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What does answering late cost you a month?

Enquiries go cold. This puts a conservative number on it — and tells you plainly when the answer is 'less than you'd think'.

Your numbers

Forms, calls, messages — everything that arrives wanting a price.
Your realistic average, including evenings and weekends — not your best day.
Something you can actually sustain. Under 5 minutes needs automation.
Of everything that comes in, how many become paying customers. Most people guess high here.
Profit, not the invoice. Don't know it? Thecustomer value calculator works it out.
How long an enquiry stays warm. 4 hours is a conservative default. CRM vendors imply this is more like 30 minutes — their business depends on you believing that, so we didn't use their number. Change it and watch the answer swing; that swing is the honest margin of error.
Cost of the delay—in lost profit per year
  • Now — jobs won a month—
  • Now — profit a month—
  • Replying faster — jobs won—
  • Replying faster — win rate—
  • Extra profit a month—
  • Enquiries you're losing to the wait—

Why this number is smaller than the ones you've seen

  • Because we didn't use the famous statistic. You'll have seen "respond in 5 minutes and you're 21 times more likely to win". That comes from one study from 2007, it measured whether a salesperson managed to qualify a lead rather than whether anyone bought anything, and it's quoted by every company selling follow-up software. Speed genuinely matters. It does not matter 21 times.
  • The gain flattens, so we made it flatten. Going from three days to one hour changes outcomes. Going from ten minutes to two mostly changes a dashboard. The model here decays towards a limit instead of multiplying forever, which is why halving your response time twice doesn't double the answer twice.
  • Some enquiries were never going to buy. Price shoppers, wrong area, already booked someone else. The model refuses to push your win rate above a realistic ceiling no matter how fast you get, and it will tell you when it's holding the number back.
  • Fast and useless still loses. A two-minute reply that says "thanks, we'll be in touch" beats silence by very little. The thing that wins is a fast reply with a price, a time, or a specific next step in it.
  • This is usually a systems problem, not a discipline problem. Nobody replies in 15 minutes at 8pm on a Saturday by trying harder. It happens because the enquiry reaches a phone, the reply is half-written already, and the person answering doesn't have to look anything up first.

Want the enquiries to chase themselves?

Instant alerts, pre-written replies, forms that already know which job they're about. Usually a small build, and it pays for itself in the number above.

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Need help fixing this?

Answering faster is almost never about trying harder — it's instant alerts, a reply that's already half written, and a form that captures enough to quote first time. Usually a small build.

Fix the follow-up

No charge for the conversation, and we'll tell you if it isn't worth doing.