"Thanks, but we've gone with someone who came out yesterday."
Mere read that text at 6:50 on a Wednesday morning, standing in the yard at Kōwhai Gully Fencing¹ on the Kāpiti Coast. The enquiry it answered had come through her website at 7:12 on Monday: 40 metres of paling fence, a double gate, and a customer who wanted it finished before Christmas. She saw it on her phone between jobs, meant to ring back that night, and finally emailed on Tuesday afternoon.
Thirty-one hours. A job worth about NZ$9,000 went to the business that rang first.
Mere assumed it was a one-off, so she checked. Auditing her last 20 enquiries took 15 minutes, and the result was worse than she expected. Here is the same audit, the numbers to judge your result against, and the four changes that got her replying inside an hour.
Before you read on, try one thing. Find the oldest unanswered enquiry in your inbox, your messages and your voicemail right now. If it's more than an hour old, keep reading.
Every enquiry is a race you didn't know you'd entered
Your customer is almost certainly asking someone else too. The government's advice to New Zealand consumers is to get quotes or estimates "from at least three businesses" (Consumer Protection, MBIE). When an enquiry lands with you, two competitors often have the same message.
Speed decides much of that race. Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review tracked 1.25 million sales leads at 42 US companies. Firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with the decision maker as firms that tried an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or longer (Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, Harvard Business Review, March 2011).
The same team sent test enquiries to 2,241 US businesses. 37% replied within an hour and 16% within a day. 24% took longer than a day, and 23% never replied at all. Among the firms that replied within 30 days, the average wait was 42 hours.
That's US data from 2011, and your customers are homeowners and site managers rather than American software buyers. Still, anyone who has chased a tradie for a quote knows the pattern. The first business that rings back gets the site visit, and the site visit usually gets the job.
The 15-minute reply audit
Open your email, your website form notifications, your Facebook messages, your texts and your missed-call log. Find your last 20 new enquiries. For each one, write down five things:
| # | Received | First real reply | Hours waited | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mon 7:12am | Tue 2:05pm | 31 | Lost |
| 2 | Mon 11:40am | Mon 12:10pm | 0.5 | Won |
| 3 | Tue 4:15pm | Thu 9:00am | 41 | No reply from customer |
A first real reply is a call, text or email from a person that moves the job forward. An auto-reply saying "we'll be in touch" doesn't count.
Then sort your 20 into the same four groups the researchers used:
- Under 1 hour
- 1 to 24 hours
- Over 24 hours
- Never
Finally, find your median. Line up the 20 wait times from shortest to longest and take the halfway point between the 10th and the 11th.
What your result means
- Median under an hour, and nothing in "never": you're in the fastest group. Keep the habit and look elsewhere for lost work.
- Median between 1 and 24 hours: you win on quiet days and lose on busy ones. The fixes below will pay off quickly.
- Median over 24 hours, or anything in "never": competitors get first go at a large share of your work. This is probably your most expensive problem, and one of the cheapest to fix.
What Mere's 20 enquiries showed
| Group | Enquiries | Won |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1 hour | 4 | 3 |
| 1 to 24 hours | 7 | 3 |
| Over 24 hours | 7 | 1 |
| Never | 2 | 0 |
Her median wait was 19 hours. She won 7 of the 20. Enquiries answered inside an hour won three times out of four. Enquiries left for more than a day won once in seven.
The two she never answered were Facebook messages. She hadn't known they'd arrived.
Twenty enquiries is a small sample, so she didn't treat her win rates as proof. They did line up with the research, and they told her exactly where to look.
Why fast replies are hard when you're on the tools
Mere's week looks like most owner-operators': on site from 7am, quotes at night, and enquiries landing in places only she checked. She found four causes.
- Enquiries arrived in four places. The website form went to her personal email, and the rest came as Facebook messages, texts to her mobile and voicemails on the office line.
- Only she replied. Her partner Sam did the invoicing two days a week but didn't know the price ranges, so he left enquiries for her.
- She tried to quote in the first reply. A proper quote needs a measure-up, so she waited until she could do it properly. The customer heard nothing in the meantime.
- Nobody could see how long an enquiry had waited. A Monday-morning enquiry looked exactly like a new one on Tuesday night.
The four fixes
1. One list for every enquiry
Every enquiry, from any channel, goes into one shared list with the time it arrived. Mere pointed the website form at a shared address, and Sam adds Facebook messages and voicemails when he sees them. Whoever is free can answer anything on the list.
2. A first reply that books the next step
The first reply offers a time to measure up. The price comes later, in writing. Here is the script Mere and Sam now send by text or say on the phone:
"Hi [name], it's [your name] from [business]. Thanks for getting in touch about your [fence, gate or wall]. I can come and measure up on [day] at [time] or [day] at [time]. Which suits you? It takes about 20 minutes, and you'll have a written quote within two working days."
It takes under two minutes to send. The customer knows they've been heard, has a date in the diary, and only has to pick a time.
3. A cover rule for days on site
On the days Sam works, he answers anything that has waited 45 minutes. On other days, Mere checks the list at 10am, 12:30pm and 3pm, when she's already stopping for smoko or lunch. Neither of them quotes a price in the first reply, so neither needs the price list by heart.
4. A clock on every enquiry
Each enquiry on the list shows how long it has waited, and anything over an hour gets flagged. This change mattered most, because "I'll get to it" became a number both of them could see.
Six weeks later
Mere ran the audit again on her next 20 enquiries:
| Group | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1 hour | 4 | 15 |
| 1 to 24 hours | 7 | 5 |
| Over 24 hours | 7 | 0 |
| Never | 2 | 0 |
Her median wait fell from 19 hours to 35 minutes, and she won 11 of the 20, up from 7.
Her average job is about NZ$6,500. Four extra wins in a batch of 20 is 4 × NZ$6,500 = NZ$26,000 of extra work. She gets about 20 enquiries a month, so that's roughly NZ$26,000 a month, from replying sooner to people who had already asked.
When speed won't save you
A fast reply gets you the conversation. Winning the job still takes a fair price, a clear quote and turning up when you said you would.
- Your quotes take a week. A fast first reply only moves the wait. Set a quote deadline too, and keep it.
- You're booked solid for three months. Reply fast anyway and say so. "We can start in March" is an answer people respect, and it keeps you on their list.
- Most of your work comes from repeat clients or one main contractor. Reply speed on new enquiries matters less. Check where your work actually comes from first.
- You get two enquiries a month. A shared list is overkill. Set a phone reminder to check three times a day.
Run your audit this week
- Collect your last 20 new enquiries from every channel
- Record received time, first real reply, hours waited and outcome
- Sort them into under 1 hour, 1 to 24 hours, over 24 hours and never
- Work out your median wait
- Find which channel your "never" enquiries came through
- Write your first-reply script
- Decide who answers when you're on site, and when they check
- Re-run the audit on your next 20 enquiries
Keep the clock running
The script and the cover rule cost nothing. The hard part is fixes 1 and 4: every enquiry in one list that whoever is free can see, with a clock on each one. Plenty of owners try it with a shared inbox and a spreadsheet, and it holds until the first busy week, when nobody updates the sheet.
That list is the kind of thing Thogits runs for small teams. Every enquiry sits in one place the whole team can see, with how long it has waited and the next step, and a nudge when one passes the hour. The same system carries each job on through the quote and the follow-up. Everyone gets every app in a growing library at one price, NZ$50 per seat per month incl. GST, so a part-timer like Sam needs one seat for everything he touches.
Start with your audit. If your median is over an hour, send your 20 rows and tell us where your enquiries come from. We scope each setup around the channels you use and quote it for your business.
¹ Kōwhai Gully Fencing, Mere, Sam, their enquiries, job values and results are illustrative. The research figures come from the sources linked.