Notes for owners · Sales management
How quickly should your team respond to a new lead?
Within five minutes during working hours, one hour outside them. The business that reaches the buyer first sets the terms of the comparison.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
Rules for this trade differ by state and professional body, and they change. Check the current position with your own council or adviser before you act on anything here.
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Five minutes during working hours, and no more than an hour outside them. That is the standard worth building for, and for most Indian small businesses it is a large improvement on what actually happens today. The reason is not a statistic. A buyer who has just filled your form is filling two or three others. The first person to call gets to ask the questions, frame the comparison and book the meeting, while the other suppliers are still reading their inbox.
Why the first call matters more than a better pitch
When somebody enquires, they are at their most willing to talk. They have just typed their need, so it is fresh, and they have not yet spoken to anyone. The salesperson who reaches them in that window has an easy conversation. An hour later the buyer is back in a meeting, or on a site, or has already been told by a competitor what to look out for.
The second effect is quieter. Speed signals how you will behave later. A buyer choosing a fabricator, a clinic or a builder is trying to predict whether you will answer when there is a problem. A call back in four minutes is evidence. A brochure emailed the next day is also evidence.
What a realistic target looks like by channel
| Channel | First response target | By whom |
|---|---|---|
| Phone call during working hours | Three rings, always answered by a person | Front desk or the assigned salesperson |
| Missed call | Called back within five minutes | Whoever owns the number that day |
| Website enquiry form | Five minutes, by phone, plus a WhatsApp message | The salesperson the form routes to |
| WhatsApp enquiry | Five minutes with a reply, one hour with an answer | One named owner, not a group |
| IndiaMART or a portal enquiry | Under five minutes, the enquiry is shared with competitors | Inside sales or the owner |
| Meta or Google lead form | Within fifteen minutes, twice if not answered | Inside sales, with a calling list |
| Email enquiry | Within two working hours | The person who owns that inbox |
| After hours, any channel | Automatic acknowledgement, then a call before 10 am | Assigned in the morning routine |
Print this and put your own current times beside it. The gap between the two columns is your cheapest available growth, because it requires no additional advertising.
The four reasons it does not happen
Nobody owns the enquiry. It arrives in a shared inbox, a shared WhatsApp group or a form that emails three people, so everybody assumes somebody else has it. Ownership by name, by day, fixes more than any software.
The enquiry arrives in a place nobody watches. Forms that go to an info address checked twice a week. A Facebook page inbox nobody has the password to. A contact number on a hoarding that rings in an office closed on Saturday.
The salesperson is busy with delivery. In most small businesses the same person who sells also handles execution, so a live customer problem always beats a new enquiry. This is a scheduling problem, and the answer is protected calling windows rather than good intentions.
There is no way to see it was missed. If nobody can list yesterday's enquiries and who called them, response time cannot improve, because nothing is visible to correct.
How to build the response system in a week
- Route every channel to one place. One number for calls and WhatsApp, one form destination, one owner per day on a written rota.
- Write the first response. Three sentences for WhatsApp, and a six-line call opener with two qualifying questions. Speed without a script produces fast, useless calls.
- Set the automatic acknowledgement. An SMS or WhatsApp with a person's name, a number and the time you will call.
- Add a second and third attempt. Most enquiries are not answered on the first call. Two more attempts on the same day, at different times, usually lifts the number of conversations noticeably.
- Record the timestamps. Enquiry received, first attempt, first conversation. A spreadsheet is enough to start; a CRM makes it permanent.
- Review it weekly for fifteen minutes. Enquiries received, how many reached within target, how many never spoken to at all.
A worked example
Take a modular kitchen showroom in Rajajinagar, Bengaluru, receiving enquiries from Meta ads, Google search and walk-ins. Suppose an illustrative 120 enquiries arrive in a month and the team speaks to 55 of them. If the calling rota, the automatic WhatsApp acknowledgement and the two extra attempts lift conversations to 90, that is roughly 60 per cent more conversations on the same advertising budget. Those numbers are an illustration of the arithmetic, not a promise, and the point stands at any scale: conversations are the constraint, and response time is what controls them.
What to measure, and what to stop measuring
Report four things every week: enquiries received by source, median minutes to first attempt, the number never contacted, and conversations that led to a next step. Stop reporting the number of calls made. It rewards activity rather than contact, and a team measured on calls will call the easy numbers twice instead of the hard ones once.
What to do next
Pick yesterday. List every enquiry your business received, from every channel, and write the time it arrived and the time somebody spoke to the person. Most owners find at least a third were never spoken to at all. That list is the whole argument for fixing the system, and it is the first thing we go through with you before anything is changed.
