Five minutes. After that, the enquiry belongs to someone else.
Almost every business thinks it replies quickly. Almost none has ever measured it. When someone finally looks at the clock, the gap between the two is regularly a matter of hours.
Contacting an enquiry within five minutes of its arrival makes you up to a hundred times more likely to reach that person than waiting thirty minutes. The figure comes from the InsideSales.com/MIT study led by James Oldroyd of the Sloan School of Management, presented in 2007: “The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times”. It measures successful contact on call-backs, not closed sales.
The delay doesn't come from people being slow. It comes from three structural things: the enquiry lands somewhere nobody is watching at that moment, nobody knows it's theirs, and outside working hours there's no mechanism at all.
The indicator to keep is called time to first reply: the minutes between an enquiry arriving and the first reply. You measure it without software: take the last twenty enquiries and note next to each one the time it arrived and the time of the reply. It's an afternoon's work.
What that number really measures
It needs reading carefully, because it's the kind of figure that gets quoted worse than it's written. It doesn't say that replying in five minutes sells a hundred times more. It says it makes you a hundred times more likely to make contact: to actually speak to the person who wrote, instead of reaching a phone that rings out and an email that gets no reply.
Put that way it's less spectacular, and more useful. It describes one thing: the attention of someone who has just written lasts a very short time. At that moment the person is at their screen, has the problem on their mind and, this is the point, has just written to two others as well. Thirty minutes later they're back at work, and your reply arrives when they're no longer thinking about you.
Why an SME replies late even when it's quick
The delay hardly ever comes from the person replying being slow. It starts earlier, at three points that don't seem to have anything to do with speed:
- The enquiry lands somewhere nobody is watching at that moment. The website form goes to a shared inbox; WhatsApp is on one person's phone; the missed call leaves no trace anywhere. There's no single place that says “something's waiting here”.
- Nobody knows it's theirs. When an enquiry reaches three people, all three reasonably assume someone else will reply. It's the most common way an enquiry dies in an organised business.
- Outside working hours there's nothing. An enquiry that arrives on Friday at 7 pm gets its first reply on Monday at 9 am: sixty-two hours, none of them down to a lazy person.
The problem isn't how fast people are, but where things land and who knows they've landed.
The indicator almost nobody keeps
Time to first reply, the minutes between an enquiry arriving and the first reply (human or automated), has the best ratio between impact and cost of measurement of any sales indicator. It needs no software: it needs someone to take the last twenty enquiries and note next to each one the time it arrived and the time of the first reply.
It's an afternoon's work, done with a spreadsheet, and it produces the most uncomfortable and most useful number an SME can have. Uncomfortable because in almost every case it's worse than the business expected. Useful because from then on there's a baseline, and without a baseline no later improvement can be proved, not even to yourself.
The study dates from 2007 and measures phone call-backs on enquiries generated online: “3 years of data across six companies that generate and response to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts”. An email isn't a phone call, so the number points in a direction and doesn't transfer as it is. Contact habits have changed too: part of today's demand comes through WhatsApp and direct messages, channels where people wait even less, not more.
The “hundred times” is a ratio between two very small probabilities, not a revenue multiplier, and it can't be transferred to your business as it stands. What the figure solidly supports is the direction and the order of magnitude: the useful window is measured in minutes, not hours. What it's worth to you depends on how many enquiries you receive and what a customer is worth, and those are two numbers only you have.
What you can do without turning everything upside down
The instinctive response, “we need to be more responsive”, doesn't work, because it asks people to do better at something they're already doing as well as they can. What you can change is the structure around them:
- A single place where everything lands. Enquiries from the website, email, phone and messaging all arrive in the same place, looking the same. It doesn't take automation, it takes order, which is the precondition for any automation later on.
- An owner from the start. Every enquiry has a name next to it from the first minute. The rule can be simple (taking turns, by sector, by time of day) as long as it exists.
- A first reply that goes out regardless. Not a fake reply pretending to be a person: a message that confirms receipt, says when the real answer will come and, where the questions are always the same, answers those straight away. It closes the five-minute window even when the right person is busy.
- The count, every week. A single number: the median time to first reply. If it doesn't get worse in summer or on Friday evenings, the system is holding.
It's deliberately unspectacular. None of these four points needs artificial intelligence, and three out of four don't even need new software. Most businesses don't have them, and the reason isn't cost: nobody has ever looked at the number, so the problem has never become visible.
Questions and answers
How quickly should you reply to a sales enquiry?
The useful window is measured in minutes, not hours. Contacting an enquiry within five minutes makes you up to a hundred times more likely to reach that person than waiting thirty minutes, according to the InsideSales.com/MIT study by James Oldroyd (Sloan School of Management), presented in 2007 and based on over fifteen thousand enquiries and more than a hundred thousand call attempts.
The reason is simple: at that moment the person is at their screen, has the problem on their mind and has just written to two others as well. Thirty minutes later they're back at work.
Where this weighs most is exports, because an enquiry from abroad almost always goes to several suppliers on the same day, and the first to reply becomes the yardstick the buyer uses to read every other offer. The full flow, from the email arriving to the goods leaving, is in the guide to export operations for small food producers.
What does the five-minute figure really measure?
It measures successful contact, not sales. It doesn't say that replying in five minutes sells a hundred times more: it says it gets you through to the person who wrote, instead of reaching a phone that rings out.
The “hundred times” is also a ratio between two very small probabilities, not a revenue multiplier, and it doesn't carry over to another business as it stands. The study dates from 2007 and measures call-backs on enquiries that came in through web forms. What the figure solidly supports is the direction and the order of magnitude.
Why does a small business reply late even when it's quick?
For three reasons that have nothing to do with how fast people are. The enquiry lands somewhere nobody is watching at that moment: the website form goes to a shared inbox, WhatsApp is on one person's phone, the missed call leaves no trace. Nobody knows it's theirs: when an enquiry reaches three people, all three assume someone else will reply. Outside working hours there's nothing: an enquiry sent on Friday at 7 pm gets a reply on Monday at 9 am, sixty-two hours later.
How do you measure time to first reply without buying software?
Take the last twenty enquiries you received and note next to each one the time it arrived and the time of the first reply, human or automated. It's an afternoon's work, done with a spreadsheet, and it gives you a baseline.
You need it because without a baseline no later improvement can be proved, not even to yourself. In almost every case the number turns out worse than the business expected.
Does the five-minute figure apply to emails too?
Not literally, and people quoting it almost never say so. The 2007 InsideSales.com/MIT study measures call attempts on enquiries collected through web forms: “over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts”. A phone call and an email don't compete for the sender's attention in the same way.
What carries over is the mechanism, not the multiplier: the person who has just written is at their screen, has the problem on their mind and has very probably written to others too. On that principle an email behaves like a call. The number, though, has to be measured on your own case, not inherited.
Sources
- InsideSales.com/MIT Lead Response Management Study, James Oldroyd, PhD, Sloan School of Management, MIT, presented on 16 October 2007. The source of the comparison between contact within 5 minutes and after 30, quoted word for word, and of the sample: three years of data from six companies, over fifteen thousand enquiries and more than a hundred thousand call attempts.
- Correction of 13 September 2026. This page used to attribute the figure to a 2011 Harvard Business Review article. The primary source of the “hundred times” is the 2007 study above, which is a different piece of work: the 2011 article reports other measurements. The original page leadresponsemanagement.com/mit_study.html no longer responds; the document cited is the PDF copy of the study, opened and read on 13 September 2026.
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