The source
The work usually cited is the lead response management study associated with InsideSales.com and a researcher then at MIT, published in 2007. It looked at something in the order of fifteen thousand leads and a hundred thousand dial attempts, drawn from six companies.
Three things follow from that sentence and none of them normally appear alongside the statistic.
The three omissions
| What is usually said | What is also true |
|---|---|
| “Research shows” | The research is from 2007. It predates the smartphone becoming universal, web chat, and every lead source a trade business uses today. |
| “A study of 15,000 leads” | Those leads came from six companies. Six. A large number of observations drawn from a small number of firms tells you about those firms. |
| “21 times more likely to qualify” | It is an odds ratio, not a probability. A 21-fold increase in the odds of something rare is a much smaller change in the chance of it happening than most readers take from the sentence. |
There is a fourth point that is fair to raise and easy to overstate: the work was connected to a company selling lead-response software. That does not make the finding false, and we are not suggesting it does. It does mean the result should have been replicated independently by now, and we have not found a modern, independent replication at any scale.
Odds ratios, briefly
This is the part that gets lost, so it is worth being concrete. If something happens one time in a thousand, and you improve the odds of it twenty-one-fold, it now happens roughly twenty-one times in a thousand. That is a genuine and valuable improvement. It is not the same statement as “you are twenty-one times more likely to win the job”, which is how the line is generally read and often how it is deliberately written.
Why we still tell clients to answer quickly
Because the underlying direction is almost certainly right, and because you do not need a 2007 study to believe it. A homeowner with a leaking roof rings three firms. The first one to answer with a human voice has an enormous advantage over the other two, and every trade business owner already knows this from their own diary.
What we will not do is put a multiplier on it in a proposal. The honest version is: answering quickly wins work, missed calls lose it, and here is what your own missed-call rate currently looks like. That last part is measurable in your own phone records, which beats a borrowed statistic.
If the calls are being missed rather than lost on speed, that is a different fix and a cheaper one.
Questions
Is the five-minute rule nonsense then?
No. The direction of the finding is sensible and matches what any trade business observes: the firm that answers first usually gets the job. What is unsupportable is quoting a precise multiplier from a 2007 study of six companies as though it were a law of nature that applies to your roofing business in 2026.
Where does the 391% version come from?
There are several variants in circulation with different percentages attached, generally traced to the same body of lead-response work or to vendor marketing built on top of it. When you see a new percentage for this claim, the useful question is which dataset and which year, and the answer is usually not available.
How fast should we actually answer?
As fast as the business can sustain without the quality of the conversation suffering. For most trade firms the real gain is not going from five minutes to two, it is going from four hours to twenty minutes, or from a missed call at half past four to any call back at all.