Typical vs best in class

Benchmarks are useful for one thing above all: they tell you whether a gap is small enough to close with effort or large enough to need a different structure. The table below sets typical against best-in-class performance on the four speed metrics. These are the targets an AuditSales engagement works back from.

Before using any of these numbers, it is worth knowing exactly where each one comes from, because they do not all carry the same weight.

Where the numbers come from — honestly

The 42 hours is research. It comes from a study published in Harvard Business Review in 2011, in which researchers audited how quickly 2,241 US companies responded to a web-generated enquiry. Among companies that responded within 30 days, the average first response took 42 hours. Only 37% responded within an hour, and 23% never responded at all. The same research found that firms attempting contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that waited even an hour longer.

The five minutes has research behind it, with caveats. The widely quoted five-minute threshold traces largely to an earlier lead response study conducted by researcher James Oldroyd using data from the sales platform InsideSales. It found the odds of contacting and qualifying a lead fell sharply between five and thirty minutes. It is useful evidence, but it is worth knowing its limits: it was based on data from a vendor’s platform, and it measured contact and qualification rates rather than revenue.

The other rows are working targets, not published studies. The qualification, quote and close figures are practical benchmarks drawn from working with sales teams. They are sensible starting points, but they are not research findings, and they vary enormously with deal size and complexity. A small software subscription and a multi-million-dollar enterprise contract should not share a time-to-close target. Treat them as defaults to adjust, not as universal truths.

A statistic to stop using

You will often see it claimed that 78% of customers buy from the company that responds first. It is repeated everywhere and it may even be directionally true — but it has no traceable primary source. Citations loop back to other articles that cite each other. If you are building a business case, use the HBR research instead. It is less dramatic and much harder to challenge.

Read the first row twice

The distance between 42 hours and five minutes is the most important thing in the table. It is not a gap you close by asking people to try harder. No rota, no amount of discipline and no motivational talk gets a human team from one to the other reliably, because leads arrive during meetings, at lunch, in the evening and at weekends.

Closing that gap takes a structural change: an automated first touch that is researched and drafted in the rep’s voice, then held for their approval. That keeps the human in the loop while removing the delay. It is described in detail in speed-to-lead.

Setting targets that fit you

External benchmarks tell you what is possible. Your own data tells you what is realistic next quarter. A practical approach:

1. Measure your current median for each metric, in clock hours.
2. Find your internal best quartile — the fastest quarter of your own leads or deals. That is proof of what your team can already do under good conditions.
3. Set next quarter’s target at your best quartile, not at the external best in class. It is achievable and it is evidence-based.
4. Use best in class to decide on structure. If the gap between your median and best in class is an order of magnitude, as it usually is for response time, that is your signal that effort will not close it and structure must.

Where to go next

The four speed metrics explains how to measure each number accurately. The six pipeline automations covers the structural fixes. And AuditSales is the practice built around closing these gaps.