Enquiry response time: how to measure it and why to start there

BOTrento Team6 October 2026 · Updated 11 October 20269 min read

Why response time is the best first sales metric

Small businesses often want to measure quote win rate or revenue from enquiries first. But those numbers depend on price, competition, seasonality and on how well the enquiry was specified. Response time is, by contrast, a purely process metric: only you influence it, so when it worsens you know where to look for the cause.

It has three further practical advantages:

• You already have the data. Every email carries a delivery time and every reply a sent time. There is nothing new to set up.
• It exposes bottlenecks. A long wait almost always means the enquiry had no owner, information needed for the reply was missing, or it sat in a shared inbox.
• It is the first step to the rest of your measurement. Once response time is stable and under control, you can add further indicators. How to build on it is covered in Measuring Sales: 6 KPIs a Small Business Needs to Track Every Week.

Definition: what exactly to measure so the numbers make sense

Most arguments about whether "we reply quickly" come from an unclear definition. Before the first measurement, agree on the following points and write them down.

Start of measurement

The time the enquiry arrived: email delivery, web form submission or the logged time of a phone call. For an enquiry forwarded by a colleague, count the time the company first received it, not the time it was forwarded.

End of measurement

The sending of the first substantive reply written by a person. An automatic acknowledgement such as "thanks, we'll be in touch" does not count. Clarifying questions to the client do count, because they move the enquiry forward. A quote does not have to be the first reply; track that separately as time to quote.

Working hours or calendar hours

Choose one and do not change it. Working hours are fairer to the team; calendar hours better reflect how the client experiences the wait. If enquiries also arrive at weekends, for example for events, track both.

Median, not average

One enquiry forgotten for two weeks skews the average for the whole month. The median shows the client's typical experience, so make it your main number. Alongside it, track the number of enquiries over the limit and the number of enquiries with no reply.

What does not belong in the measurement

Spam, supplier pitches, questions from existing customers about an order in progress, and duplicate enquiries. Remove them when you log, otherwise the numbers will be inaccurate.

Where to get the data: email, forms, phone and CRM

You do not need to connect anything straight away. For the first few weeks, manual entry into a spreadsheet is enough, because it teaches you how enquiries really arrive.

• Email inbox. You will find both the delivery time and the time of your reply in the thread. If enquiries land in several inboxes, log them all, otherwise you are measuring only part of your sales.
• Web form. Most forms send an email notification with the submission time. Treat that as the start.
• Phone. This is where data gets lost most often. Introduce a rule that whoever takes an enquiry by phone logs it in the spreadsheet the same day, with the call time.
• CRM. If you use a CRM such as HubSpot or Pipedrive, check whether it stores the record creation time and the time of the first activity. Beware that the record creation time is often later than the real arrival of the enquiry.

For a manual spreadsheet these columns are enough:

The reason-for-delay column is the most valuable for improving the process. After a few weeks you will see recurring patterns. Removing them is covered in How to handle sales enquiries fast without losing any.

Procedure: introducing measurement in 4 steps

1. Write down the definition. In one sentence, set the start, the end, the type of hours and what is excluded. Send it to the whole team.
2. Measure the baseline. For two to four weeks just log and change nothing. If possible, add enquiries from previous weeks from the inbox. The result is a median and a list of the most common reasons for delay.
3. Set a limit and an owner. Derive the limit from the baseline, not from a guess. Every enquiry must have an owner who either answers it within the limit or hands it on.
4. Introduce a weekly check. Fifteen minutes is enough, on the same day each week. Go through the numbers in the report below and agree one concrete change for each enquiry over the limit.

What helps most is preparing templates for typical situations, so the first reply does not wait until someone has time to write it from scratch. You will find ready-made wording in our guide to speeding up sales proposals without losing control of your prices, which covers the same principle for quotes.

Weekly report template

Keep the report short. If it does not fit on one screen, people stop reading it.

You can send the team a short email with the report:

Hello,
enquiry summary for last week: we received [number] enquiries, and the median first reply time was [hours] h (last week [hours] h). [Number] enquiries stayed over the limit, mainly because of [reason]. [Number] have no reply; [name], please deal with them today.
This week we will try: [one change].
Thanks, [name]

How BOTrento approaches it and how to set a target after the trial run

Manual measurement shows the problem well, but it will not solve it by itself. When enquiries pile up in an inbox, most time goes on sorting them, finding information and writing the first reply. BOTrento Chief of Staff is aimed at exactly this step. It is a managed process that sorts enquiries from the inbox, records them in your tracking system and prepares a draft reply or quote. Nothing is sent without approval by a person. A member of your team always checks and sends the draft.

It is introduced through a 14-day free trial that starts with your first successful data upload (an import or connecting your mailbox); you have 7 days to prepare. First response time is a natural process KPI for a trial run, because you can measure it before and during the trial. The steps:

1. Baseline: measure it using the definition above before launch.
2. Trial run target: phrase it as a process indicator, for example the median first reply time and the number of enquiries with no reply. Not as revenue or number of orders. Too many other factors affect those, and BOTrento does not guarantee them.
3. During the trial run: follow the same weekly report. The routine stays the same; only who prepares the first version of the reply changes.
4. After the trial run: compare the results with the baseline and set a new limit your team can hold even in peak season.

For a sense of scale: in an internal pilot, 35 enquiries, 18 emails, 24 quotes and 15 actions went through the process in 7 days. How such a run looks is shown in the step-by-step process demo.

You connect to the language model with your own API keys from a provider of your choice, so you pay the provider directly for AI, with no markup. How to enter keys and when to remove them is described in the help page on your own API keys. We store data on servers in Germany (EU). The text needed for the task is processed by the model provider you choose, so this is a call to an external API, not a closed computation. You can find the plans and the 14-day free trial in the overview of plans and free trial.