Inbound leads decay fast. A lead contacted within five minutes is far likelier to convert than one that waits an hour. Enter four numbers for a rough estimate of what slow follow-up costs you each month, and what closing the gap could recover.
Published lead-response research (the Lead Response Management study, widely cited via Harvard Business Review's "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads") found that the odds of reaching and qualifying a lead fall sharply with delay: responding within five minutes versus thirty minutes makes a lead many times more likely to convert.
This model assigns each response-time band a recoverable fraction: the share of extra conversions that faster follow-up could win back against a sub-five-minute baseline. The estimate is:
leads/mo × close rate × recoverable fraction × deal value
The point is the gap. If leads sit before anyone responds, some of them were winnable.
This is the gap I closed for a dental lead-gen client. I built Orbit: an AI voice agent that calls and texts every lead within seconds, routes it to the right clinic, and hands off the booking. Response within seconds was the difference between a booked appointment and a dead lead.