What Is Speed to Lead?

Speed to lead is the time between an inquiry arriving and you responding to it. It is the single most controllable number in contractor marketing, it is almost never measured, and in every channel where a customer contacts more than one company it decides a large share of who wins the work.

Where it decides the job

On a shared lead from a marketplace, three to five contractors get the same inquiry simultaneously, and the homeowner talks to whoever calls first. You are not competing on price at that point; you are competing on being awake.

On Local Services Ads and on inquiries from your own Google Business Profile, the dynamic is softer but the direction is identical. A homeowner with a problem is working down a list, and every minute you take is a minute somebody else is using to book the job.

How to measure it without buying anything

Take two weeks of inquiries — calls, form fills, texts, marketplace leads — and write down for each one when it arrived and when a human being responded. That is your speed to lead. Most contractors who do this exercise for the first time find the median is measured in hours and the tail is measured in days.

Then split it by source. It is common to find that the phone is answered in seconds and the website form sits until Thursday, which is worth knowing before anybody spends money on more website traffic.

What actually fixes it

Routing, then automation. Decide who is responsible for each channel and on what device it reaches them. Then close the gaps you cannot staff with missed-call text-back and, if the volume justifies it, an AI receptionist. Software helps at the edges; the middle of the problem is that nobody owns the inbox.

The bottom line

Measure it for two weeks before you buy anything to improve it. The number usually embarrasses people, and it is almost always cheaper to fix with a decision about who answers what than with another subscription.