For a property enquiry, the useful target for first response is under five minutes in business hours. Not because five is magic, but because a buyer who fills a form on Facebook at 9pm usually fills two or three, and the first developer to have a real conversation sets the frame — the price the others get compared against, the specification that sounds standard, the person the buyer trusts. Everything after that is uphill.
Where the time actually goes
Almost no developer intends to be slow. The delay accumulates in handoffs:
| Step | Typical delay | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Ad platform to spreadsheet | 2–24 hours | Someone downloads the CSV, usually once a day |
| Spreadsheet to sales person | 1–12 hours | Assignment happens in a morning meeting |
| Assignment to first call | 1–6 hours | The list is worked top to bottom, newest last |
| First call to second attempt | 2–5 days | No rule about how many attempts, so there is no second one |
Total is often two to three days. The marketing team reports cost per lead; nobody reports cost per contacted lead, which is the number that matters.
The four fixes, in order of payback
- Stop downloading CSVs. A lead should arrive in the system the moment it is submitted, through the ad platform's webhook. This alone usually removes a day. See Facebook lead ads to CRM for the mechanics and the deduplication rules.
- Auto-assign on arrival. Round robin within a project team, with a fallback if the assignee is on leave. Assignment by meeting is assignment by delay.
- Acknowledge instantly, in the buyer's channel. A WhatsApp message with a name, the project, and "I will call you within 30 minutes" converts silence into an appointment. It also keeps the 24-hour service window open for a real conversation.
- Make the follow-up sequence non-optional. Six attempts across ten days, mixing calls and messages, with the outcome of each logged. Most "dead" leads are simply unattempted after the second try.
What to measure
Three numbers, reported weekly, tell you whether the sales floor is working:
- Median first-response time, split by hour of arrival. The night-time figure is usually the ugly one.
- Contact rate — the share of leads that reached a real conversation. Below 40 percent, the problem is speed and persistence, not lead quality.
- Attempts per lead before disposition. If leads are being marked lost after fewer than three attempts, they are not being lost, they are being abandoned.
Speed does not mean pressure
Fast contact works because it is useful, not because it is aggressive. The first call should establish four things and then stop: which project the buyer saw, what size and budget they have in mind, whether they are buying to live or to invest, and when they could visit. That is enough to route the lead properly and to write a follow-up that is worth reading. Pipeline stages built on that information stay honest — see pipeline stages defined so they mean something.
The NRB exception
An enquiry from Dubai, Kuala Lumpur or Riyadh needs a different clock. The buyer is often awake when Dhaka is not, cannot visit, and needs documentation rather than a site visit. For those, response speed still matters, but the winning behaviour is sending a structured pack — floor plan, price sheet, payment plan, and the remittance route — within the same day. The NRB buyer journey covers the rest of that path.
What to do next
Pull your last 100 leads, timestamp the first outbound attempt on each, and take the median. If it is over an hour, the fastest available improvement in your sales numbers is not a bigger ad budget — it is routing leads the moment they arrive.