How quickly should your team respond to a new lead?

1. An enquiry with urgency in it — a breakdown, a deadline, “we need this by Friday”, an emergency treatment — is answered within minutes, by phone, whatever the channel it came on; the buyer is calling others while you read it. 2. A specific enquiry — a quote request with a quantity, a treatment named, a service and a date — is answered within the hour in business hours, by phone or WhatsApp, because the buyer has decided what they want and is choosing who from. 3. A general enquiry — “tell me about your services”, a brochure request, an early-stage question — is answered within the hour by a person too, but the conversation is discovery, not a quote, and the buyer is not yet comparing on speed. 4. Channel sets the medium of the reply, not the speed: a WhatsApp gets a WhatsApp reply then a call, a form gets a call then a WhatsApp summary, a missed call gets a callback within minutes, an email gets a reply and a call.

Outside business hours, an automated acknowledgement that says when a person will call — and then a person calling at that time — holds the buyer for most non-urgent enquiries. It does not hold an emergency.

5. The standard is written as sentences by intent and channel, from the items above, and everyone who touches enquiries has read it. 6. Coverage: someone is responsible for the enquiry queue during business hours, named per shift or per day, with a backup; the enquiry channels — the form, the WhatsApp number, the main line, the marketplace inbox — all land in one place they watch; and evening and weekend enquiries have an owner or an automated holding message with a real callback time. 7. Escalation: an enquiry not contacted within the standard is flagged to the manager automatically — a CRM rule or a simple report — and reassigned; an enquiry with urgency goes straight to the owner’s phone. 8. First contact means a conversation attempted by a person, recorded with the time; an automated “thanks for your enquiry” does not count as contact.

Coverage is the item that fails. The standard is easy to agree and impossible to keep if nobody is actually watching the queue at 11 am on a Tuesday.

9. Speed: median time to first contact attempt, by channel, weekly, against the standard — the number that moves first. 10. Contact: the share of enquiries where a conversation actually happened within the standard, not just an attempt, because a fast voicemail is not a response; and attempts per enquiry until contact. 11. Conversion: the share of contacted enquiries that qualified, and that became quotes and orders, compared between enquiries contacted within the standard and those contacted later — the comparison that shows the owner what speed is worth. 12. The review: fifteen minutes weekly on the three numbers, the enquiries that missed the standard and why, and the coverage gap that caused it.

Measure speed alongside quality, always. A team told to respond in minutes with no qualification standard will respond in minutes and qualify nothing.

The mistakes: counting an auto-reply as a response; a standard nobody is rostered to keep; enquiries landing in five inboxes; the salesperson who “calls them all back on Friday”; no escalation, so a missed enquiry stays missed; and measuring speed alone. A safeguard: enquire through your own website on a Saturday evening and time what happens.

What changes: enquiries contacted within the hour convert at a visibly higher rate than those contacted the next day, the marketing budget produces more customers without spending more, and the owner stops discovering lost enquiries by accident. This is the lead-response work we set up — the standard by intent and channel, the single queue, the roster and the holding messages, the escalation rule in your CRM, and the weekly numbers — and the free audit begins with the enquiry we send you before we meet.