The July guide on this site says speed beats price and reviews, then puts three numbers on a card: about five minutes, 10× harder after 30 minutes, and 78% hire whoever responds first. The first idea is directionally the 2007 study. The 10× is not the number in that PDF. The 78% is not in either study. This page is the replacement reading. The July URL stays up. It is no longer the page to cite.
What 2007 counted
James Oldroyd, then a faculty fellow at MIT, with InsideSales.com, looked at web-generated leads. Six companies. Three years. More than 15,000 leads. More than 100,000 call attempts. The question was when a phone call connected, and when that connection became a qualification.
The line in the PDF: the odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times. From 5 minutes to 10 minutes, the contact odds decrease by 5 times.
Read the nouns. Contact means they reached the person. Qualify means they qualified the lead. It does not mean the homeowner signed a furnace replacement. It does not mean a contractor. The companies in the file were generating web leads and dialing them. If you put "100× more likely to book the job" on a slide, you changed the study.
What 2011 counted
Same researcher, different paper, Harvard Business Review, March 2011, with Kristina McElheran and David Elkington.
They sent a web-generated test lead to 2,241 U.S. companies and timed the reply. 37% responded within an hour. 16% responded within 1 to 24 hours. 24% took more than 24 hours. 23% never responded. Among companies that did respond within 30 days, the average was 42 hours.
A second dataset in that article, not the 2007 file: 1.25 million sales leads across 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies. Firms that tried to contact within an hour were nearly 7 times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that tried an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or longer. Qualify, in their words, was a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker.
One is the odds of contact at 5 minutes versus 30 on a 2007 web-lead file. The other is how slow a 2011 audit of 2,241 companies actually was. They point the same direction. They are not one number.
What a shop should do with this
A missed call is not a web form, and a text is not the phone call the 2007 study dialed. The studies still tell you the window is minutes, not the end of the day. They do not tell you that a text-back closes at 21×. Anyone who prints that is selling.
Two clocks, kept separate:
- 01Web form or Facebook lead. A person has to try to reach them. Allsopp, on an April 12, 2025 interview about Neal Roofing, said their form-fill speed-to-lead was under 30 seconds, and that the touch was a text, a voicemail drop, a phone call, and an email. That is one roofing company reporting its own desk. It is not the MIT file. The September 12, 2026 interview has a chapter titled "Why they contact leads in under a minute." Use the chapter title as the topic. Do not invent a sentence from inside the chapter.
- 02Missed call to the published shop number. The product target on the speed-to-lead page is a text in about 30 seconds. That is a product spec, not a study. The first text is scored on the scorecard page. The playbook has the template. This page does not repeat either.
The misconception
FAQ
How long between the lead arriving and a real first touch. For a web lead, the 2007 study measured a phone attempt. For a missed call, the first touch is the text, then a person. They are not the same event.
The 5-versus-30 contact and qualify findings are in the 2007 PDF. The 42-hour average is in the 2011 Harvard Business Review article. The “78% hire the first responder” line is not in either. Use the studies. Drop the card.
No. The studies are about the clock, not about who holds it. A person still has to take the conversation once the lead answers. The locked receptionist pages are the bill if you want a person on every inbound minute. This page is the clock.
Read the July speed-to-lead guide, the speed-to-lead product, the first-text scorecard, and booking rate, not more leads.