8 August 2026
How fast do you actually need to call a solar lead back?
Every installer has heard some version of “first call wins.” Most have also seen the number that’s supposed to prove it. We went looking for where that number actually came from before repeating it ourselves — and it turned out to be worth writing up.
The stat you've probably seen
“78% of homeowners go with the first company to call them back.” It shows up on answering-service websites, home-services blogs, even a solar lead-gen page or two. It sounds exactly right — plausible enough that nobody checks it. So we checked it.
There's no study behind it
We traced it as far as it goes: every page that quotes “78%” cites another page that quotes it, back to a “survey” with no publisher, no sample size, and no year attached. It doesn't exist in any findable form. That's not a technicality — it means the number could be anything. Nobody measured it.
What was actually measured
Harvard Business Review published a real one in March 2011: researchers sent a test enquiry to 2,241 U.S. companies and timed every response. 23% never called back at all. Of the ones who did, calling within the first hour made a company roughly seven times more likely to actually qualify that lead than waiting even a little longer. Separate platform data on 15,000+ leads found the drop-off starts almost immediately — calling within five minutes beats calling within thirty by a wide margin. Different studies, same shape: speed matters a lot, and most businesses are slow.
What it means for an installer
You don't need to memorise a percentage. You need to notice the pattern: nearly a quarter of companies never respond to a lead at all, and most of the rest take hours, not minutes — because someone's on a roof, in a van, or mid-quote for someone else. Every one of those gaps is a homeowner who's already dialling the next name on their list. The fix isn't trying harder. It's not being the one who's still climbing down the ladder when the phone stops ringing.
We wrote more on the shape of this problem — what a single missed call is actually worth on a typical €8k–€15k install — in an earlier post. This one is about the part that’s fixable without hiring anyone: Nula answers every call in seconds, whether you’re on a roof or two jobs deep, so the gap this research measured never opens in the first place.