Glossary term
Speed to Lead
Speed to lead is the time between a prospect reaching out and the first real response from your team. Every minute that passes is a minute the prospect may spend talking to a competitor.
What is speed to lead?
Speed to lead is the elapsed time between a lead's expression of interest (a form submission, a WhatsApp message, a missed call) and the company's first genuine contact with that person, whether by call, personal message or email. It is measured in minutes because interest peaks at the moment of contact and fades quickly, and because many buyers message several suppliers at once. A generic auto-reply does not count; what matters is contact from a person, or from a bot that actually qualifies the lead. Research published in Harvard Business Review in 2011 concluded that most companies respond to online inquiries far too slowly.
Measuring and reading it
Illustrative example: a real-estate agency receives 200 leads a month from click-to-WhatsApp ads and its website form. Measurement shows a median first-response time of 3 hours 10 minutes, only 22% of leads answered within an hour, and inquiries after 5 p.m. waiting until the next morning. Three measures are enough to read the picture:
- Median first-response time. More reliable than the mean, which a few very late cases can distort.
- Share answered within a set time, such as the percentage answered within one hour.
- Breakdown by channel, hour and day. It exposes peaks and uncovered periods, such as Thursday evening and Friday.
With an owner assigned automatically to every new lead, an alert when a reply is late, and a bot that answers after hours and books appointments, the median can move from hours to minutes without adding headcount.
In Naffes CRM
Naffes CRM runs speed-to-lead alerts on every new deal. If nobody reaches out by message, logged call or email from the app, the deal owner is alerted after a quarter of an hour, and workspace managers after an hour, or at once if the deal has no owner.
- Admins change both delays under Settings, then Records & Fields, then Modules, then Deals; setting either to 0 turns that rule off.
- The check runs every minute and only looks at deals created in the last 48 hours.
- Alerts go to the deal's owner. On the contact side, territory rules give each new contact an owner the moment it is created, either a named user or the next person in a team's rotation, so no new lead is left without someone responsible.
- A Speed-to-lead board is one of the one-click dashboard templates, and the manager dashboard tracks first human response time and 90th-percentile response time in conversations.
When the team is offline, a WhatsApp bot can keep the conversation going: it answers free-text questions with AI and can book a meeting with the rep who owns the thread. A bot can also be limited to set active hours, with an away message outside them. See the WhatsApp bot and lead.
Faster responses without a bigger team
- Assign an owner the moment a lead arrives; a lead shared by everyone is answered by no one.
- Send the alert to one named person first, then to their manager if the reply is late.
- Prepare a first message per source that refers to exactly what the lead asked for, instead of a generic greeting.
- Cover evenings and weekends with a bot that qualifies and books, not with a 'we will get back to you' message.
Questions
Questions 2
Does an automatic reply count toward speed to lead?
A 'we received your message' reply moves nothing forward, so it is not a real response. A bot that asks qualifying questions and books a meeting does part of the work. Keep in mind that Naffes alerts watch activity inside the product, so a call from a personal phone stops them only if it is logged in Naffes.
How long should the owner alert wait?
It depends on the channel and the product. The Naffes default is a quarter of an hour for the owner and an hour for managers, a sensible starting point for WhatsApp and form leads. Watch the results for a month, then adjust both delays.