Nearly a quarter of enquiries never get a reply.

Not a slow reply. No reply. That is the finding from the largest audit of the question anyone has published, and it is the cheapest problem most small businesses are carrying.

By Ryno Jordaan. Published 28 August 2026, updated 14 October 2026.

2,241 US companies, audited

How fast should a business reply to an enquiry?

Within the hour. One study is worth more than the ten that quote it. In March 2011, Harvard Business Review published The Short Life of Online Sales Leads by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. They sent test enquiries through the web forms of 2,241 US companies and measured what came back.

Those four numbers in the panel above are the result. The one that matters is the last one. 23% of companies never responded at all.

The same study found firms that made contact within an hour were about seven times more likely to have a qualifying conversation than those that waited even one hour longer, and roughly sixty times more likely than those that waited a full day or more.

The famous statistic is usually attributed to the wrong study.

You will see "leads contacted within five minutes are 21 times more likely to qualify" credited to Harvard almost everywhere. It is not from the Harvard article. It comes from a separate dataset, the Lead Response Management study run with MIT in 2007, by one of the same researchers.

Both are real. They are different studies with different samples, and the five-minute figure has been repeated so many times that the original sample size has largely disappeared from the retelling.

We are pointing this out because the temptation in this industry is to reach for the biggest multiplier and not check where it came from. The honest version is less dramatic and holds up better: reply within the hour and you are in a different league from most of your competition. Reply the next day and you are usually too late.

Why do small businesses miss enquiries?

It is almost never laziness. Owner-operated businesses do not miss enquiries because nobody cares. They miss them because the person who answers enquiries is also the person on the roof, in the van, in a treatment room, or in front of a client.

The enquiry arrives at 10:40 on a Tuesday. The owner sees the notification at 16:20, between jobs, decides to do it properly that evening, and then does not. By Thursday it is buried under nineteen other notifications, and by the following week the customer has hired someone else and the owner never finds out.

Nothing in that sequence is a character flaw. It is the absence of a system, and it is worth saying plainly: a business can be excellent at the actual work and still lose a quarter of its enquiries this way.

Which is also why "try harder" does not fix it, and why buying more leads makes it worse. More leads into a process that drops a quarter of them just means more dropped.

1. Tue 10:40The enquiry arrivesThe owner is on the roof
2. Tue 16:20Seen, between jobs"I'll do it properly tonight"
3. Tue 21:00Not tonightQuotes, invoices, dinner
4. ThursdayBuried under nineteen notificationsStill meaning to reply
5. Next weekThey hired someone elseAnd the owner never finds out

Work out your own number. It takes a minute.

Take the enquiries you get in a month. Be honest about how many never got a real reply — not a "we'll get back to you", an actual reply. Multiply by your average deal value, then by the rate at which you close the ones you do speak to.

A business getting 40 enquiries a month, dropping 23% of them, on a R25,000 average job, closing one in four of the conversations it actually has:

The monthly leak

Those inputs are illustrative, not a claim about your business. Put your own in — there is a calculator on the home page that does the same sum.

The point is the order of magnitude. For most owner-operated businesses this is not a rounding error, and it is money that has already been paid for once, in advertising, in referrals, in time.

Four numbers, and you can get all four yourself.

Average first response time

From enquiry arriving to a human replying. Measure it across your last twenty, not your best one.

Percentage with a documented follow-up

Not "I think I called them." Written down somewhere another person could find.

Deals with no next action

Open, quoted, and nothing scheduled. This is usually the ugliest of the four.

Enquiry to closed conversion

The one most owners already know. It only means something next to the other three.

How do you reply faster without hiring anyone?

Most of this you can do yourself. The first fix is almost always an automatic acknowledgement that goes out the moment a form is submitted, saying when a real reply will come, and then keeping that promise. It is not sophisticated. It moves you out of the 23% immediately.

The second is a single place where every enquiry lands, regardless of whether it came from a form, a phone call, or WhatsApp. Most businesses lose leads at the seams between channels rather than inside any one of them.

The third is a rule about what happens when a quote goes quiet, written down, with a date attached. "I'll chase them next week" is not a rule.

None of that needs new software. If you already pay for a CRM and do not use it, the tooling is not your problem — and we would say so rather than sell you a rebuild of something that already works.

Thirty minutes, no charge, no deck.

We send you a test enquiry, time the reply, and look at what happens to a quote nobody answers. Then we tell you which package fits. If the answer is "none of them", we say so.