- Sort last month's leads by arrival hour. The gap is usually obvious within a minute.
- Evening leads are not worse leads — they are unworked leads.
- Fix coverage before you buy more lead volume.
Buyers browse when they are not at work. That is the entire mechanism, and it puts a large share of your inbound into the exact window when your office is a voicemail greeting.
01Run it
- 01 Export last month's leads with their arrival timestamp.
- 02 Bucket them: before 9 AM, 9 AM–6 PM, after 6 PM, weekend.
- 03 For each bucket, find the median minutes to first call attempt — and the share that got zero attempts.
Do not average the whole month together; the daytime numbers will hide the evening ones, which is the reason this problem survives in teams that track speed-to-lead at all.
02Read it honestly
Two numbers matter. The first is the share of after-hours leads that got no call at all — not a text, a call. The second is how long the ones that did get called waited: if the answer is next morning, you are competing with whoever answered last night.
More leads into a leaky funnel is just a bigger puddle.
03Then fix the cheapest thing
The cheapest fix is almost never more lead spend. It is coverage in the window you are currently ceding — a rota, an answering service, or an AI that picks up on ring two and books the showing. Whatever you choose, re-run the audit in a month against the same buckets, because a fix you cannot measure is a story.