The elapsed time between a lead arriving — a missed call, a web form, a chat — and the first outbound contact attempt.
Speed to lead starts when the lead becomes visible to you (the missed-call notification, the form submission, the chat transcript) and stops at the first genuine outbound attempt — a dial, not a CRM task. Auto-acknowledgement emails do not stop the clock: the caller's question is whether a human is coming.
A lead's willingness to answer a callback decays fast and roughly monotonically, so one three-hour miss buried in a pile of two-minute responses leaves the average looking healthy while the revenue leaks. The number that matters is the share of leads contacted inside the window your close rate actually depends on — and that window is trade- and lead-source-specific, worth measuring from your own records rather than assuming from someone else's study.
Export missed calls and form fills with timestamps, join to the outbound call log, and report a distribution, not a mean: share inside five minutes, inside one hour, inside one day, never. The "never" row is usually the finding. If after-hours calls dominate it, the fix is coverage and routing — a capacity question — before it is a follow-up-discipline question.
Related terms: Abandoned call · First-call resolution · Booking rate · the full glossary
The share of missed callers who never come back, and how to price them honestly.
Scope, the five exports we need, timeline and fee — written to be forwarded.