Leads Answered in 5 Minutes Booked 38%. After an Hour: 15%
I run a pressure washing and window cleaning company in Madison, Wisconsin, and I co-founded Workely. People argue about speed to lead all the time, usually with numbers from somewhere else. So I pulled our own. This is the full breakdown, including the parts that make the result weaker than it looks.
What did the data show?
Here are our website leads from January 1 to October 12, 2026, grouped by how long it took us to first answer:
| First answer | Leads | Booked | Booked rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Within 5 minutes | 79 | 30 | 38% |
| 5 minutes to an hour | 10 | 3 | too few to read |
| An hour or more | 68 | 10 | 15% |
| No answer recorded | 39 | 0 | 0% |
"Booked" means the lead ended up booked, completed or won. The middle row has 10 leads, which is too few to say anything about, so I left its rate out.
The last row needs a caution. "No answer recorded" means our system has no timestamp for a reply. Some of those leads may have been answered by phone or text outside the system, so don't read that row as proof that ignoring a lead never works.
What counts as an answer?
I counted the earliest recorded reply of any kind: an automatic email, a priced quote, a call attempt or a human reply. That is a loose definition, and it matters. Of the 79 leads answered within five minutes, 63 got an automatic first reply and 42 included a priced quote. Sixteen got a human first.
So in our data, "answered fast" mostly means a system answered instantly. That is the point of automating the first reply, but it also means this is not a story about a faster human.
Why shouldn't you read this as proof?
Four reasons, in order of how much they worry me.
- It's a correlation. The fast group is mostly leads our system could quote on its own. The slow group can include harder jobs, like three-story homes and commercial lots that need a look first, and those book less often for reasons that have nothing to do with speed.
- The numbers are small. 79 leads and 68 leads. A few bookings either way moves the percentages.
- It's one company in one city. Madison, Wisconsin, and one year of records.
- It's website forms only. Phone leads showed no gap. Phone leads we answered within five minutes booked 12% (23 of 194), and those first answered after an hour or more booked 14% (9 of 65). Calls get answered live, so speed works differently there.
What did we leave out, and does it change the answer?
Of 296 website leads, we set aside 100 before counting, because their timing can't be trusted:
- 82 were created by our own recovery and backfill scripts after the original request. For those, the lead record is newer than the real request, so the clock is wrong.
- 18 more had a first reply dated before the lead record itself.
That leaves 196 leads, which is the table above. Leaving the 100 in would have made the fast group look better than it is. The 60 records where the reply came before the lead record booked 55% of the time (33 of 60), and they would all have landed in the "within 5 minutes" row.
As a second check, we also dropped abandoned quote-form captures and exit-intent pop-ups, which are low-intent leads. That leaves 59 leads answered within five minutes with 28 booked (47%), against 34 answered after an hour or more with 7 booked (21%). The gap stayed. The headline numbers use the version with fewer judgment calls.
What can you do with it?
Check your own. For each website lead in the last few months, write down when the request arrived and when your first real reply went out. Group them into under five minutes, five to sixty minutes and over an hour, then count how many in each group booked. If your numbers look like ours, the fix is writing your price rules down once so the first reply can go out without you.
That is what the free quote calculators are for. They cover 12 trades, you type your own rates, and nothing you enter is stored.
Workely does this for website leads. It prices the job from your own rules and gets the quote ready with a link to book a time. Leads outside your rules wait for your OK. We are early and in a founding pilot, and this post is data from my company's records, not from Workely customers. To see what the first reply looks like, read how lead capture and qualification works.
Want the earlier take on how fast to reply? Start with how quickly you should respond to a lead.