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Guide · Lead response time
Speed to lead automation: answer every new inquiry in under a minute
Speed to lead is the time between a person asking you for something and a person, or your system, answering them. For a small business it is often the cheapest improvement available: most of those leads are already paid for, and the only question is whether anyone replies while the customer is still looking.
What speed to lead means
A lead arrives the moment someone fills in a form, answers a Facebook lead ad, clicks a portal listing, scans a QR code or calls your number. Speed to lead measures how long that person waits before they hear back. It is not the same as how fast your team eventually calls. A rep who calls back in two hours has good intentions and a slow speed to lead.
The measurement that matters is the first meaningful reply: a text or email that names your business, confirms what they asked about, and gives them a way to book, plus a call from a real person as soon as one is free. Automation handles the first part every time. Your team handles the second.
Why lead response time matters
The general principle is simple. People who ask for a quote, a consultation or an appointment usually ask more than one business at once, and they tend to go with whoever answers first and makes the next step easy. Interest fades quickly; the evening someone fills in a form is the evening they are thinking about the problem.
The most-cited research on this is old but still useful. In "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Harvard Business Review, March 2011), James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington audited 2,241 U.S. companies with a web test lead: 37% responded within an hour, and 23% never responded at all. In a separate study of 1.25 million leads, firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that tried even an hour later. The data is from 2011 and the channels have changed, so treat the exact multipliers as history. The direction has not changed.
Slow response is rarely laziness. Leads arrive in the evening, reps are with customers, or two people each assume the other one took it.
How Everborn's Launch package handles it
Launch is the first of three fixed packages, and its tagline is the whole job: every lead answered, every call returned. The speed-to-lead parts of it are:
- A reply in under 60 seconds. Every new inquiry gets a text and an email under your brand, with a booking link. The sequence stops the moment they answer, so nobody gets chased after they have replied.
- Round-robin with a claim window. The lead is assigned to the next person in a fixed order. If they do not claim it inside the window, it moves to the next person and a manager is alerted, so no lead sits with someone who is off.
- Missed-call text-back. A call that rings out gets an immediate text with a booking link. See the missed-call text-back guide.
- Booking calendars per person, with confirmation and reminder messages.
- A 5-day follow-up drip for people who do not answer the first touch, stopping instantly on any reply or opt-out.
- Consent capture on every form, with a privacy link, so the texting is on solid ground from day one.
- Lead-source tagging at entry, and a daily recap plus a weekly funnel report to the owner, so response time and cost per sale by source are visible rather than guessed.
Everything lands in one CRM that you own. Where an industry cannot text, the channel changes and the speed does not: credit repair gets email plus an automatic call-back attempt inside the minute, because carriers do not allow that category on business texting.
What it looks like in your industry
The spine is the same everywhere; the words it may send are not. A dealership reply carries no payment or approval language. A mortgage reply carries no rate. A clinic reply carries no treatment detail. Each industry page shows the version built for that business:
- Dealership sales: a first touch on every internet lead, including evenings and Sundays.
- Real estate teams: portal and web leads answered and routed to the on-duty agent.
- Insurance agencies: quote requests answered and round-robined to a producer.
- Mortgage brokers: text, email and a call task on the LO's phone, with no rate language.
- Home services: estimate requests answered by text and email in under 60 seconds, with text-back on calls that ring out.
- Credit repair: email and a call-back attempt in under 60 seconds, with no SMS.
Or see all twelve industries.
Snap Credit Fix, a California credit repair company, runs on a system I built for them.
Chris Magee, Everborn Productions
Common questions
What is a good lead response time for a small business?
As fast as the customer is still looking, which in practice means minutes, not hours. An automated first reply can go out in under a minute at any hour. The human call should follow as soon as someone is free, and the system should tell you when nobody has picked the lead up.
Does speed to lead automation replace my salespeople?
No. It sends the first reply, books the appointment and makes sure the lead is assigned to someone. The conversation that turns an inquiry into a sale is still your team's job; the system just makes sure they have it while the customer is interested.
Same three packages in every industry
Launch covers the front door. Growth adds the named engine for your vertical. Full Engine adds the partner program and the operating system.
Launch
$3,500 build + $697/mo
Every lead answered, every call returned
Tracked number, consent-capturing forms, a reply in under 60 seconds, missed-call text-back, booking, a 5-day drip, review requests and weekly reporting.
Growth
$6,500 build + $1,197/mo
Launch plus your Industry Engine
Adds your Industry Engine, onboarding, payment links, long-term nurture, list re-activation, retention, an after-hours assistant and the owner's report.
Full Engine
$9,500 build + $1,697/mo
Growth plus the partner program and the operating system
Adds the partner program (with statements only where the law allows payment), internal alerts, written procedures, priority support and the monthly automation think-tank.
Same prices in every industry. Half the build fee at signature, half on delivery; month to month after 90 days. Each monthly includes a $197 platform license (take it off if you already pay for the platform we build on). Free week-one compliance review for regulated industries. Your accounts and data are yours and export any time. The system we build runs in your accounts, and you keep the right to use it even if you cancel.
Websites and search add-ons
Starting points, confirmed in your written quote. Sites are built and hosted on the platform your monthly already covers. We never guarantee rankings or traffic.
| Add-on | What it is |
|---|---|
| Bundle: Online Presence Starter $1,800 | Core site, Local SEO foundation and social profile set-up ($2,200 separately) |
| Bundle: Online Presence Complete $3,200 | Full site, Local SEO foundation, brand kit and social profile set-up ($4,000 separately), first month of Local SEO growth free |
| Website build: core site $1,200 | Up to 6 pages, lead capture and booking wired to the CRM, compliance and disclosure pages, mobile, basic on-page SEO |
| Website build: full site $2,400 | Up to 15 pages: services, locations, team or rep pages, recruiting, blog set-up |
| Website redesign or migration $900 | Existing site rebuilt or moved, with redirects kept |
| Local SEO foundation $750 | Google Business Profile optimization, citations, on-page SEO and schema, Search Console and analytics |
| Google Business Profile set-up $250 | Set-up and optimization, standalone |
| Local SEO growth $350/mo | Two articles a month, weekly Business Profile posts, citation and review monitoring, a rank and traffic report |
| Website care plan $49/mo | Hosting, updates, backups, uptime, compliance-page upkeep, small edits |
Also available: additional pages ($350 per 5), brand kit ($600), social profile set-up ($250), accessibility review and fixes ($450), Google Ads account build ($600). Other one-time add-ons bought with the build are 15% less; monthly add-ons and bundles don't get that discount.
Book a build call
Tell Chris what your team still does by hand. You will get a straight answer on which package fits, or whether none does.
Email [email protected]
Call (916) 541-3415
Chris Magee · Sacramento, CA · serving clients across the United States