How to Benchmark Speed to Lead Without Borrowing Somebody Else's Numbers

Speed to lead has been a buzzword in real estate for years, and the space is full of confident benchmark numbers with no method attached. There is still no wholesaler-specific benchmark dataset with a published sample rule, date range, and set of metric definitions. Until there is, the useful move is to benchmark yourself against yourself. Here is how, and here is what the genuinely published research does and does not say.

What is actually published, accurately attributed, is short. The Drift Lead Response Report, using 2017 data published in 2018, submitted real lead forms to 433 companies and found that 7 percent responded within five minutes, while among the companies that responded at all the average was 42 hours. Oldroyd, InsideSales.com and MIT Sloan published a lead response study in 2007 finding that the odds of contacting a lead called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times, and the odds of qualifying one drop 21 times. That 2007 work is routinely miscited as an MIT institutional study. It is InsideSales platform data analysed by a Faculty Fellow at MIT Sloan, and the same paper also found that past about twenty hours of dialling, additional dials start hurting contact rates rather than helping. Citing the limit is what makes the rest of it credible.

Neither study is about wholesaling, neither is recent, and neither tells you what your market does. Use them for the shape of the curve, which is a cliff rather than a slope, and stop there.

Now benchmark yourself. Pull the lead-created timestamp and the first-outbound-attempt timestamp for ninety days out of your CRM. Report the median, the 90th percentile, and the share answered inside whatever target you set. Break it down by lead source, by hour of day, and by day of week, because those three cuts usually explain most of the variance and all three are actionable.

Read the hour-of-day cut carefully. Evening and weekend leads are the ones a staffed team is least able to answer quickly, so that is usually where the widest gap between your median and your 90th percentile lives, and it is the cheapest gap to close because it needs no additional people.

Then set a target you can be held to and measure against it every month. Ours is 10 seconds to a voice call, with a text and an email going out at the same moment, and it is written into the guarantee precisely so the number has consequences attached. Whatever target you pick, the discipline is the same: measure it, publish it inside your own team, and treat a number without a method behind it, including anybody's benchmark report, as a marketing asset rather than a fact.