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.
Six figures you already know gives you a screening range in about a minute. The full diagnostic prices it from your own call records in two to three weeks, for a fixed $4,500, and costs you about an hour of someone's time to pull the exports.
If your data cannot support a defensible figure, you get a readiness report naming exactly what to start capturing, at no charge, and no number is published.