How fast to call a new mortgage lead

Within minutes of it arriving, with an hour as the outer edge rather than the goal. The best published evidence on response time compares attempts made inside an hour against attempts made an hour later, and the difference is not marginal. What happens after that first dial is a separate question with separate evidence behind it.

What the response-time evidence actually measured

Response time in that research was measured across 1.25 million sales leads reaching 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the United States. Firms attempting contact within an hour of a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead, which the authors defined as a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker, as firms that tried an hour later. Web enquiries across many industries, not mortgage applicants.

Source: James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review, March 2011. The same article reports an audit of 2,241 US companies sent a test web lead: 37 percent replied inside an hour, 23 percent never replied, and the average first response among those who did ran to 42 hours. Against companies that waited 24 hours or longer, the same authors put the hour-one firms at more than 60 times as likely to qualify a lead. hbr.org

Three things have to be true before the first dial

The first dial depends on three conditions and only one of them is a phone. The lead has to reach the CRM as it happens, not in a morning export. A named person has to be on shift when it lands, because leads arrive when the advertising runs and not when the desk is staffed. And the number has to be dialable at that moment, which is where the law sets a floor.

Source: Federal Trade Commission, Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 CFR 310.4(c), which bars an outbound telemarketing call before 8am or after 9pm at the called person's location. A lead submitted at 11pm local time cannot be called for nine hours, whatever the response-time research says. ecfr.gov

What the borrower is doing while the lead sits

A borrower who has just sent a form is most reachable in the minutes they are still looking at the screen. They remember filling it in, they half expect the phone to ring, and they have not spoken to anyone else yet. An hour later the phone is in a pocket and an unknown number interrupts something half remembered. Their need has not changed. The context that would have made them answer has.

How many attempts follow, and the dataset under that number, is taken apart in how many times to call a mortgage lead. Which days and hours the later attempts fall on is the follow-up schedule. Both begin where this page stops.

One thing could not be sourced: a mortgage-specific measurement of first-call latency against outcome. Federal mortgage data, HMDA and the CFPB complaint database among it, records loan outcomes rather than the minute a lender first dialed. Every mortgage-specific speed claim we followed led back to the research above, or to a company with something to sell.