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The 5-minute rule, in dollars. Your dollars.

Inside-sales research is brutal: contacting a web lead within 5 minutes is 100x more effective than waiting 30. Plug in your numbers — see what slow response is costing you.

Your current response time vs. 60-second auto reply.

Based on the InsideSales / Harvard Business Review research on lead response.

Today
Contact rate
5%
Jobs / month
1.4
Revenue / month
$700
With 60s auto-reply
Contact rate
70%
Jobs / month
19.6
Revenue / month
$9,800
Annual upside
$109,200

Extra revenue per year from the same lead volume — just by answering faster. This is the cheapest growth lever in your business.

The research, in one paragraph.

In 2007, InsideSales.com analyzed 1.25 million sales leads from 90 companies and found that the odds of qualifying a lead drop 10x between 1 minute and 5 minutes after submission, and 100x between 1 minute and 30 minutes. Harvard Business Review followed up in 2011 with similar findings on a different dataset. The shape of the curve is the same: speed eats everything else.

For home service contractors, the implication is direct. A homeowner who fills out your "get a quote" form is actively shopping — they have three other tabs open with competitor forms. The contractor who replies first wins 50–70% of the time, regardless of price. Slow response is a price you pay in lost work.

The fix isn't hiring a CSR to watch the inbox. It's an automated reply that fires within 60 seconds — SMS or email, with a self-scheduling link. That covers 95% of the response-time value, runs for ~$50/mo of tooling, and lets you stay in the truck instead of behind a phone.

Common questions.

Where does the contact-rate decay curve come from?
The classic InsideSales.com Lead Response Management Study and the Harvard Business Review follow-up. Contacting a lead within 5 minutes is roughly 21x more effective than waiting 30 minutes, and 100x more effective than waiting an hour. The curve in this tool approximates that data for home service trades.
Does this apply to phone leads or just web leads?
The original research is on web/form leads, where the prospect just clicked submit and is still on your competitors' tabs. Phone leads have their own dynamic — see our Missed Call Cost Calculator for those. Both feed into the same fix: automated response within 60 seconds.
What's a realistic 'auto-reply' look like?
An SMS or email triggered automatically by your lead-capture form, within 60 seconds, that says: 'Got your request — I can be at [neighborhood] [day]. Want me to lock in [time]?' Self-scheduling links double the conversion. This is what EarnYour's Starter tier wires up on day 14 of onboarding.
We already get to most leads same-day — is this still real?
Same-day is too slow for the modern buyer. The contractor who replied first gets the customer 7 times out of 10. By the time you call back at 5pm, three other companies have already quoted. Speed is the lever, not effort.
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