In 2011 the Harvard Business Review published “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. The authors audited 2,241 American companies and measured how long each took to answer an inquiry from its website.
Of the companies that answered within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours. Thirty-seven percent answered within an hour, and 23 percent never answered at all. In a separate analysis of 1.25 million leads, firms that answered within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that responded later.