Speed wins: whoever replies first usually gets the deal
Between “reply in five minutes” and “reply in half an hour” lies a vast difference in your odds of a deal. And most companies don’t reply even by the next day.
A customer sends an inquiry at the moment they’re thinking about the problem most. An hour later they’re thinking about something else. A day later they may already be talking to someone else. Response speed isn’t politeness — it’s one of the strongest and cheapest sales tools you have. And almost nobody uses it.
The numbers that surprise
A classic study by James Oldroyd (MIT and InsideSales, 2007), across hundreds of thousands of calls, found that reaching out within five minutes instead of thirty makes you twenty-one times more likely to qualify the lead. Not a fifth more. Twenty-one times. And a later Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies showed how rare that is: the average response took 42 hours, and 23% of firms never replied at all.
Why slowness wins so often
Not because salespeople are lazy. The inquiry lands in an inbox among fifty others, nobody “owns” it in any system, and by evening it’s buried. Forgetting, again, isn’t a human failing — it’s a hole in the process. Whoever plugs that hole wins deals a faster competitor doesn’t even know they’re losing.
Speed without chaos
Fast doesn’t mean rushed. It means having a system that assigns a new inquiry to someone straight away and won’t let go until someone has replied. A reminder that rings in ten minutes, not two days. The first reply doesn’t have to be a perfect quote — a human “I see you, I’ll get back to you today with details” is enough. That alone puts you ahead of most of the market.
A small test
Measure how long it takes for a reply to reach someone who sent an inquiry today. If you can’t say, that’s an answer in itself.
Lemnio makes sure no inquiry or reminder slips through — you reach out when it counts. Try it free.