Speed to lead statistics, traced back to the source.

The short answer

What the research supports, in one paragraph

Two studies, both involving the researcher James Oldroyd, found that the odds of reaching and qualifying an online lead fall sharply in the first hour after the enquiry. Neither measured revenue, and neither looked at clinics, salons or local service businesses specifically. The honest version of the claim is: respond within minutes where you can, and certainly within the hour, because contact rates drop quickly after that. Anything more precise than that is borrowed from a B2B dataset that is now 15 to 19 years old.

Read the fine print

Why these numbers are weaker than they look

• Contact is not a sale. The 100x figure measures whether someone picked up. A faster call raises the chance of a conversation; it does not tell you how many of those conversations turned into paying clients.
• The leads were B2B. Both datasets came from companies selling to other businesses. A person asking a med spa about pricing on a Sunday night behaves differently from a procurement manager filling in a form.
• They are old. In 2007 most follow-up meant a phone call. Today a lead may have messaged you on WhatsApp, filled in a Meta lead form on their phone, or emailed three competitors at once.
• Odds are not probabilities. "100 times the odds" sounds like "100 times the chance." When the base rate is low, a big odds ratio can still mean a modest real difference.
• Even Oldroyd flagged variation. Reporting on the 2007 study notes that the best response time varied a lot by industry.

None of this means speed doesn't matter. It means a clinic owner should treat "respond fast" as solid advice and the exact multipliers as marketing.

What still holds for service businesses in 2026

Strip away the multipliers and three practical points survive, and they match what we see when we set up lead inboxes for clinics, salons and franchise locations:

1. The first hour matters most. Both studies found the steepest drop early. Your process should be built around a same-hour first touch during opening hours.
2. Leads that get no response at all are the real loss. In the 2011 audit, almost a quarter of companies never replied. In small businesses this usually happens because enquiries arrive in five places: a website form, a Meta lead form, a Google ad form, a WhatsApp chat and a staff member's personal phone.
3. Persistence beats a single fast call. A fast first touch followed by nothing performs worse than a reasonable first touch followed by a planned sequence. Write down the sequence, and make the software remind the person who owns the lead.

How to measure your own lead response time

You don't need industry averages if you can measure your own. Over the next 30 days, record for every new enquiry:

• The time it arrived and the channel it came from.
• The time of the first human or automated reply, and who sent it.
• Whether you reached the person, and whether they booked.

Then split the results by response time: under 15 minutes, 15 to 60 minutes, 1 to 24 hours, and more than a day. If your booking rate drops sharply after the first hour, you have your own speed to lead statistic, for your own clients, and it beats any figure from 2007. Our follow-up email templates give you the messages to send while you test.