A couple of years ago, I was in the market for a Ford Mustang. There are two local dealerships that sell those – I’ll refer to them as Dealership A and Dealership B.

Like a lot of consumers, I started researching Mustangs on the Internet by visiting the sites of both dealerships. I found cars that met my requirements on both sites and asked for more information about those vehicles. Dealership B got back to me in a hurry while Dealership A responded much later. I bought my Mustang from Dealership B because that lot got back to me first. Both dealerships had similar cars and there wasn’t much difference in price.

The only difference between them is that one responded to me before the other one did – the quick company made a $28,000 sale, whereas the slow one lost a customer to a competitor.

What can we take from this? Response time matters and anyone who doesn’t realize that simple truth is living in a fool’s paradise.

Now, that all makes sense, and there’s data to back up that notion. A Kellogg study proving that the odds of connecting with a lead increases 100 times if contact is made within five minutes rather than within 30 minutes. Here’s something else – leads contacted within five minutes are 21times more likely to become customers than leads contacted within 30 minutes.

The name of the game, then, is lead generation. You can spend a ton of time and cash putting together a snazzy site that gets people interested in your business, but you’re not doing yourself any favors if a slow response time means you don’t convert leads into paying customers. You can have great content and an attention-grabbing call to action button that potential customers click like crazy, but all of that is wasted effort if your response time is so slow that interest leads wander to sites run by your competitors.

If you need some help in that area, you’re in luck – there’s a company called Speak2Leads that specializes into helping you turn those leads into paying customers.

That’s why your company started an Internet site to begin with, isn’t it? The whole point of putting your company on the Web is to find people interested enough to pay you money. If your company isn’t responding quickly enough to inquiries from potential customers, then what’s the point of its Internet site?