Glossary
What is speed to lead?
How fast you respond after a prospect reaches out, from form fill or demo request to your first real reply.
Definition
Speed to lead is the time between a prospect reaching out, such as submitting a form, requesting a demo or starting a chat, and your team's first real response. Shorter is usually better: interest fades quickly, and a buyer comparing options may book with whichever vendor answers first.
How to measure it
Take the timestamp when the lead came in and the timestamp of the first meaningful response: a personal email, a call or a booking link that answers their question. A generic "thanks, we got your message" auto-reply doesn't count. Track the median, not the average, since a few leads left for days will skew an average. Include nights and weekends, because that is when many small teams quietly lose leads.
What the research says
The best-known study is "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011. Its headline conclusion: most companies are not responding to online leads nearly fast enough. You will see many speed-to-lead multipliers quoted online; check where a number comes from before repeating it.
An example
Say a facilities manager fills in your demo form at 6 p.m. on a Friday. If the first reply goes out Monday at 10 a.m., your speed to lead is 64 hours, and they may have already booked calls with two competitors. If an alert hits a rep's phone and they reply with two time slots and a booking link at 6:15 p.m., the response time is 15 minutes, and the lead is still thinking about the problem.
How to shorten it
- Route instantly. Send each new lead to one named owner, not a shared inbox.
- Alert where people look. Phone or chat notifications beat a CRM view nobody checks.
- Offer a booking link. Let ready buyers pick a time without back-and-forth.
- Cover off-hours. Decide who or what responds on evenings and weekends.
How Siela AI uses it
When a lead is ready, Siela shares your booking link, and its booking pages are checked against your connected calendars so people only see times you are free.
Questions
What is a good speed to lead?
Faster is better, and many teams aim to reply to inbound demo requests within minutes during business hours. The right target depends on your volume and staffing, so measure your current median response time first, then set a goal you can hit every day, including evenings and weekends.
How do you calculate speed to lead?
Subtract the time a lead came in from the time of your first meaningful response, such as a personal email, a call or a booking link. Exclude automatic acknowledgments. Report the median across all leads, and break it out by source and by hour of day to find gaps.
Sources, checked 25 October 2026: Harvard Business Review: The Short Life of Online Sales Leads (Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, March 2011).
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