# The Lead Decay Curve — What Happens to a Lead While You Don't Reply

> An interactive chart of what slow follow-up costs a service business, minute by minute — sourced from lead-response research, with an industry marker and a revenue-at-risk calculator.

Reviewed by Maxime Houle, Founder, SeldonFrame. Facts checked July 2026.

HTML version: https://www.seldonframe.com/charts/missed-revenue-decay

## What this chart shows

A new lead who reaches out is usually reaching out to more than one business at once. Lead-response research keeps finding the same pattern: the odds of reaching and qualifying a lead are highest immediately after they contact you, and fall off fast the longer you wait. Every point below is a real, sourced comparison — not a smoothed guess. Where the literature has no data point, the gap is marked explicitly rather than papered over with an invented curve.

## The data points, with sources

| Time since inquiry | Relative odds (indexed to 100 at ~5 min) | Source |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 5 min | 100 | [Lead Response Management study (InsideSales.com data + MIT's James Oldroyd)](https://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/lrm_study) |
| 10 min | 25 | [Lead Response Management study (InsideSales.com data + MIT's James Oldroyd)](https://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/lrm_study) |
| 30 min | 4.8 | [Lead Response Management study (InsideSales.com data + MIT's James Oldroyd)](https://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/lrm_study) |
| 24 hours | 4.8 | [Lead Response Management study (InsideSales.com data + MIT's James Oldroyd)](https://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/lrm_study) |

**Unsourced gap:** no data point exists between 30 minutes and 24 hours in the cited study — the chart draws this segment dashed, not solid. The same study separately notes qualification success fell "over sixfold" within the first hour overall, but that is a coarser, differently-scoped stat than the 30-minute point and is not plotted as its own point on this curve.

## Industry markers (illustrative, not sourced benchmarks)

No trustworthy numeric per-industry response-time table exists in the public research (see our guide on why average lead response time by industry is unreliable). The markers below are an illustrative placement only:

| Industry | Illustrative typical response time |
| --- | --- |
| Plumbing / HVAC | ~45 min |
| Home services (roofing, landscaping, electrical) | ~90 min |
| Med spa / wellness | ~120 min |
| Legal / professional services | ~240 min |
| Real estate | ~30 min |
| Auto repair / detailing | ~60 min |

## What this doesn't prove

- This is correlational data, not a controlled experiment — it can't prove responding faster *causes* more sales for every business, only that faster responders connected and qualified more often in the studies measured.
- The underlying data is old — the Lead Response Management figures come from a multi-year study whose data collection predates 2011, and the Harvard Business Review analysis by the same researcher (James Oldroyd) was published in 2011.
- The exact multipliers (4x, 21x, 6x) come from a single vendor-hosted study across six companies — not a peer-reviewed, replicated result. Treat the direction as reliable and the exact numbers as illustrative.
- The industry markers are illustrative placements, not sourced per-industry benchmarks.

## Sources

- [Harvard Business Review — "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Oldroyd, McElheran, Elkington, 2011)](https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads) — Full text is paywalled; used here only for the qualitative finding that odds of meaningful contact drop sharply as response time grows, not for a specific multiplier.
- [Lead Response Management study (InsideSales.com data + MIT's James Oldroyd)](https://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/lrm_study) — Vendor-hosted summary of ~15,000 leads / ~100,000 call attempts across 6 companies over 3 years. Not peer-reviewed, and the underlying data collection predates the 2011 HBR write-up by the same researcher — treat the exact multipliers as old and directional, not current fact.

## Try it

- Related free tool: https://www.seldonframe.com/tools/speed-to-lead-calculator
- Also see: https://www.seldonframe.com/tools/missed-call-calculator
- Go deeper: https://www.seldonframe.com/guides/what-is-speed-to-lead
- Build your AI front office free (about 3 minutes): https://www.seldonframe.com/signup