The speed-to-lead study everyone quotes, and the line in it nobody quotes

If you have taken a sales call from anybody selling response software in the last decade, you have heard a version of this: answer faster and you win more work. The number attached to it varies. Seven times. A hundred times. Seventy-eight per cent. The numbers are usually presented as though they were the same finding.

They are not. Most of them trace back, eventually, to one paper: The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011 by James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. We cite it on our own homepage, because it is the only figure about response speed we have found that carries a stated sample.

We went back to the primary source this week to write this article. Three things in it are worth knowing before you let anybody quote it at you, and the third one changed our own homepage.

One. There are two studies in that article, and they get merged

The paper reports two separate pieces of work, and almost every retelling collapses them into one.

1. A measurement of 2,241 US companies, timing how long each took to respond to a web-generated test lead. That is where the well-known finding comes from that 23% of companies never responded at all, and that the average response time among those that answered within thirty days was 42 hours.
2. A separate study of 1.25 million sales leads, received by 29 business-to-consumer and 13 business-to-business companies in the US. Forty-two firms in total. That is where the seven-times figure comes from.

So when somebody tells you the seven-times finding is based on 2,241 companies, they have merged the two. It is based on forty-two. That is still 1.25 million leads and it is still a real study, but the shape of the sample matters and the two are not interchangeable.

Two. It measured qualification, not sales

Three. One of the three authors sold the software

The author line at the foot of the article names David Elkington as chairman and chief executive of InsideSales.com, a company that sold lead-response software. That is the product the finding argues for.

This does not make the paper wrong. It ran in Harvard Business Review, it has two academic co-authors, and it states its sample, which is more than almost anything else circulating about response speed manages. It does mean the paper is not disinterested, and a reader is entitled to know that before weighing it.

We were not printing it either. Our own rule says a figure never appears without its publisher, its year, its sample and what that publisher sells, and every cited figure on this site carries all four. Except this one, which carried three, on the homepage, since the first build. Checking the primary source to write this article is what caught it. The homepage now names the disclosure, and the gate that runs on every deploy fails if it is ever removed again.

What to do with it instead

The honest version of the finding is narrower than the sales pitch and still worth acting on: on a sample of 1.25 million online leads across forty-two US firms in 2011, contacting inside the hour was associated with roughly seven times the odds of reaching a decision maker for a real conversation, compared with contacting an hour later.

It is fifteen years old. It is about online sales leads generally rather than about roofing, or dentistry, or executive search. And it is a study about an association, not a promise about your business.

So the useful move is not to adopt the number. It is to measure the same thing in your own operation, where the sample is yours and the denominator is one you can actually see: how many enquiries arrived last month, how many were contacted inside an hour, and what happened to each group. Most businesses have never counted it. Counting it is usually cheaper than buying anything, and it tells you whether the gap is worth closing before anybody sells you a way to close it.