Free tool
Lead response time grader
Enter your average first-response time and see where it lands against published benchmarks, plus the gap to best in class.
Enter your average and grade it
Nothing is sent anywhere. The calculation runs in your browser and there is no form to fill in before you see the result.
How the grades are set
Bands are fixed regardless of channel, so a grade means the same thing to everyone. The channel changes the target you are measured against, not the grade boundaries.
- AUnder 5 minutes
- You are inside the window most published research treats as best in class. The work now is holding this at nights and weekends, which is where most teams with a good weekday average lose it.
- B5 to 30 minutes
- Fast by the standard of most teams, and still outside the five minute window. The gap usually sits in one specific place: a channel nobody owns, or the hours after the office closes.
- C30 to 60 minutes
- You are inside the one hour mark that the Harvard Business Review study used as its threshold, but only just. Anything that adds a queue in front of your response pushes you the wrong side of it.
- D1 to 24 hours
- The lead has almost certainly spoken to someone else before you reply. At this range the constraint is structural, not effort. A person cannot watch every channel continuously.
- FOver 24 hours
- At this range the response is no longer part of the buying decision. Most leads at this speed are effectively unworked, whatever the CRM records against them.
Best-in-class target by channel
- Website form5 minutes
- The five minute mark is the threshold used across the lead response literature, and a form fill is the moment of highest intent you will get from that visitor.
- WhatsApp2 minutes
- WhatsApp is read as a messaging app, not an inbox. People expect a reply in the rhythm of a conversation, so the practical target is tighter than a form.
- Instagram or Messenger2 minutes
- Social DMs carry the same conversational expectation as WhatsApp, and the platforms themselves surface a response time badge to your audience.
- Email enquiry5 minutes
- Email tolerates a slightly longer wait in perception, but the competitive picture is identical. The enquiry usually went to more than one supplier.
- Missed call5 minutes
- Someone who picked up the phone wanted an answer immediately. A callback or a message inside five minutes still catches that intent.
- Paid social lead form5 minutes
- Lead form fills are low-friction and often low-recall. Beyond a few minutes the person may not remember which advert they filled in.
Where the benchmarks come from
Firms that tried to contact a potential customer within an hour of receiving an enquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried even an hour later.
Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, 2011. Independent research.
The study also found that only 37 percent of the companies audited responded within an hour.
Response within five minutes is the point at which contact and qualification rates fall away sharply in the underlying lead response research.
Lead Response Management study, Oldroyd et al., 2007. Independent research.
Widely cited and widely re-quoted. Treat the exact multipliers with caution, and the direction as well established.
A small minority of audited companies replied to an inbound enquiry within five minutes, and a large share never replied at all within the study window.
Drift Lead Response Report, 2021. Vendor-published research.
Vendor-published research. Useful as a picture of the field, not as an independent measurement.
This tool does not estimate lost revenue. Turning a response time into a money figure needs a conversion multiplier that would be our assumption rather than your data, and a number like that is worth less than the credibility it costs.
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