Before you buy more leads, measure what happens to the enquiries you already pay for. In most growing businesses the cheapest growth sits in the reply and the follow-up, and it leaks because nobody owns an enquiry in the gap between marketing and sales.
Who Owns Growth? Issue 1. By Sagar Pratap, Principal Consultant and Fractional CMO, Dizital Connect.
The Number: 42 hours
In 2011 Harvard Business Review published an audit by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. The researchers sent test enquiries to 2,241 US companies and timed the replies. Only 37% replied within an hour. 23% never replied at all. Among the companies that did reply within 30 days, the average wait was 42 hours.
The same article reports a separate analysis of 1.25 million leads. Firms that made contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that waited even one hour longer.
The data is US-only and fifteen years old, so read it as a baseline rather than a forecast.
What it means for your week: if your reply time is measured in days, a bigger budget mostly buys more enquiries that cool in the same queue.
The same leak, sector by sector
The HBR audit is fifteen years old, so it is fair to ask whether the pattern still holds. Recent mystery-shopper studies across five sectors say it does, and in law firms it has got worse.
| Sector | Study | What the mystery shoppers found |
|---|---|---|
| Law firms (US) | Clio Legal Trends Report 2024, mystery shop of 500 firms | 33% replied to an email (40% in 2019). 40% answered the phone (56% in 2019). 48% neither answered nor called back. |
| B2B software and services | Workato, demo requests to 114 B2B companies, published March 2026 | Average email reply took 11 hours 54 minutes. Nearly 1 in 5 never replied by email. One company sent a personalised email within 5 minutes. |
| Real estate (US) | Pied Piper, 2,198 inquiries to 21 large brands, reported October 2026 | 68% of website inquiries got no response within 24 hours. 10% heard from an agent within an hour. Nearly 1 in 10 inquiry forms did not work. |
| Car dealerships (US) | Pied Piper 2025, 4,023 dealerships | Dealers failed to personally respond to website leads 19% of the time, the industry's best result on record. |
| Local home-service businesses (US) | Service Direct, as reported by MightyCall | Companies answered 66% of their calls. Their owners believed they answered 97%. |
Look at the car dealers first. Pied Piper has mystery-shopped them for years and publishes the results brand by brand, and their miss rate is now down to 19%, the best the industry has recorded. Being measured in public seems to change behaviour. Then look at the home-service owners: they thought they answered 97% of their calls and actually answered 66%. That 31-point gap is why the fix below starts with counting, not guessing.
The causes differ by business. In a law firm, enquiries usually reach a lawyer who is in court or with a client, so calls go unreturned until the evening. In a small business, the owner is often the phone line. In B2B software, the demo request lands in a shared queue that sales and marketing each assume the other is working. The leak looks the same from the customer's side, but each of these needs a different owner.
The Fix: four numbers and one form
Pull four numbers for last month. One person can do it in under an hour.
- Enquiries by channel. Every form fill, call, WhatsApp message, chat and email, grouped by source.
- Time to a meaningful reply. The first real answer, not the autoresponder. Use the median, because one fast weekday reply can hide a weekend of silence.
- Quiet enquiries followed up three or more times. How many non-responders heard from you three more times?
- Enquiries that became customers, by channel.
Then run the self-contact test. At 8 pm on a weekday, fill in your own website form using a personal email address. Time the reply and read it as a customer would. Does it answer what you asked, or does it ask you to book a call before telling you anything?
If any of the four numbers takes more than ten minutes to find, that is your first finding. It usually means the enquiry has no owner.
Where to start, by business type
- Law firms: count calls missed during court hours and after 5 pm separately, then name one intake owner with a same-day reply rule for email. With 48% of firms in the Clio shop unreachable by phone, a reliable callback is enough to stand out.
- Small businesses and local services: log every missed call for two weeks before deciding anything. An owner-answered line is where the gap between 97% believed and 66% actual tends to sit.
- B2B and SaaS: route each demo request to a named person, and put a calendar link in the first reply. In the Workato test, companies using a lead routing tool replied in about 3.5 hours, against nearly 13 hours for those without one.
- Consumer and D2C brands: test the enquiry form and chat on a phone, not just a desktop. Pied Piper found nearly 1 in 10 real estate inquiry forms did not work at all, and a broken form never shows up as a lost lead in any report.
From the Desk
When I start work as a Fractional CMO, I ask for access to the enquiry inbox before the ad account. Across the 15+ companies I have served, a pattern I've seen is that the brief says lead quality is poor while the inbox tells a different story. Enquiries land in a shared mailbox or a form notification that nobody is assigned to. Marketing reports them as delivered. Sales picks up the ones that look ready and lets the rest go quiet.
Ask why replies are slow and the first answer is workload. Keep asking and you reach how the roles were drawn: marketing's job ends when a lead is created, sales begins when a lead is qualified, and nobody is measured on the hours in between.
So the fix is rarely a new channel. It is a named owner for every enquiry and a weekly look at the four numbers above. I have managed more than $1M in ad budgets, and I would still fix the queue before adding anything to the spend.
Worth reading this week
- Marketing teams are not growing (Demandbase and G2, 20 October 2026). In interviews with 124 US B2B marketers, 72% said their team is the same size or smaller than two years ago, and 56% named cross-functional workflows as their biggest challenge. CMSWire
- Salesforce agrees to acquire Braze (announced 20 October 2026). The deal values the customer engagement platform at about $5.66 billion in enterprise value. A bigger stack still needs an owner for each enquiry. B2BMX Insights
Get the Lead Leak Audit sheet
Email hello@dizitalconnect.com with AUDIT in the subject line and I'll send the Lead Leak Audit sheet. It is set up for the four numbers above. If the results raise questions, a 15-minute intro call is open to readers who want a second pair of eyes.
Who Owns Growth? is the Dizital Connect newsletter for founders and leadership teams who want growth they can measure.
Sources
- Oldroyd, J. B., McElheran, K. and Elkington, D., The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011.
- BYU ScholarsArchive, record of the same article.
- SmartCompany, summary of the HBR audit figures, 4 July 2011.
- Demandbase and G2 research on B2B marketing teams, reported by CMSWire, 20 October 2026.
- B2BMX Insights, Salesforce to Acquire Braze for $5.6B, 21 October 2026.
- Clio, 2024 Legal Trends Report secret-shopper findings, as reported by the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism (2Civility).
- Workato, "We Tested 114 B2B Companies' Lead Response Times", 19 March 2026.
- Pied Piper, 2026 Real Estate Lead Handling Effectiveness Study, reported by Florida Realtors, 13 October 2026.
- Pied Piper, 2025 PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness Auto Industry Study, reported by Auto Remarketing, 3 March 2025.
- Service Direct research on local home-service companies, reported by MightyCall.
