How fast are we responding to new inquiries?

Bottomline measures the time between a new lead entering your CRM and the first outreach, so you know your actual response speed.

Who on my team is converting best?

Your report shows close rates by team member so you can see who is performing and who needs support.

Who’s dropping leads?

Bottomline flags leads that went cold with no follow-up activity and shows which team member was assigned.

How long is a lead sitting before someone calls them?

Your report calculates average time-to-first-contact from your CRM data and flags leads that sat too long.

Are proposals going out on time?

Bottomline tracks the time between initial contact and proposal delivery to show where your pipeline slows down.

Is my team actually following up on leads?

You are spending money to generate leads. But are they actually getting called? Here's how to check whether your team is following up or letting opportunities die in the CRM.

6 min read

The short answer

Are leads getting follow-up? Check your CRM for leads with no activity logged within 24-48 hours of creation. If more than 20% of new leads have zero follow-up within 48 hours, you have a follow-up problem and you are wasting the money you spent to generate those leads.

Every uncontacted lead is money you already spent going to waste

You spent $4,200 on Google Ads this month and generated 28 leads. That is $150 per lead. If 8 of those leads never got a phone call, you just burned $1,200. Not because the ads did not work, but because your team did not follow through.

This is one of the most common and most expensive problems in small businesses. The leads come in. They sit in the CRM. Your team gets busy with existing jobs. By the time someone gets around to calling, the prospect already hired a competitor.

Research consistently shows that response time is the single biggest factor in lead conversion. Contact within 5 minutes and your odds of qualifying the lead are 100x higher than waiting 30 minutes. Wait 24 hours and the lead is effectively dead.

Two metrics that expose follow-up failures

Untouched lead rate. Percentage of new leads with zero logged activity within 48 hours. Above 20% is a problem.
Average time to first contact. The time between lead creation and the first call, email, or task. Above 4 hours and you are losing deals to faster competitors.

How to audit lead follow-up in your CRM

1
Filter for new leads created this month
In HubSpot, go to Contacts → filter by Create date is this month and Lifecycle stage is Lead. In Salesforce, go to Leads and filter by Created Date this month.
2
Check activity on each lead
In HubSpot, add the Last activity date column. Any lead where last activity is blank or more than 48 hours after creation is untouched. In Salesforce, check the Activity History section on each lead record.
3
Count untouched leads and calculate the rate
Divide the number of untouched leads by total new leads. If you created 28 leads and 8 have no activity, your untouched rate is 28.6%. That means nearly a third of your ad spend produced nothing.
4
Identify which team members are responsible
Check the owner field on untouched leads. Is it one person dropping the ball or a systemic issue? This determines whether the fix is a conversation with one employee or a process change.

Total time: about 20 minutes. All data comes from your CRM. If your team is not logging activity consistently, the data will be unreliable.

Audit lead follow-up weekly, not monthly

Monthly is too late. A lead that sat for 3 weeks is gone. Check untouched leads weekly so you can intervene while the leads are still warm. Some businesses check daily. The more frequently you look, the less money you waste.

Or get lead follow-up accountability automatically

Bottomline connects to your CRM and tracks follow-up activity on every new lead. Your monthly report shows the untouched lead rate, average time to first contact, and which team members are following up and which are not.

Lead follow-up scorecard

New leads this month28

Contacted within 4 hours14 (50%)

Contacted within 48 hours20 (71%)

Never contacted8 (29%)

Estimated wasted ad spend$1,200

From a real Bottomline report. Follow-up data from your CRM, ad spend from your accounting software.

You see exactly how much money is being wasted on leads that never get a callback, which team members need to improve, and whether the problem is getting better or worse each month.