Credit first
Sometimes doing nothing is the right call
Staying as-is costs nothing new. There is no subscription, nothing to learn, and no project on your desk. If your calendar is full from referrals and repeat work, and growing is not the goal, leaving everything alone is a rational choice, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
The rest of this page is for the other case: when the phone should be ringing more than it is, and you are deciding whether the gap is real.
What survived fact-checking
- 01
Speed matters, by the best study there is
A Harvard Business Review study from 2011 audited 2,241 U.S. companies and found that firms contacting a lead within an hour were about seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker, and that waiting 24 hours or more made qualifying the lead about 60 times less likely. It is an old study. It is also the only rigorous, still-published one in this space, which tells you something about the rest of the numbers floating around.
- 02
Calls really do go unanswered
A 2016 monitoring study by 411 Locals, an SEO firm, watched 85 small businesses across 58 industries for 30 days and found only 37.8% of inbound calls were answered by a person; 37.8% went to voicemail and 24.3% got no response at all. Treat it with care: it was run by a vendor, the sample is small, and it is a decade old. We cite it because it is the only measured version of a claim that usually appears with no source at all.
- 03
The rest did not survive
You have probably seen the others: missed calls cost the average small business $126,000 a year, 85% of callers never call back, 62% call a competitor instead. We went looking for the primary sources and found none still standing; every trail ends in vendor marketing. So we will not use them, here or anywhere.
Your own arithmetic
The napkin math, with your numbers
Skip the borrowed statistics and use three numbers you already know. What is your average job worth? How many calls or quote requests do you plainly miss in a month? And what share of those would have closed?
If your average job is worth $800, you miss four calls a month, and half of those would have booked, that is two jobs: $1,600 a month, $19,200 a year, from arithmetic alone. Swap in your own numbers; smaller ones still add up.
That is the honest version of every scary statistic: not a study, just your own math.
Questions
Staying as-is, answered
Are the famous missed-call statistics true?
The ones we could verify are on this page, with their sources and their caveats. The popular dollar figures, like $126,000 a year in missed calls, have no surviving primary source we could find, so we do not use them.
When is staying as-is the right choice?
When you are at capacity from referrals and repeat customers, and growth is not the goal. New tools and rebuilds only make sense when there is demand you are actually missing.
How do I find out if I am losing anything?
Run the free scan. It reads your website and profile the way a customer would and lists what is costing you calls and quotes. It is free, it takes about a minute, and if it comes back clean, staying as-is just got easier to defend.
Check before you decide
If you have the referrals and the full calendar, staying put is a fair call. If you are not sure, the scan settles it with your own site instead of somebody else's statistic.
Sources
- Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (primary; full figures paywalled)
- LeanData, speed to lead (carries the HBR study’s figures)
- 411 Locals, small business call answering study, 2016 (vendor study, small sample, dated)