How Long Does Your Team Take to Reply to a New Lead?

Say the operations head of a mid-sized logistics company fills in your demo form at 11:02 on a Tuesday morning. She has budget, a problem to fix this quarter, and two other vendors on her list. She sent the same request to all three.

Your form email lands in a shared inbox. Each rep assumes someone else has it. The reply goes out at 10:56 that night, and by then the other two vendors have already called her.

This post looks at B2B lead response time: what one study found when it tested 114 B2B companies, why new leads wait, and what a faster first reply looks like in practice. Camrio is the CRM we build to help sales teams answer every new conversation sooner.

B2B lead response time: what 114 companies did

Workato, an automation software company, filled in a demo request at 114 B2B companies of different sizes, industries and regions, then timed each reply. It published the results in March 2026.

The average personal email reply took 11 hours and 54 minutes. Only one of the 114 companies replied by email within five minutes. Nearly one in five never replied by email at all.

Phone calls were rarer and slower. Only 31% of the companies called back, those calls came 14 hours and 29 minutes after the request on average, and none came within five minutes.

One finding stands out. Companies that used a tool to route each lead to a person replied in about 3 hours and 32 minutes on average. Companies without one took nearly 13 hours.

Why new leads wait

In most teams, three things slow the first reply, and none of them is a lack of effort.

Nobody owns the lead yet. A demo request that lands in a shared inbox belongs to everyone, so it waits until someone claims it.

Leads arrive in more than one place. Form emails, website chat, WhatsApp and social messages often sit in separate inboxes. A rep who works from email may not see a chat until the end of the day.

Reps spend most of the week on other work. Salesforce's State of Sales survey of 7,775 sales professionals found reps spend 28% of their week selling. Deal admin and data entry take up much of the rest, so a new lead competes with a long list of other tasks.

Why the first reply carries more weight now

Buyers now do more of their research alone. In Gartner's 2025 survey of 646 B2B buyers, 67% said they prefer to buy without a sales rep, and buyers used about seven sources of information on a recent purchase.

So when a buyer does fill in a form, they are usually well into their decision and want specific answers. Gartner also found that 69% of buyers turn to sales reps to check what AI tools told them. The team that replies first, and knows what the buyer asked, gets to shape that conversation.

What a faster first reply looks like

A faster reply rarely needs a bigger team. It needs fewer steps between a lead arriving and a person answering.

1. Give every new lead an owner the moment it arrives, by a rule your team agrees on.
2. Bring form emails, website chat, WhatsApp and email into one inbox, so no channel is checked only once a day.
3. Send a short welcome message straight away that tells the buyer who will contact them and when. Your team writes and approves it once.
4. Create a follow-up task with a due date for the owner, so the lead appears in their day.
5. Start each morning with a list of leads waiting on your team, with the most promising at the top.

How Camrio handles a new lead

Camrio brings email, WhatsApp, Slack, website chat and other inboxes into one shared inbox, with call and meeting notes on the same conversation.

Each new conversation gets an owner by round robin, and admins see who owns what. Workflows can route new leads, send the welcome message your team approved, alert the owner and create a follow-up task with a due date, all within the sending windows you set.

Inbox Intelligence scores each lead from 0 to 100 based on what the buyer has said, and the morning list shows who is waiting on you. Our post on which lead to chase next explains how that works. The AI assistant can draft a first reply from the buyer's own message, and a person reviews it before it is sent.

The same Tuesday, with Camrio

Back to the example. The demo request arrives at 11:02 and is assigned to one rep straight away. The buyer receives the approved welcome message, which says who will call her and when. The rep gets an alert and a follow-up task due before lunch.

Before the call, the rep reads the summary of the request: logistics company, a problem to fix this quarter, comparing vendors. She calls at 11:40 with answers ready, while the buyer is still deciding who to speak to first. If leads also reach you on WhatsApp and chat, our guide to managing leads across channels covers that setup.

Book a walkthrough of Camrio to see how fast your own leads get an owner.