The purpose is to put a dollar amount on something many business ignore. Your response time. Slow response time isn’t just a customer service problem, it is also a revenue problem. We designed this calculator to help you understand your business in terms of possible losses by something that is easy to resolve.
This calculator helps you:
- See what slow follow-up is costing you in real monthly dollars.
- Estimate the upside if you tighten it up (faster call-backs, faster text follow-up, same-day quoting).
- Make staffing/process decisions with numbers instead of vibes. Like: do we need a dispatcher, an answering service, better routing, or just a tighter rule for calling back within X minutes.
- Pick a response time target that’s worth chasing, because you can see what it’s worth if you hit it.
In short: It help you understand the cost of not responding faster to incoming calls.
How to use the Lead Response Time Loss Calculator
- Leads per month
Put in how many leads you get in a typical month. Calls + forms + chats, whatever you count as a lead. - Current average response time (minutes)
Your real average. Not “when we’re on our game.” If you’re not sure, estimate it from call logs or your CRM. - Current close rate (%)
What percent of leads turn into sold jobs right now. - Average ticket ($)
Your average invoice size for those sold jobs. - Response time goal (minutes)
What you want to get down to. Most shops pick 5–15 minutes.
Hit Calculate, and you’ll see estimated revenue lost from slow response (monthly), and estimated revenue gained if you hit your goal (monthly).
One important note: this calculator assumes faster response improves close rate. It’s not magic, it’s just showing what the upside looks like if you actually tighten follow-up. A fast response time, simply put, will improve your close rate, because you can stop the customer from looking elsewhere.
The uncomfortable truth: speed closes deals
When a homeowner fills out a form or calls a contractor, they’re usually doing one of three things:
- They have an urgent problem.
- They’re price shopping and calling 3 places.
- They’re anxious and they want a professional to tell them their world isn’t over.
In all three cases, the first company to respond professionally and urgently wins more often. Not every time, but enough that it matters. If you urgently respond, treat it like an emergency, you build rapport and most importantly, trust. And if you’re in HVAC, plumbing, or electrical, you already know the pattern: people don’t “research” for long when the basement is wet, the panel is tripping, or the furnace is dead. They want a solution.
Why lead response time is a hidden revenue leak
Most owners measure marketing like this:
- How many leads did we get?
- How much did we spend?
- What did we sell?
And in most cases, unless you have a combined in-house marketing and sales team, an agencies or marketers job stops at getting you the leads. What happens after that is entirely up to operations, management and sales.
But they don’t measure the part in the middle:
- How long did it take us to respond?
- Did we respond at all?
- Did we respond like we actually wanted the job?
That middle part is where the job gets won or lost. If your response time is an hour, two hours, next day, you’re basically handing business to whoever is quicker. And here’s the kicker: you can spend more on ads and “get more leads,” but if your response time stays slow, you’re just paying to waste more opportunities.
Why this matters more than “getting better at marketing”
Let’s say you’re doing 120 leads/month and closing 35%. That’s decent. But if your average response time is an hour, you’re losing deals you never even knew you had. They’re not “lost leads.” They’re leads that went to another contractor before you ever called back. Most people are sitting down and calling 3 to 6 businesses and they’ll typically stop at the one that answers first, answers right, and cares.
When you improve response time, you usually see two changes:
- More leads turn into booked calls
- Fewer leads ghost you
Same lead volume. Same ad budget. More sold jobs. That’s why this is one of the highest ROI operational fixes most contractors can make.
