Speed-to-Lead Intelligence: The 5-Minute Window, Measured

Why the window matters

The gold standard for portal leads is first contact within 5 minutes; the maximum acceptable response window is 15 minutes. Past that, contact rates fall off sharply — the lead is already talking to the next agent. Speed to lead is the single highest-leverage behavior a team can coach, because unlike market conditions, it's entirely under your control.

The problem isn't knowing this. It's measuring it — across every lead source, every agent, every hour of the day — without someone manually auditing timestamps.

How Ace measures it

Ace subscribes to Follow Up Boss webhooks, so lead creation and every call, text, and email land in its event stream the moment they happen. From that stream it computes:

• Per-lead clock status — is this new lead still inside the 5-minute window, approaching the edge, or already breached?
• Per-agent response-time distribution — each agent's first-response median and 90th percentile. The median tells you the habit; the p90 tells you what happens on their bad days, which is where deals die.
• Honest coverage — the instrumentation distinguishes "no data yet" from "measured: 0%", so a team report never mistakes missing history for perfect performance.

Team leads see the distributions in the Team Cockpit, and can benchmark their team's speed to lead against anonymized peer cohorts in You vs Market.

The tools that act on it

• speed_to_lead_5m guard A pre-built Revenue Guard that fires when a new lead hasn't been contacted inside the 5-minute window — surfacing the breach while the lead is still warm, not in next week's report.
• zillow_speed_to_lead_check The clock, on demand: checks whether a specific portal lead is inside the 5-minute gold-standard window (15-minute maximum) and what to do about it.
• ai_engine_get_speed_to_lead_status Reads one contact's speed-to-lead tracker — when the lead arrived, when the first touch happened, and the resulting grade.
• enroll_speed_to_lead Builds the speed-to-lead follow-up sequence for a new lead — drafted first message and cadence plan. The agent confirms before anything sends.
• get_response_time_per_agent The coaching view: first-response median / p90 per agent, ready for a one-on-one or the weekly team meeting — available in the dashboard and via the MCP connector.

A speed-to-lead coaching workflow

1. Turn on the 5-minute guard. Breaches surface in real time instead of in retrospect.
2. Review the per-agent p90 weekly. Coach the tail, not the average — an agent with a 4-minute median and a 3-hour p90 has a coverage problem (evenings? weekends?), not a habit problem.
3. Pair speed with the score. A breached lead with a high Ace Win Score is your most expensive miss — those are the saves worth interrupting a showing for.
4. Benchmark it. You vs Market shows where your team's speed to lead ranks against anonymized peer cohorts (10-team minimum per cohort).

For the portal-lead-specific playbook — Zillow lead evaluation, BANT+M qualification, and the 10-day follow-up plan — see the Zillow Speed-to-Lead Playbook.

Frequently asked questions

• What counts as "first contact"?

  The first outbound touch logged in Follow Up Boss — call, text, or email — after the lead is created. Because Ace reads the webhook stream, anything logged in FUB counts automatically.

• Why 5 minutes?

  It's the gold standard Ace's own tooling enforces for portal leads (15 minutes as the outer bound) — the window in which contact rates are dramatically higher before the lead moves on.

• What do median and p90 mean on the agent report?

  Median (p50) is the agent's typical first-response time — half their responses are faster. The 90th percentile (p90) is their bad-day number — 9 in 10 responses beat it. Coaching the p90 down usually moves conversion more than shaving an already-good median.

• Do I need Ace Trove for this?

  The per-contact speed-to-lead tools ship with the agent-facing product; the team-wide guards, per-agent distributions, and peer benchmarks are part of Ace Trove.