Free tool

Speed-to-lead calculator

The speed-to-lead calculator turns four numbers you already have — leads per month, average job value, close rate, and how long a lead currently waits for a reply — into the revenue at risk from slow response and the share of it you would recover by answering in under a minute. Arithmetic on your inputs, not a forecast.

Leads per month

Every inbound enquiry across every channel — calls, web forms, texts, portal leads. Count them from one real month, not a good one.

Average job value

What one booked job is worth on the first invoice. Leave repeat work out — including it only makes the loss look larger.

Close rate on leads you reach

Of the leads you actually get hold of, the share that books. Use your own measured number, not a borrowed benchmark.

Current average response time

2 hours

Lead arrives to real reply, measured on your worst channel — usually a web form that lands after hours.

Share of leads you lose to the response gap — your assumption

20%

The judgement call this model hinges on, and yours to make. Nothing here fills it in for you from someone else's study.

Share of those you would win back by replying inside a minute

60%

Answering first wins some of those jobs back, not all of them. Set it low if you would rather be surprised upward.

What the delay is costing

Revenue at risk from slow response

$32,400 / year

At your numbers: 50 leads a month, 20% of them lost while a reply is pending, a 30% close rate and a $900 job — that is 3 jobs and $2,700 a month.

Today

replying in 2 hours

Leads / mo: 50
Leads lost to the gap / mo: 10
Jobs lost / mo: 3
Revenue at risk / mo: $2,700
Revenue at risk / yr: $32,400

Those leads spend 100 hr a month waiting for a reply — 50 × 2 hours.

Replying inside a minute

at the recovery share you set

Jobs won back / mo: 1.8
Revenue recovered / mo: $1,620
Revenue recovered / yr: $19,440
Revenue still at risk / yr: $12,960
Lead waiting time / mo: 0.8 hr

That is 99 hr a month of waiting removed, and $19,440 a year at your own recovery assumption.

Every figure above is arithmetic on numbers you entered, including the two you guessed at. It is a model of your own assumptions, not a forecast, and no percentage here was borrowed from a study and quietly applied to your business.

How does this calculator work out the revenue at risk?

The speed-to-lead calculator multiplies four of your own figures: leads per month × the share you believe slow replies cost you × your close rate × your average job value. That product is the monthly revenue at risk; twelve times it is the annual figure. No benchmark, curve, or industry average enters the calculation.

The recovery panel applies one more of your numbers to that result: the share of the lost jobs you think you would win back by replying inside a minute. Set it at 100% and the model assumes speed alone wins every contested job, which nobody should believe. Set it at 40% and the annual figure is still usually large enough to be worth a decision.

Two things are deliberately left out, both of which make the real loss bigger rather than smaller: repeat work from the customers you never won, and the marketing spend that produced the enquiry in the first place. A lead lost to a slow reply is paid for twice.

What counts as your response time?

Response time on this page means the gap between a lead arriving and a real reply reaching that person — not the gap until someone on your team notices it. An automated acknowledgement counts only if it opens a two-way conversation. Measure it from your worst channel, usually after-hours web forms.

Measure from arrival, not from when the enquiry was first seen. The customer is timing the former.
Use your worst channel, not your best. A phone answered in three rings does not offset a contact form read on Monday.
Include nights and weekends in the average — a Friday 7pm enquiry answered Monday morning is a 60-hour response, not a same-day one.
A templated acknowledgement that goes nowhere is not a response. It sets an expectation and then breaks it.

Most owners who run this measurement honestly find their real average is several times their assumed one, for a mundane reason: the fast responses are the memorable ones. The lead that waited until Tuesday left no impression at all, because the person who sent it simply hired somebody else.

Why does this calculator refuse to guess how many leads you lose?

This calculator asks you for the lost-lead share instead of supplying one, because any decay curve it applied would be someone else's data wearing your logo. The published research on response time is real and worth reading — it lives on the lead follow-up automation page — but it is not your close rate.

Every calculator that auto-fills a loss percentage is doing one of two things: quoting a study conducted on a different industry in a different decade, or making the number up. Both produce an output that looks precise and means nothing, and both are easy to spot once you ask which input the vendor supplied and which one you did.

So the arrangement here is plain. You bring the two judgement calls, this page brings the multiplication, and the evidence for why minutes matter sits on the service page where it is cited and dated. If your assumptions are wrong the output is wrong, and you will know exactly which knob moved it.

How much time do your leads spend waiting for a reply?

Lead waiting time is the one output here that needs no assumption at all: leads per month × your current response time. Fifty leads waiting two hours each is a hundred hours a month of enquiries sitting unanswered. Answering in under a minute collapses that to well under an hour.

This number is worth looking at separately from the money, because it is not a model of anything — it is a straight multiplication of two figures you supplied. It also reframes the problem usefully. A four-hour average response does not mean one customer waited four hours; it means every enquiry that arrived this month collectively spent days in a queue nobody was watching.

It is also the number that makes the after-hours case obvious. Enquiries do not arrive evenly across a working day, and the ones that land at 9pm on a Saturday are the ones with the longest wait and, often, the most urgency behind them.

How does a service business actually answer every lead in under a minute?

A service business answers every lead in under a minute by removing the person from the first response, not from the relationship. Hitman Marketing builds that as lead follow-up automation for forms, texts and portal leads, and AI phone answering for calls — capture, reply, qualify, route, book.

Capture from every channel into one place, so no enquiry depends on the right person opening the right inbox.
Reply immediately by text with a real two-way conversation rather than a receipt.
Qualify against your criteria — service, location, timeline — before anyone spends a minute on the lead.
Route to the right person with the conversation attached, not summarised away.
Keep following up on a defined cadence until there is a reply or a documented opt-out.

Most of that sequence is fixed, rule-shaped workflow, with a language model doing only the part it is genuinely good at: understanding what a person wrote. The proportion matters for reliability, because a fixed workflow fails loudly and the failure that costs jobs is the quiet one, where the system looks busy and no appointment ever gets created.

Lead follow-up automation AI phone answering

Common questions

What lost-lead share should I enter?: Whatever you can defend from your own records. The honest way to find it is to pull last month's enquiries, mark the ones that went quiet after a slow reply, and divide. If you have never measured it, start low, look at the annual figure, and decide whether it is worth an afternoon of counting.
Does this calculator cover phone calls that ring out?: It does if you count them as leads, but an unanswered call is a distinct problem with its own arithmetic and its own fix. The missed-call math post works that example end to end with a home service business, and AI phone answering is the service that closes it.
Related: The missed-call math, worked throughAI phone answering
Is replying fast enough on its own?: No. Speed gets you into the conversation; qualification, routing and persistence decide whether it becomes a job. A one-line auto-reply that nobody follows sets an expectation and then breaks it, which is worse than a slow but real answer. Fast plus a real conversation is the combination that pays.
What does it cost to close the response gap?: Hitman Marketing's lead follow-up automation starts at $997 setup plus $497 a month, covering capture, instant reply, qualification, routing and follow-up until there is an answer. Adding AI phone answering, which handles the calls nobody picks up, starts at a $6,500 build plus $997 a month.
Related: See the full pricing ladder

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