Speed to lead: what to do in the first five minutes after an enquiry

Why the first five minutes matter

A buyer who fills a form or sends an enquiry is comparing you with two or three other businesses at that moment. The one who answers first is often the one who gets the next conversation, even if the price is not the lowest.

Most teams know this and still lose time, because the enquiry sits in a shared sheet, an email inbox or a portal dashboard that nobody is watching in real time.

A routine that works for a small team

Keep it simple enough that every agent can follow it on a busy day.

• Route every new lead to a named person within seconds, never to a shared pool nobody owns.
• Send a short WhatsApp or SMS acknowledgement automatically so the buyer knows you saw the enquiry.
• Call within five minutes during working hours; if there is no answer, retry after 30 minutes and again the next morning.
• Log the outcome with a disposition so the manager sees what happened without asking.

How to measure it

Track one number: median minutes from enquiry to first call attempt, by source and by agent. Review it weekly and look at the slowest 10 percent of leads, not the average.

If a source is consistently slow to be called, that is usually a routing problem rather than an effort problem.

Where a CRM helps

A CRM does not make people faster by itself. It removes the waiting: leads are routed the moment they arrive, the first call is one tap away, and overdue leads are visible to the manager. The discipline is still yours.