How fast should you reply to a B2B lead?
Within the hour, and the research behind that answer is older than most marketing stacks. The hard part is not knowing it. It is doing it every time.
· Inbox · 4 min read
Someone fills in your demo form at 4:40 on a Thursday. They have three tabs open, one for each vendor on their list. The first one to answer with something useful usually gets the call.
What the research says
In 2011 Harvard Business Review published a study of more than 2,200 US companies and how quickly they answered web leads (Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads"). Companies that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a real conversation with a decision maker as those that waited even one hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited a day or more.
The same study found the average first response took 42 hours. Many teams have improved since, but the shape has not changed. A lead is warmest in the minutes after they ask, and it cools fast.
Why teams still miss it
Almost nobody misses the hour because they do not care. They miss it because of where leads land and who is watching.
- Leads arrive in different places: the shared inbox, a form tool, WhatsApp, someone’s personal email.
- Nobody owns the first reply, so everyone assumes someone else has it.
- The person who should answer is in a meeting, on a plane or asleep in another time zone.
- A good first reply takes thought. It has to answer the question, offer a time and ask the next useful thing, so it waits until there is time to write it properly.
What a fast first reply needs
Speed alone is not the goal. A one-line "thanks, we will be in touch" is fast and useless. The reply that works does three things.
- Answers what they actually asked.
- Offers a specific time, not "let me know when suits".
- Asks one question that makes the call better, such as which tools they use today.
How Levric handles it
In Levric, email, web forms and WhatsApp land in one inbox. Conversations that need a reply rise to the top, tagged with how long they have waited, so nobody has to sort anything to see who is next.
Chief reads each thread and drafts the reply with a time and a question. A person on your team sends it as it is, changes it, or writes their own. The draft is ready the moment the lead arrives, so the slow part, working out what to say, is already done when someone opens the thread.
See it in the app: the Inbox tour