Six in ten companies take more than an hour to answer an inquiry, if they answer at all.

Three researchers, writing in Harvard Business Review, audited 2,241 US companies by sending each a web inquiry and timing the reply. 37% replied within an hour. 16% replied within one to 24 hours, 24% took longer than a day, and 23% never replied. Among companies that replied within 30 days, the average reply took 42 hours.

A separate study by the same authors followed 1.25 million leads received by 42 US companies. Firms that tried to reach a buyer within an hour of the inquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead, meaning a real conversation with a decision maker, as firms that tried an hour later. They were more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day or more.

Why inquiries wait

The authors name three causes: leads pulled from the CRM once a day instead of as they arrive, sales teams focused on prospecting their own leads, and rules that hand out inquiries by territory or by turn instead of by value. A fourth applies to many industrial companies. Inquiries arrive in a shared inbox or through a distributor, and no one person is responsible for the reply.

How to measure your own

Send an inquiry through your own website from an outside address on a weekday afternoon and time the reply. Then pull the last fifty inquiries and record, for each one, the hours until a person replied, who replied, and the estimated value of the work. The most useful comparison is whether the largest inquiries were answered faster than the small ones.

Limits

The audit was published in 2011, and response times have probably improved in some industries since. We cite it because it measured what companies did rather than what they reported, and because the test takes a few minutes to repeat on your own company.