Here is a number that should bother every local service business owner: 63 percent. That's the share of companies, across a study of more than a thousand businesses, that never responded to a lead inquiry at all. Not slowly. Never.
The average response time among the ones that did respond was over 29 hours. More than half took longer than five days.
This is where most leads go. Not to a competitor with better pricing, not to a business with a shinier website, not because of a bad review. They go cold in the window between someone raising their hand and the business getting around to calling back.
Why the window is shorter than most people think
Research going back to a landmark study of 15,000 leads established a finding that has held up for nearly two decades: businesses that contact a lead within five minutes are roughly 100 times more likely to make contact than those who wait thirty minutes. After five minutes, odds drop sharply. After an hour, the gap is substantial. After 24 hours, the lead has almost certainly moved on.
In 2026, that window may be shorter still. Apple's call screening feature now intercepts calls from unknown numbers on iPhones before they ring, asking callers to state their purpose. A customer who filled out a form two hours ago and has since moved on to other things may never even hear your number ring. The window to reach them while they still remember who you are has never been smaller.
The specific shape of the gap
The failure to follow up isn't usually laziness. It's a systems problem. Leads arrive through different channels, a contact form here, a Google Business Profile inquiry there, a Facebook message somewhere else, and most local service businesses have no single place where all of those land. Things fall through the cracks between channels, especially during busy periods, which is also when the most leads tend to arrive.
Over 40 percent of high-intent inquiries come in during evenings and weekends, when nobody is working. A form filled out on a Saturday afternoon sits untouched until Monday morning. By Monday, that person has called three other businesses.
What persistence actually looks like
Speed matters most for the first contact. But speed alone isn't the whole answer. Research on lead response consistently finds that the majority of leads that eventually convert required more than one attempt to reach. Most businesses give up after one or two tries.
The businesses with the best conversion rates on their inbound leads do two things: they respond fast to the initial inquiry, and they have a simple, consistent follow-up sequence that doesn't depend entirely on someone remembering to make a second call. That sequence doesn't have to be automated, though automation helps. It just has to exist.
What the math looks like
For a local service business averaging $300 per job, the cost of a 63 percent non-response rate isn't abstract. If ten people inquire in a week and six of them never hear back, that's six potential jobs that went somewhere else. At $300 average, that's a pattern costing real money every single week, quietly, with no invoice attached to it.
The follow-up gap is the least glamorous marketing problem a local service business has. It doesn't require a new platform, a new ad spend, or a new website. It requires a consistent answer to one question: when a new lead comes in, what happens in the next five minutes?
Most businesses don't have an answer. The ones that do tend to win more of the leads they were already paying to generate.