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A homeowner fills out a form, or picks up the phone for a call, because water is coming through their ceiling or a storm just tore shingles off their roof. In that moment, they're not comparing five contractors on price. They're calling whoever answers first.

That's the entire game in home-improvement lead generation, and most companies get it wrong by treating "fast" as a nice-to-have instead of the thing that decides whether the lead turns into a job at all.

The data is blunt

A widely cited MIT/InsideSales study on lead response found that contacting a lead within 5 minutes makes you roughly 100 times more likely to actually reach them, and about 21 times more likely to qualify them, compared to waiting 30 minutes. Separate industry testing on text-based follow-up found responses sent within 60 seconds booked an appointment 73% of the time. That rate fell to just 4% once the response took 30 minutes.

And yet most of the industry doesn't move that fast. The median first-response time for home service businesses sits around 42 minutes, and only about 12% of contractors consistently respond within 5 minutes. Whoever calls first still tends to win the job regardless of price: by some estimates, the first business to respond closes around 78% of the deals it responds to.

100x
More contact within 5 min vs. 30 min
42min
Median contractor response time
78%
Of deals won by whoever responds first

Figures from published MIT/InsideSales lead-response research and industry speed-to-lead studies, not S&J-specific data.

Why we built delivery around 10 minutes

Every lead that comes through S&J gets a phone call from a real person on our team before it ever reaches a contractor. That call confirms the homeowner actually wants the work done, in your vertical, in your territory. Once that's confirmed, the lead goes out by text and email, and we hold ourselves to getting it to you in under 10 minutes.

That window isn't arbitrary. It's short enough that the homeowner is still expecting your call, and long enough that our team can actually have a real conversation instead of firing off unverified names.

What this means for your team

  • Call back within minutes of getting the text, not at the end of the day
  • Treat every S&J lead as time-sensitive: the homeowner is expecting to hear from you
  • If a lead goes cold because of a slow callback, that's on follow-up, not lead quality

Bottom line: speed isn't a courtesy. It's the difference between a booked job and a lead that goes to the next contractor on the homeowner's list.

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