62%
of inbound calls to small businesses go unanswered
In a field study of 85 small businesses across 58 industries, only 37.8 percent of calls were answered by a live person. The rest went to voicemail or rang out with no response.
Sources
Where the numbers come from.
Every headline statistic on this site is here, next to the study that published it and a link to the source. If a figure is our own field observation rather than published research, we say so plainly at the bottom.
5 min / 21x
is the window before a web lead goes cold
Call a new web lead inside five minutes and the odds of qualifying it are 21 times higher than waiting 30 minutes. The finding comes from three years of data across more than 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts.
Published by
Lead Response Management Study, James Oldroyd (MIT and InsideSales.com), reported in Harvard Business Review
View the source27%
of web leads ever get contacted at all
Sales teams average just 1.3 contact attempts before giving up on a lead. Six attempts reaches roughly 90 percent of them. Most of the pipeline is never worked.
80%
of top performers' revenue is repeat and referral
Bain loyalty research shows the best businesses in service categories run on repeat customers and the referrals they generate. Most businesses never build the system that asks.
Our Own Numbers
Two figures here are ours, not published research.
The representative $400-plus lost per missed job and the $5M–$20M band where infrastructure compounds come from IronBridge field observation across the service businesses we work with. They are estimates drawn from our own experience, not peer-reviewed findings, and we label them that way wherever they appear. We would rather you know which numbers are which.