The Saturday evening enquiry: replying in five minutes when nobody is at work
A large share of web enquiries to trade businesses arrive in the evening and at weekends, when the office is dark and the reply comes on Monday. By then the customer has heard from someone else. This article looks at what the response-time research actually shows, what the first reply must and must not contain, how to run a five-minute reply out of hours with one person, and what the automated version does differently.
Saturday, 8:40 in the evening. A couple in a 1970s semi have spent the afternoon on comparison sites and have decided that the gas boiler will be replaced with a heat pump this winter. They find three installers within twenty kilometres. Two have a contact form, one has an email address. They fill in all three, with the same message: house size, current heating, when they would like a site visit.
Installer A's form drops the message into an inbox that opens on Monday at 7:30. Installer B's email address goes to the owner's phone, which is face down on a restaurant table. Installer C's form sends an automatic reply at 8:41 that thanks them, asks two questions about the house and offers two site-visit slots the following week. The couple answer C at 8:50. On Monday morning A and B reply to an enquiry that was decided on Saturday night.
Nothing about A or B is careless. They answered within one working day, which is what most firms consider prompt. The enquiry just did not arrive in working time, and most enquiries from homeowners do not.
What the research shows, and its limits
The best-known study on response time is by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, published in the Harvard Business Review in 2011 as "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads". They sent a test enquiry to 2,241 US companies and timed the reply. Among the firms that responded at all within 30 days, the average was 42 hours. 23 percent never responded. Treat the 42 hours as a historical benchmark. A newer test by RevenueHero in 2022 sent enquiries to 1,000 B2B websites: only 365 replied at all, and their average first reply took just over 29 hours. The picture has barely moved. The second finding matters more: firms that made contact within an hour were about seven times more likely to qualify the lead than firms that waited even one more hour.
XANT analysed about 55 million sales activities in 2019 and concluded that 77 percent of inbound leads never got a response at all. That figure covers sales organisations generally, not trades.
Both studies are American and one is fifteen years old. Neither looked at a heat pump installer in Germany, and neither measured weekends specifically. What they establish is the shape of the curve: the value of a reply drops steeply in the first hour and keeps dropping. Behaviour since then has moved in one direction only. People expect faster answers, not slower, and a homeowner filling in a form at 8:40 on Saturday is comparing you with whoever else replies that night.
Why five minutes, and why out of hours
A person who has just sent an enquiry is still sitting with the browser open. They have the problem in mind, they have probably contacted two other firms, and they are ready to answer a question. Reply within a few minutes and you are talking to them while they are still looking. Reply on Monday and you are interrupting a decision that has been made.
Five minutes is not a magic threshold. It is roughly the window in which the customer feels that someone is there. After an hour they have moved on to something else. After a weekend the enquiry is history, and your reply is a reminder of a firm that was not there when it mattered.
The out-of-hours point is the one most owners underestimate. Homeowners enquire when they have time, which is evenings and weekends. Business customers enquire during the day, but often at the end of it, after the meeting where the problem came up. The firm that replies only in office hours is slowest precisely when most of the enquiries arrive.
What the first reply must contain
The first reply is not a quote. Its job is to confirm the enquiry arrived, to say what happens next, and to ask for one thing that moves the job forward. For installer C on Saturday night, this is enough:
"Good evening, thank you for your enquiry about a heat pump for your house. To quote properly we come and look at the building and the existing system. Would Tuesday between 4 and 6 or Thursday morning suit you for a visit? If you can, send us a photo of the boiler and its label, and tell us roughly how large the house is. Kind regards, Muster Heating."
Two things make that reply work. It asks one concrete question, two time slots, that the customer can answer with a word. And it collects the information the firm needs for the visit anyway, while the customer is still engaged.
What the reply must not do is name a price. An automated reply that says "heat pumps from 18,000 euros" commits the firm to a number nobody has checked against the house, and it invites the customer to compare that number with two others on the same night. Price comes after the visit. The reply's purpose is to get the visit.
Doing it with one person and a phone
The usual objection is that a trade business is not sitting at a computer on Saturday night. True, and the five-minute reply can still be organised with one person and one phone, up to a point.
Every enquiry has to land on a phone, not in an inbox. The contact form sends a notification to a number that somebody carries. Who that is on a given evening can rotate, but it has to be unambiguous.
That person needs a template that takes thirty seconds to adapt. Name, the job, two slots, done. Anyone who composes each reply from scratch will postpone it to Monday.
And there needs to be a fixed rhythm for following up. Anyone who has not answered the slot question after two days gets a second short message. After a week, a third. Most firms stop after the first message and lose the customers who were simply busy.
This works, and it depends on one person who is at a wedding, has flu, or is on a site with no signal. In the season, when most of the enquiries come, that person is least available.
What the automated version does differently
The automated version takes the first contact off that person and leaves them the decision. A web enquiry gets a reply within five minutes, at any hour, including Saturday at 8:41. The reply picks up the customer's wording, asks the questions the firm needs for a quote, and offers slots from the real calendar. If the customer does not answer, a reminder goes out after two days and another after a week. Before the visit, a reminder; after a no-show, a new slot.
The owner sees the result on Monday: a booked visit with name, address, house size and a photo of the boiler label. That is the job of the lead nurturing employee, which we install fourth, once the website is fast enough to produce enquiries worth answering. The calculator shows what the enquiries you currently answer on Monday are costing you now.
Installers A and B did not lose the heat pump job on price. The couple never saw their quotes. The job was decided at ten to nine on Saturday night, and only one firm was there.