The Leads Nobody Calls: How Much Inbound Goes Untouched

Executive Summary

Most conversations about lead response focus on speed — how many minutes or hours it takes to reply. A separate, less-discussed number sits underneath it: how many leads get no reply at all. Across every independently published study we could find, that number is uncomfortably large. A 2024 test of 1,000 B2B SaaS companies found 63.5% never responded to a real demo request. A 2024 secret-shopper study of 500 law firms found 48% were unreachable by phone entirely. A smaller, older phone-monitoring study of 85 businesses found 24.3% of incoming calls got no response of any kind — not even voicemail.

These aren't the same study, the same industry, or the same year — which is part of the point. The pattern shows up whenever anyone actually measures it.

What the Studies Found

B2B SaaS, 2024 (RevenueHero). Researchers submitted live demo requests to 1,000 B2B companies and tracked what happened. 635 of the 1,000 — 63.5% — never responded at all. Of the 365 that did respond, the average time to first contact was over a day.

Legal services, 2024 (Clio Legal Trends Report). Research firm Lux ran a secret-shopper study on 500 law firms — emailing and phoning each one with a realistic client enquiry. Only 40% answered the phone call, down from 56% in the same test in 2019. Counting firms that neither answered nor called back, 48% were essentially unreachable by phone. Email fared worse: only 33% of firms responded, down from 40% in 2019.

General small business, 2016 (411 Locals). An older but still-cited study monitored incoming calls to 85 businesses across 58 industries over 30 days. 37.8% of calls were answered by a live person, 37.8% were forwarded to voicemail, and 24.3% got no response of any kind. Separately, 70% of the businesses monitored answered less than half of their incoming calls.

The 2011 baseline (Harvard Business Review). The earliest large-scale version of this research, from Oldroyd, McElheran, and Elkington, audited 2,241 companies and found 23% never responded to an online lead at all, even within 30 days.

Reading These Together

Four different studies, four different industries, four different years — and the share of leads that get zero response never drops far below one in five, and in two of the four studies, it's closer to one in two. That's not a coincidence of methodology; it's what happens by default when response depends on someone noticing, remembering, and finding the time, instead of a system built to guarantee it happens.

It's also worth separating this from a slow-but-eventual response, which is its own leak (see our related report on speed to lead). A lead that's contacted a day late is a weaker version of the same opportunity. A lead that's never contacted at all is just gone — and by definition, it never shows up as a complaint, a bounce, or anything else your team would notice without going back and checking.

What This Means, Not What It Promises

We can't tell you what percentage of your leads are going untouched — every business's number is different, and guessing at it (the way an industry benchmark would) isn't the same as measuring it. What we can say is that in every published study of this specific question, the number was never zero, and it was usually higher than the business being studied would have guessed. Finding your own number, from your own call logs and form data, is what the audit exists to do.

The Data at a Glance

Sources

1. RevenueHero — _We Tested Lead Response Times of 1,000 B2B Sales Teams_ (2024) — revenuehero.io
2. Clio — _2024 Legal Trends Report: Secret Shopper Survey_, conducted by Lux (October 2024) — clio.com
3. 411 Locals — _SMBs Don't Answer 62% of Phone Calls_ (2016 call-monitoring study of 85 businesses) — 411locals.us
4. Oldroyd, J. B., McElheran, K., & Elkington, D. — _The Short Life of Online Sales Leads_, Harvard Business Review (March 2011) — hbr.org