The research is blunt. The MIT/Oldroyd lead-response study found that calling a web lead within 5 minutes gives roughly 100× the odds of making contact versus waiting 30 minutes — and 21× the odds of qualifying the lead. Harvard Business Review’s 2011 audit found firms responding within an hour were 7× more likely to qualify the lead than those an hour slower. These are B2B-wide studies, not forwarding-specific — but the direction is unambiguous, and it makes response speed a policy decision. Most forwarders don’t have a policy.
What did the studies actually measure?
The Oldroyd study (MIT-affiliated research on web-generated leads) measured how contact and qualification odds decay with response time: at five minutes, contact odds are about 100× what they are at thirty; qualification odds about 21×. HBR’s 2011 follow-up audited real companies’ response behaviour and found the first-hour responders 7× likelier to qualify the lead than those who waited even one hour more. The decay isn’t linear — it’s a cliff, and the cliff edge is minutes wide.
Do these numbers transfer to freight forwarding?
Honest answer: nobody has replicated them on forwarding RFQs, and we won’t pretend otherwise — treat the multipliers as B2B-wide evidence, not forwarding gospel. But the mechanism transfers cleanly. An RFQ is a shipper with cargo to move, usually pricing several forwarders at once; the first substantive response frames the conversation every later one is compared against. And the industry’s baseline is dismal — Freightos’ mystery shopper found 60% of quote requests were never quoted at all (see the follow-up post). Against that field, speed isn’t an edge. It’s a category difference.
You’ve seen “80% of sales take five follow-ups” and “78% of buyers choose the first responder.” We don’t use either: the first has an attribution that has never been verified, the second has weak provenance. If a number can’t survive sourcing, it doesn’t go on the board.
What does “first touch within N days” change as a policy?
Everything, because it converts intention into a state. The Focus Engine’s cadence policy includes a first-touch window — set by you, in days — and every lead that enters the pipeline starts that clock. An inbound RFQ email becomes a lead automatically, owner assigned, before any human reads it; from that second it sits in the queue as never contacted, and the board surfaces it until someone makes the touch. No score, no mystery — a rule you wrote, enforced in public.
What should the window actually be?
Yours to set — that’s the point of a rule-based engine. The research argues for treating inbound RFQs in minutes and working cold-list accounts in days; what matters is that the number is written down, visible, and enforced by the queue rather than by memory. See the first-touch clock running on how it works, put your own response times into the calculator, or start from the complete guide.
From reading to hunting.
Everything on this page runs live on a working board — queue, cadence, quotes, wallet share. Bring your pipeline and watch Monday morning rank itself.
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