Free tool
What are unanswered leads actually costing you?
Your own close rate and deal value, not our assumptions about them. Every step of the arithmetic is shown, so you can check it rather than trust it.
Quick answer
What do unanswered leads cost a business?
The cost of an unanswered lead is the number of leads missed each month multiplied by the rate you would have closed them at and the value of a closed deal. This calculator does that arithmetic with your own figures, shows every step, and assumes nothing about your close rate or deal size.
Your numbers
Drag to match your business. Nothing is sent anywhere.
After hours, weekends, missed calls, forms nobody worked.
Estimated opportunity currently unworked
$22,500/ month
That is 45 leads a month reaching you and going unworked, $270,000 a year at your own close rate.
Recoverable / month
$13,500
Recoverable / year
$162,000
Your response time: 30-60 minutes
Harvard Business Review found firms contacting a lead within an hour were nearly 7x more likely to qualify it than those responding even an hour later.
Harvard Business Review, 2011How this is calculated
lost / month = monthly leads x unworked % x your close rate x your deal value
We value unworked leads at your own close rate, not an improved one, this model never assumes automation closes better than your team does.
The recoverable figure applies a deliberately conservative 60% recovery rate, on the basis that an instant automated response reaches most but not all of the leads currently going unanswered.
Response time is shown as research context, not as a multiplier. We are not aware of a defensible way to convert it into a precise revenue figure, so we do not pretend to.
Estimates are illustrative and are not a guarantee of results.
Why response speed is the variable that moves
The calculator asks for missed leads because that is the number most businesses can estimate honestly. Response speed is the lever underneath it. A lead that is answered late is, in practice, most of the way to being a lead that was missed.
- 7x
more likely to qualify a lead when a firm responds within an hour, versus even one hour later
- 21x
drop in the odds of qualifying a lead when the callback slips from 5 minutes to 30 minutes
MIT / InsideSales.com Lead Response Management Study, 2007 ↗
- 23%
of the 2,241 US companies audited never responded to a web-generated sales lead at all
A note on the arithmetic
This is a model, not a measurement. It multiplies figures you supply; it cannot know whether the leads you are missing would have closed at the same rate as the ones you answer. Treat the output as an order of magnitude for deciding whether the problem is worth fixing, not as a forecast.
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