When a purchasing manager, facility manager or general contractor reaches out, they are usually asking more than one company. The first business to answer with something useful has the best shot at the work. Here's what the most cited research on response time found, with its caveats.
A lead that waits is a lead that shops around
Picture a facility manager with a broken rooftop unit on a building she manages. She fills out the form on three commercial HVAC contractors' websites before lunch. One calls her back in twenty minutes. One emails the next morning. One calls on Thursday.
Who gets the service call? In most cases, the one who answered first and sounded like they had a plan. The other two didn't lose on price or quality. They lost before the conversation started.
The same thing happens to a distributor when a new account asks for a line card and pricing, and to a machine shop when an RFQ lands in a shared inbox. B2B buyers have deadlines and bosses. The vendor who makes their next step easy gets the business.
What the research found
The most cited study on this topic is "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," published in the Harvard Business Review in March 2011 by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. The authors looked at 1.25 million sales leads across 42 U.S. companies.
Their finding: companies that tried to contact a lead within an hour of the inquiry were nearly 7 times as likely to qualify that lead, meaning to have a real conversation with a key decision maker, as companies that tried even an hour later. They were more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.
The same authors audited 2,241 U.S. companies and found that, among companies that responded to web leads within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours.
The honest caveats
The study is from 2011, and it mixed consumer and business companies (29 B2C and 13 B2B). It is not specific to distributors, contractors or shops. Treat the exact multiples with care.
But the pattern matches what most B2B owners know from experience: interest fades fast, and buyers keep looking until someone answers.
Why small B2B teams answer slowly
Slow response is rarely a people problem. It's a systems problem:
- Leads arrive in too many places. Web forms, the main line, a salesperson's cell, a shared inbox, trade-show scans.
- Nobody owns the first reply. Everyone assumes someone else saw it.
- The people who can answer are doing the work. Estimators estimate. Owners are on site or on the shop floor.
- There's no record of who replied and when. So nobody knows a lead went cold until a customer says they "never heard back."
None of these are fixed by working harder. They're fixed by deciding how leads come in, who answers them and what happens if nobody does.
What "fast" means
Fast doesn't mean a full proposal in an hour. It means the buyer hears from a real person quickly, knows their request was received, and knows what happens next. Our companion blog covers how to build that reply process.
Where HSGA fits
HSGA builds a lead-capture and speed-to-lead plan and follow-up cadences on top of your custom CRM, so every lead from every channel lands in one place, gets an owner and gets a reply. Your custom CRM is built in 2 to 4 weeks.
Sources
- Oldroyd, J. B., McElheran, K., & Elkington, D. "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads." Harvard Business Review, March 2011. https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads (figures checked Oct 24, 2026).