Speed to Lead
Responding within 5 minutes makes a lead 9x more likely to convert than responding within 10 minutes.
Every minute past the 5-minute mark is measurable revenue lost.
Source: Harvard Business Review - The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
Average first response time to a web lead is 47 hours.
Industry average is so slow that being fast is a near-permanent advantage.
Contact rates drop more than 80% after the first 5 minutes.
If you do not reach the lead in 5 minutes, you usually do not reach them at all.
Calling a lead within 1 minute increases conversions by up to 391%.
Speed beats almost every other lever in the funnel.
Follow-Up & Persistence
80% of sales require 5 or more follow-up calls after the initial meeting.
One touch is not follow-up. A real cadence is.
Source: Marketing Donut
44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up.
The businesses that follow up 5+ times capture the revenue everyone else abandons.
Source: Marketing Donut
SMS open rates are 98% vs 20% for email.
Follow-up should be SMS-first, especially in home services.
Missed Calls & Lost Revenue
85% of customers whose calls are not answered will not call back.
A missed call is a lost job, unless you text back fast.
60% of consumers prefer texting a business over calling.
Two-way SMS is no longer optional in the trades.
Source: EZ Texting Mobile Consumer Study
Customer Acquisition Cost
Acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one.
Database reactivation has the highest ROI of any marketing channel in the trades.
Source: Harvard Business Review
A 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25 to 95%.
Existing customers are the cheapest source of incremental revenue.
How to use these numbers
Multiply your current monthly lead volume by the conversion lift implied by each stat, then multiply by your average ticket. That number is the revenue currently being left on the table by slow speed-to-lead, weak follow-up, and missed calls. A Revenue Optimization System is built to capture it.