Speed to Lead / The Response Desk

You do not have a lead problem.
You have a 42-hour problem.

Harvard put the average first response to an online lead at 42 hours. Almost a quarter of firms never respond at all. You are already paying for the lead. The only question left is who picks up the phone, and how fast.

The Response Desk

  • Every lead inside your covered hours gets a live dial in five minutes
  • Every lead worked for fourteen days, not one call and a shrug
  • Evenings and weekends covered, because that is when leads arrive
  • Every dial timestamped and reported to you daily, per lead, per source
  • Month one includes a backlog sprint across the leads already sitting cold
  • Miss more than five in a hundred and that month drops 25%
The research, not our opinion

The lead does not go cold in a week. It goes cold in an hour.

Two studies have measured this properly, and both landed in the same place. Speed is not a nice-to-have on inbound. It is most of the outcome, and it is the part almost nobody staffs for.

42hAverage time firms take to make first contact with an online lead
23%Of firms studied never responded to the lead at all
21xDrop in the odds of qualifying a lead, five minutes against thirty
7xMore likely to qualify when contact is made inside the first hour

Sources. Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011, auditing 2,241 US companies and 1.25 million leads across 29 B2C and 13 B2B firms. Oldroyd, Lead Response Management Study, MIT and InsideSales.com, three years of data across six companies, more than 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts. Figures are theirs, quoted as published. They describe the market, not a result we promise you.

What lands on your desk

A trained operator, on your hours, pointed at your leads.

Not a queue. Not a shared pool. One dedicated operator who knows your product, works your window, and is managed by us every day they are on the phone.

01

Five-minute first dial

A lead lands, an alert fires, a human dials. Inside five minutes, every time, on every lead that arrives in your covered window.

02

The fourteen-day chase

Six or more touches across call, email and text where compliant. Speed alone does not fix a funnel. Speed plus persistence does.

03

Backlog sprint

Month one, your operator works 500 aged records alongside the live flow. The leads you already paid for get one honest attempt.

04

Booked into your calendar

Calls land directly in your team's diary. Live transfer when someone is hot and you want them now.

05

Timestamps on everything

Every lead, time in, time dialled, outcome, by source. You find out which campaigns produce conversations and which produce noise.

06

Recorded, scored, coached

Calls recorded and QA scored. We review them weekly with you, so the pitch improves instead of drifting.

07

Cover that does not break

If an operator does not work out we replace them and you do not pay for the downtime. That is the difference between a desk and a person.

08

Founder-led

Justin is on the account. Not a coordinator, not a ticket queue. You get the person whose name is on the company.

09

Evenings and weekends

Consumer leads peak after work and on Saturdays. Your desk can cover that window. An in-house hire will not.

The Five-Minute Standard

We will not guarantee your close rate. We guarantee ours.

Anyone who promises what percentage of your leads will buy is guessing with your money. Your close rate belongs to your product, your price and your sales team. So here is the only thing we will put in writing, because it is the only part that is entirely ours.

Every lead that lands inside your covered hours gets a live dial within five minutes, up to eight leads per hour per seat. We publish the timestamp on every single one. Miss on more than five in a hundred in a calendar month and that month's invoice drops 25%. Miss on more than ten in a hundred and the next month is free.

We set the capacity envelope at eight leads an hour because our operators comfortably beat it. The number is there to be beaten, not met.

What counts
  • Every lead delivered inside your covered window
  • From a connected source, with a valid phone number
  • Measured dialer timestamp against lead timestamp, per lead
  • Reported to you daily, not summarised monthly
What stops the clock
  • The lead source is not connected, or system access has not been granted
  • Your CRM or dialer is down
  • Leads arriving outside your covered window. Those are dialled at window open.
  • Volume above eight per hour per seat. Those queue in arrival order and we tell you to add a seat.
  • Missing or invalid phone number on the record
Your arithmetic, not our forecast

What are your uncalled leads actually costing you?

Put your own numbers in. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored. This runs in your browser and the only figures it uses are the ones you type.

Ad spend, list cost, or whatever you pay to create the lead
Best honest estimate. Most owners guess low.
You pay per lead$15Spend divided by lead count
Spent on leads nobody works$2,400Every month, on the leads in that last box
Leads arriving per covered hour1.8Across a 22-day working month
Deals you close today4.0At the close rate you entered
One seat covers your flow

At this volume a single Response Desk holds the five-minute standard with room to spare.

One extra point of close rate is worth$16,000Per month, at your deal value
Against a desk at$2,300Per month, all in

This calculator multiplies the numbers you typed. It is your arithmetic and it is not a forecast, a projection or a promise. We do not guarantee a close rate, a conversion rate or a number of booked meetings, and any firm that does is selling you a story. What we guarantee is in the section above this one.

Skill-priced, month to month

Two shapes. Pick the one your lead flow needs.

Most common

Response Desk

$2,300
per month, one dedicated operator
  • 160 operator hours a month
  • Eight covered hours a day, Monday to Friday, window you choose
  • Up to eight leads an hour inside the five-minute standard
  • 500 aged records worked in month one
  • Daily timestamped reporting

Response Desk, two seats

$4,600
per month, two dedicated operators
  • 320 operator hours a month
  • Up to sixteen covered hours a day, or full seven-day cover
  • Up to sixteen leads an hour inside the five-minute standard
  • 1,000 aged records worked in month one
  • Weekend cover at no extra cost, same hours rearranged

$1,000 setup deposit to build the desk, load the leads and train the operator. It comes straight off your next invoice, so it is not an extra cost, it covers the ramp.

Month to month. No term contract. If we are not delivering, you should not need a lawyer to leave.

Live in ten business days from the onboarding call. There is no list to build and no targeting to research on this desk, which is why it stands up faster than a cold outbound build.

Your first invoice falls due the day your operator starts dialling. You do not pay for training, onboarding or the time we spend building the desk.

Be honest with yourself

This is not for everyone. Read both columns.

Book the call if

  • You are spending money every month to create leads
  • There are leads in your CRM right now that nobody ever called
  • Your best conversations happen on the phone, and you know it
  • Leads arrive in the evening or at the weekend and sit until Monday
  • You can name what one closed deal is worth to you
  • You want to own the outcome and not the hiring

Skip it if

  • You have no inbound flow yet. You want the outbound desk, not this one.
  • You want a two-day trial. Four weeks is the shortest window that produces a number worth reading.
  • You want to pay a percentage of sales. We do not work on commission, ever.
  • Your leads have no phone numbers on them
  • You want the cheapest hour on the market. We are not it and we are not trying to be.
The questions everyone asks

Straight answers.

Do you guarantee results?

No, and be careful with anyone who does. We guarantee the part that belongs to us, which is that your leads get a live dial inside five minutes and that you see the timestamp on every one. Your close rate is a function of your product, your price and your sales team. What we will not let happen is a lead you paid for dying in a queue.

Can we run a two or three day test first?

No, and the reason matters. Three days measures whether an operator can dial a phone. It cannot measure response time against real volume, and the fourteen-day follow-up cycle never completes once, so the touches that produce most of the bookings never happen. Four weeks at forty hours a week is the shortest honest read.

That is roughly what we spend on ads.

It usually is. So the question is which of those dollars works harder, the one that buys the lead or the one that answers it. Right now you are paying full price to create leads and reaching a fraction of them. Doubling the ad budget doubles the pile nobody calls.

We can hire someone at nine dollars an hour.

You can. What nine dollars an hour does not buy is a replacement on the same day, a manager listening to the calls, a QA score against a scorecard, and a second trained operator who already knows your script when the first one stops answering. You are not buying an hour of talking. You are buying the desk that stays up.

What if our leads are junk?

That is a claim today. In thirty days it is a number. Every lead comes back timestamped and dispositioned by source, so you find out which campaigns produce conversations and which produce noise. That is a decision you cannot make today at any price.

Who actually makes the calls?

A dedicated operator, native English speaker, hired with prior sales experience and put through our own training programme before they touch your leads. You interview them before they start and you have the final say. They work your account and no one else's.

What do you need from us to start?

Access to wherever your leads land, whatever scripts or answers you already use, and a phone number to dial from. That is genuinely it. We build the desk, the cadence and the training material from there.

Fifteen minutes. Bring your lead numbers.

Tell me what you spend, how many leads it makes, and what happens to one that arrives at seven in the evening. If a desk is not the answer I will say so on the call.

Book the call
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