A handful of statistics do real work across our articles, so they live here once: what each number says, who published it, and — the part most marketing blogs skip — how solid the sourcing actually is. Primary research, secondary-only figures, and our own portfolio numbers are labeled as exactly that.
If a figure here is ever discredited or replaced by better evidence, it gets corrected on this page and every article that cites it inherits the correction.
Primary source
“Contacting a lead within five minutes makes qualifying it roughly 21× more likely than waiting thirty minutes.”
The HBR piece audited 2,241 U.S. companies and reported that firms contacting a lead within an hour were about seven times more likely to qualify it than those that waited even an hour longer. The sharper five-vs-thirty-minute multiple (~21×) comes from Oldroyd’s underlying lead-response research. The study is old but has never been contradicted — response-time decay is one of the most replicated findings in sales research. We treat the exact multiples as directional and the direction as settled.
“About 78% of customers buy from the company that responds to their inquiry first.”
Source: Attributed to a Lead Connect survey; the original publication is no longer online. Circulates via roundups such as SetSmart’s lead-response statistics and Vendasta.
We can no longer trace this figure to its primary publication, so treat the precise number as directional. We keep citing it because it agrees with the primary-sourced response-time research above and with what we see in managed accounts: on shared leads, the first responder wins most of the time. If a primary source resurfaces — or a better-evidenced figure replaces it — this entry gets updated and every article inherits the correction.
A framework, not a measurement — there is no percentage to verify. Sixty years of copywriting practice, including ours, is the evidence base: we map every campaign’s traffic to an awareness level before writing a word.
“$30M+ in managed ad spend; clients average a 4.8× return on ad spend.”
Source: Growth Key Marketing portfolio figures, from the accounts we manage.
Our own numbers, not third-party research — cumulative managed spend across the agency’s history, and the average blended ROAS across reporting accounts. They move as the book of business changes, and we update them here when they do. Where an article says “in our accounts” or “across $30M+ in managed spend,” this is the basis.