Speed to lead calculator

How to use this calculator

Enter your lead volume, your genuine average response time, your average job value and the rate at which you close the people you actually get hold of. Then read the two assumption boxes underneath and change them if they do not match what you see in your own business.

Those two assumptions do all the work, so they are inputs rather than constants baked into the page. The first is the contact rate you would hit answering within five minutes. The second is how steeply contact rate falls as the wait grows, expressed as percentage points lost each time response time multiplies by ten — five minutes to fifty, fifty to five hundred.

This is an estimate and it is labelled as one throughout. Contact rates and their decay vary by trade, market, time of day and how the enquiry arrived, and nobody has a universal figure for your business. The output is here to show whether response time deserves attention, not to forecast a bank balance.

A worked example

A pressure washing company gets 120 leads a month, averages $9,500 a job, and closes 30% of the people it speaks to. Enquiries are worked from an inbox, so average response time is about 60 minutes.

They believe they would reach 80% of leads answering inside five minutes, and lose about 15 points of contact rate each time the wait multiplies by ten. Sixty minutes is twelve times five minutes, so the model puts their current contact rate at roughly 64%.

That is about 77 leads reached instead of 96, or 23 jobs instead of 29. Six jobs a month at $9,500 is roughly $55,000 of monthly revenue and around $664,000 a year — from a delay that exists because nobody is watching the inbox.

Reading the result honestly

• The annual figure looks implausible. It usually does, because it multiplies a per-lead effect across a year. Check the monthly job count instead: if the model says you are losing six jobs a month and that feels wrong, lower the decay assumption until it feels right.
• Your response time is already under five minutes. The model shows no loss, which is correct on its own terms. The remaining lever is coverage — evenings, weekends and lunch breaks — not raw speed.
• The average hides the problem. A two-minute weekday average with nothing answered on a Saturday is not a two-minute business. Recalculate with the true average including overnight waits and the number changes sharply.
• Contact rate is already low at five minutes. If you would only reach half of leads even answering instantly, the problem is lead quality or bad contact details, and speed will not fix it.

The common mistake

Measuring response time from when someone looked at the lead rather than from when it arrived. A form submitted at 6:40pm and called at 8:15am is a fourteen-hour response, and averaging it in is what makes the real number three or four times worse than the one people quote. Take the timestamps from the CRM for a full month, including nights and weekends, and use that figure here.

The second mistake is treating an automated text as the response. It is a holding action — useful, and much better than silence — but the clock that matters runs until a human is talking to the homeowner.

Faster follow-up also raises what you can afford to pay for a lead in the first place: check the new ceiling with the max cost per lead calculator. The appointments you save still have to happen, which is what the no-show cost calculator covers, and the cost per booked job calculator shows the whole funnel in one view. There is more on the mechanics in speed to lead for contractors.