The four metrics
1. Time-to-first-response (TTFR)
Elapsed time between the lead entering your system (form fill, call, chat) and the first outbound attempt from your side. Includes voicemails. This is the number most dashboards show, and it's the least useful of the four — but it's the leading indicator.
Target: median under 5 minutes during business hours.
2. Time-to-first-conversation (TTFC)
Elapsed time to the first two-way conversation with a human. This is the one that actually correlates with conversion. TTFR is easy to game; TTFC is not.
Target: median under 15 minutes during business hours.
3. Contact rate
Percentage of new leads that ever reach a two-way conversation, across the full follow-up sequence. Highly sensitive to cadence discipline — see Follow-Up Sequences.
Target: 70%+ for typical service-business inbound.
4. Speed-to-book
Median time from lead-created to a booked appointment on the calendar. This is the one to put on the wall. It rolls up every other operational problem into a single number the whole team can see.
Target: under 24 hours for 70% of qualified leads.
Why these four, and only these four
Most operations teams try to track a dozen response metrics and end up watching none of them. Four metrics fit on one dashboard, take five minutes to review in a weekly meeting, and cover the full funnel from "someone raised their hand" to "someone is on the calendar."
How to instrument them
You do not need a dedicated analytics platform. Most CRMs and phone systems can generate three of these four metrics natively. The fourth (TTFC) usually needs a small integration between your telephony logs and your CRM records — a Zapier or Make flow that stamps the first connected call time back onto the lead record.
The weekly review
Fifteen minutes, every Monday, one slide. Four numbers. Compare to last week and to a 6-week rolling median. If any number moved more than 15%, pull five example leads and read the transcripts.
That is the entire process. The temptation is to build a nicer dashboard. Resist it. The improvement always comes from reading the actual conversations, not from staring at the chart.
Reporting traps to avoid
- Averaging instead of using medians. One lead that waited three days will drag your "average TTFR" from 4 minutes to 45. Always use median.
- Counting after-hours leads in the same bucket. Split business-hours and after-hours cohorts. Otherwise the metric punishes you for the industry, not your process.
- Reporting per-team instead of per-rep. Team medians hide individual disasters. Show both.