instead of as they arrived, and rules that shared them out by "fairness" instead of speed. In each case the reply was slow because the route to it was slow.

## Step 1: Put every enquiry in one place

Choose one place where every new enquiry goes on the day it arrives, so anyone can see what's waiting. A shared inbox works, or a simple list. Five places don't, and neither does one partner's memory.

A list suits most firms of 8 to 30 people. The free [pipeline workbook](/library/template/pipeline) has an Enquiries sheet with one row per enquiry: when it came in, who sent it, how they got in touch, what they asked, who owns it, when you first replied, and its status. Keep enquiries out of your main pipeline. Most never become real work.

One rule makes it work: whoever receives an enquiry adds it to the list that day. A partner who gets an introduction adds a row before replying. If they're travelling, they forward it to whoever keeps the list.

## Step 2: Give every enquiry one owner and a reply time

Every row gets one name in the owner column, a person rather than "the team". That person replies by the time in the table above, or hands it on clearly.

Then decide cover. When the owner is on leave or on site for a week, who replies for them? Write the pairs down. The week an enquiry goes unanswered is usually the week the right person is busy elsewhere.

A good first reply is short. It shows a person read the enquiry, says something useful and offers one next step. Here's one you can adapt. The firm and client are made up.

> Dear Ana,
>
> Thank you for getting in touch, and for Miguel's introduction. You mentioned your regional managers are new to running budgets, and that you'd like something in place before the next planning round in March.
>
> We've run programmes like this for finance and operations teams. Before I suggest an approach, it would help to understand who the managers are and what a good result looks like for you.
>
> Would a 30-minute call on Tuesday at 10:00 or Wednesday at 15:00 suit you?
>
> Best wishes,
> Daniel

It's under 120 words, so it reads easily on a phone. It repeats her problem in her words, which tells her you listened, and it doesn't attach a brochure. In later messages, avoid "just checking in", "touching base" and "circling back". The free [follow-up schedule](/library/template/follow-up-schedule) sets out what to send if there's no reply, and when to stop.

## Step 3: Qualify before the first call, without building a gate

Qualifying means deciding whether a first call is worth having and what it should cover. Most small firms do it by feel, or take every call, and both waste time. Instead, ask three or four questions every time, in the first reply or the first five minutes of the call.

These four work for most expert firms:

1. What prompted this now? The answer tells you whether there's a real deadline.
2. What would a good result look like, and by when? This shows whether you can help, and how big the work is.
3. Who else will be part of the decision? If the person writing can't decide, you need to know who can.
4. Is there a budget range, or a set process such as a tender or a panel? A formal process changes how you respond.

Keep them conversational. A twelve-field form on your website puts off the person you most want: a buyer who was referred to you and expects to talk to a person first.

Qualifying also runs the other way. The top reason in the Hinge study for ruling out a referred firm was not being able to tell how it could help. So say plainly in your first reply what you'd do about this kind of problem. One sentence showing you've done similar work tells them more than a capabilities deck.

For tenders and formal requests, decide before anyone writes. The free [bid-or-no-bid checklist](/library/template/bid-or-no-bid) gives you seven red flags and five scored factors in about fifteen minutes. I wrote more about it in [the bid or no-bid decision](/library/article/bid-no-bid-decision).

### A worked example

This firm is made up. A 12-person research firm gets an enquiry through its website. A regional development agency wants a market study and asks for a call.

The owner replies the same afternoon with the four questions in a short email. The answers come back the next morning. The agency's board meets in six weeks. The person writing is a project officer, and her director decides. The work will go out as a formal request to three firms.

Now the founder knows what the first call is for. She asks for the director to join it, and she runs the request through the bid-or-no-bid checklist before agreeing to write anything.

## Step 4: Write down where each enquiry came from

Lead source tracking sounds like marketing software. In a firm your size it's one column on the enquiry list, filled in every time. Use a short, fixed list so everyone picks the same words:

- Referral from a past client (note who)
- Referral from a partner firm or contact (note who)
- A past client coming back
- A talk, event or workshop
- Something you published, such as an article
- Your website, found through search
- A tender portal or procurement alert

Ask "How did you hear about us?" in the first reply or on the call. When it's a referral, write down the name and thank that person.

After three months, sort the list by source and look at which sources brought work you won, not just enquiries. You may find that one or two people send you most of your best work, and it's worth knowing who they are.

If tenders are one of your sources, log each opportunity on the same list in the same format. That way you can compare them and decide which are worth your time.

## What doesn't work

Some fixes look sensible and make things worse.

- **Counting an automatic reply as a reply.** It stops the clock in your head but not in the client's. Measure the first reply from a person.
- **Racing to five minutes.** Chat widgets and instant-reply tools are built for software buyers. I'd rather send a thoughtful reply in three hours than a canned one in three minutes.
- **A long enquiry form.** Asking for budget, timeline, company size and a phone number up front puts off the referred buyer.
- **A CRM nobody updates.** If the partners won't keep it current, nobody trusts what it shows. A list everyone fills in is worth more.
- **A shared inbox with no owner.** Three people watching one inbox is how an email waits a week.
- **Taking every call.** A call with no questions asked first can leave the founder feeling they lost a job that was never a fit.

## Set it up in one week: a checklist

You can put all four steps in place in a week, alongside client work.

- **Monday.** Look at your last ten enquiries. Note how long each waited for a reply from a person, and whether any got none.
- **Tuesday.** Choose the one place enquiries will go. Tell the team, and add this month's enquiries to it.
- **Wednesday.** Write down who owns new enquiries, and who covers for whom.
- **Thursday.** Write your qualifying questions and a first-reply email in your own words.
- **Friday.** Add a source column and fill it in for last month's enquiries as best you can.

Then keep it going in one short meeting a week. The [weekly review agenda](/library/template/weekly-review-agenda) gives you a 30-minute structure that ends with three actions. Once an enquiry becomes a proposal, the guide to [following up on a proposal](/library/article/how-to-follow-up-on-a-proposal) takes over.

## Frequently asked questions

### How quickly should a consulting firm respond to a new enquiry?

Aim for a reply from a person on the same working day. If the enquiry arrives late or at the weekend, reply by 11:00 the next working day. I know of no study that has measured the right time for expert firms, so treat this as a working standard, not a proven number.

### Is the five-minute rule real?

It comes from a 2007 study of three years of data from six companies, run with a sales-software firm, and it is often wrongly credited to Harvard. The study says it did not look at close ratios. It's a poor guide for a firm that wins work through referrals and proposals.

### Does an automatic reply count as responding to an enquiry?

An automatic message confirms the email arrived, and it's fine to send one. Measure your lead response time from the first reply a person writes, one that shows they read and understood the enquiry.

### What questions should I ask before a first sales call?

Ask the same three or four every time: what prompted this now, what a good result looks like and by when, who else will decide, and whether there's a budget range or a formal process such as a tender.

### How do I track where enquiries come from without a CRM?

Add a "source" column to a simple enquiry list, with a short fixed list of options. Ask every new contact how they heard about you, and note who referred them. After three months, compare the sources of the work you won.

## Where to start

Start with Monday's task: count how long your last ten enquiries waited. That number tells you how urgent the rest of this guide is for your firm.

To see where your firm stands on enquiries, follow-up and proposals, take the free five-minute [scorecard](/library/tool/scorecard), and if you'd like someone to look at it with you, that's what the [Diagnostic](/diagnostic) is for.

Source: https://inspiredworkx.com/library/article/lead-response-time-consulting-firms