Why it decides the outcome
A marketplace lead is not an inquiry to you. It is an inquiry to four of you. The customer is not evaluating businesses in the abstract — they are having a conversation with whoever showed up, and forming an impression of everyone else based on silence.
This is why speed beats polish. A short, specific reply in two minutes wins against a carefully written one in two hours, because the second one arrives into a decision that has already been made.
What the research actually says
The most-cited work found that responding within five minutes rather than thirty made contact roughly a hundred times more likely, and qualification about twenty-one times more likely. Those numbers come from B2B web-form leads collected between 2004 and 2007.
Treat the direction as solid and the multipliers as not yours. Nobody has published equivalent numbers for a plumber answering a Thumbtack request in 2026, and anyone quoting these figures as if they were is repeating a citation rather than measuring anything.
A realistic target
Under five minutes during working hours is a good goal and achievable by hand if someone is genuinely watching the inbox. Under a minute, at 2am, on a Sunday, is not achievable by hand at any staffing level a small business can afford.
The honest framing is not "reply faster" — you already know that. It is "which leads are you structurally unable to reach in time", and those are almost always the after-hours ones and the ones that arrive while you are doing the work.
Where the numbers come from
- Lead Response Management Study, Dr. James Oldroyd with InsideSales.com (2007)Three years of data (2004–2007), six companies, 15,000+ leads and 100,000+ call attempts. B2B web-form leads, not home-services marketplace leads — the direction is well established, the exact multipliers are not transferable.
- "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review (March 2011)Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington extended the pattern across 2,241 US companies. The widely-quoted "100x / 21x" figures come from the 2007 study above, not from this article — they get attached to the Harvard name in retelling.