MIT / InsideSales.com Lead Response Management Study 2007 (Oldroyd) — odds of contact drop ~100× from 5min to 30min; commonly misattributed to Harvard

Claim: The foundational lead-response dataset is the 2007 MIT / InsideSales.com Lead Response Management Study by Dr. James Oldroyd: ~3 years of data, 6 companies, 15,000+ leads, 100,000+ call attempts. Headline findings:

• "The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times."
• "The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times."

Source: Oldroyd 2007, MIT / InsideSales.com; widely reproduced.

Confidence: Verified for the original study.

Caveats:

• The comparator is 5-vs-30 minutes, not 5-vs-10 minutes — citation drift has produced shorter versions of this claim.
• The study is routinely misattributed to Harvard ("HBR study"). This is the same citation-drift pattern that plagues the whole interactive-content topic — see The "2× engagement / conversion" interactive-content stat is widely (mis)attributed to "Content Marketing Institute" — no original CMI dataset producing it exists.
• A widely circulated "47-minute average insurance-agency response time" figure originates with US Tech Automations https://ustechautomations.com/resources/blog/best-lead-management-software-insurance-agencies-2026 — single-source.

Why this matters for Candid: Settles the operational precondition for any lead-capture tool: if there is no 5-minute follow-up SOP, the calculator is wasted infrastructure. See R6 — A lead-capturing calculator is wasted infrastructure without a 5-minute follow-up SLA; build the SLA first.