Speed-to-lead calculator
Drag one slider from one minute to one hour and watch what happens to your chance of reaching a brand-new inbound lead. The curve falls steeply at the start and then flattens, which is the whole argument in one picture: the difference between two minutes and twelve matters far more than the difference between forty and fifty.
Read the vertical axis as relative odds, not a conversion rate. It is scaled so the fastest response on the chart sits near the top and everything else is expressed as a share of that best case.
Speed-to-Lead Decay
Move the slider to see how the relative odds of reaching and qualifying a fresh inbound lead fall as your first-response time grows. The shape is illustrative, but the direction is well established: faster response wins, and most of the advantage lives in the first few minutes.
How long before someone reaches out to a new inbound lead.
At 5 minutes, relative odds have already started to slide to about 71% of the best-case window. The first few minutes carry most of the advantage.
Note: the curve is a directional illustration of a widely reported pattern -- contact and qualification odds drop quickly as first-response time grows, with the steepest fall in the first minutes. Exact figures vary by industry, channel, and offer; the percentages here are relative to a best-case fast response, not a published benchmark.
What the curve is, honestly
It is a smooth decay shape, not a measurement. It encodes a direction that is not in dispute -- responding faster wins, and most of the advantage lives in the first few minutes -- without pretending to a specific published percentage. The widely circulated multipliers in this corner of the internet nearly all trace back to a single vendor slide deck being requoted, so none of them appears on this page.
The curve also never reaches zero. That is deliberate. An hour-old lead is worth much less than a two-minute-old one and is still worth calling, and a model that dropped to nothing would quietly tell you to stop working your backlog. If a tool ever tells you a lead is worthless, check the tool.
Use it to set a target, not to score people. A shop that pulls its median first-dial time from forty minutes to five has moved along the steepest part of this shape; a shop already at five gains almost nothing by chasing two and should spend the effort on attempt count and callback discipline instead.
Measure your response time the strict way
Most speed-to-lead numbers people quote are flattering because of where they start the clock. Start it at the moment the lead record is created -- the form submission, the call that rang out, the marketplace ping -- and stop it at the first genuine dial attempt, not at the first automated text and not at the first time somebody opened the record. Report the median and the worst decile, because the tail is where the damage is.
Then split the measurement by hour of day and by day of week. Almost every roofing shop has an excellent weekday-afternoon number and a terrible Saturday-evening one, and a single blended average hides exactly the window a storm fills up.
The one hard number nearby, and what it does not cover
There is no federal standard for how fast an inbound call to a contractor must be answered. There is a binding rule about the reverse direction. Under the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, a call is abandoned if a person answers and is not connected to a live representative within 2 seconds of their completed greeting; the safe harbor caps abandonment at 3% of calls answered by a person and requires at least 15 seconds or 4 rings before disconnecting.
Quoted from FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iv) and 310.4(b)(4), https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-310/section-310.4. The asymmetry is the point: federal law caps how long an outbound caller may leave a person hanging after they say hello, and says nothing at all about how long a homeowner may sit in your voicemail box. Do not read the two-second figure as an inbound answer standard, because there is no such standard -- only the competitor who answers first.
The same rule governs when you may dial out at all: 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. local time at the called person location. The load-bearing words are local time at the called person's location, not your own. A floor in Houston calling into the Eastern time zone is out of window an hour before its own clock says so. Source: FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 CFR 310.4(c), https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-310/section-310.4. This is a description of published rules, not legal advice.
Where this fits
- Roofing answering service -- the usual fix for the tail of the distribution, which is evenings, weekends and the hour after a hailstorm.
- Roofing lead generation -- if your response time is already good, more speed is not the lever.
- Missed-call revenue calculator -- puts a dollar figure on the calls that never got a response at all.
Cover the hours the curve punishes
We answer and dial for roofing and storm-restoration contractors in the windows their own crews cannot. Twenty minutes on the phone is enough to tell whether that applies to you.
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