Do 78% of Customers Buy From the First Company to Respond? Every Source Checked (2026)

No: the claim that 78% of customers buy from the company that responds first has no study behind it. The oldest dated version we could find is a June 2008 white paper by Leads360, a lead-management software company, which opens with "In some industries, 78% of buyers close with the company that contacted them first" and supports it only with a lead-response vendor's remark about real estate, with no sample, method or year (Leads360, June 2008, archived PDF). Since then it has been credited to InsideSales, MIT, Harvard, the National Association of Realtors and a "Lead Connect" survey that does not exist, while the research that does exist shows something narrower: answering fast raises your odds of reaching and qualifying a lead, and B2B buyers usually contact the vendor they already prefer first.

This page follows the number back through every citation we could open, oldest first, with the year, the sample where there is one, and how much weight each source can carry. Its twin, "35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first", gets the same treatment. Every link below was opened on 29 October 2026; archived pages are linked through the Internet Archive. For the speed-to-lead studies that do hold up (MIT/InsideSales 2007, HBR 2011, Velocify 2012 and Drift 2017), our lead response time hub with every study has the full detail.

Do 78% of customers really buy from the first company to respond?

Nobody has shown it. We looked for a study, survey, sample or method behind the figure under every name it is credited to that comes with something checkable: Lead Connect, InsideSales, the 2007 MIT study, Harvard Business Review 2011, the National Association of Realtors' 2025 report, Leads360 and LeadQual. None of them publishes one. Some retellings pin the number on McKinsey or Forrester; none of the pages we read gives a document for either, and our lead response time hub explains why there is no McKinsey speed-to-lead study at all.

What the number is: a talking point from the 2000s internet lead market, first used about real estate, which picked up a precise-looking figure, lost its hedges ("in some industries", "for inquiries submitted on the web") and was later moved onto B2B sales. What it is not: a measured share of sales won by whoever answers first. None of the studies we found measures that share.

What does each source actually say?

Every source in the chain, in date order, with what it actually says and how much weight it can carry. Read the Confidence column first: every row that states a first-responder share of sales is rated Low, because none of them names a sample. Every row with a disclosed sample measures something else.

Where does the 78% statistic come from?

From the mid-2000s internet lead market: a lead-response vendor's talking point that a lead-software white paper published as 78% in 2008. Here is the trail, oldest first.

2006: a lead-response vendor's sales page says 58%

The trail starts with LeadQual, a lead-qualification start-up. Its founder, Andrew Coleman, had been Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Finance at HomeGain.com before starting LeadQual in October 2005 (LeadQual "about us", 2005, archived). LeadQual sold a service that, in its own words, "responds to your Internet leads within seconds" (LeadQual home page, 2007, archived).

Its service page told visitors: "58% of Internet consumers, who transact, choose the first company who responds" (LeadQual service page, February 2006, archived). The same sentence is on every capture we opened from February 2006 to April 2009. No source is given. It was sales copy for a call-back service.

July 2006: the same vendor is quoted for 69%

In July 2006 the consumer real estate columnist Ilyce Glink wrote: "According to a company called LeadQual, 69 percent of home buyers who shopped for a home online selected the first agent they interview compared with only 9 percent of traditional buyers" (ThinkGlink, "How Fast Will They Answer", July 27, 2006). Note the wording: the first agent they interview, which is not the same as the first agent to respond. No sample was given.

June 2008: Leads360 publishes the 78%, with a hedge

The oldest dated 78% we could find is in "First To Call: Why You Can't Afford To Be Second", an 11-page Leads360 white paper on B2C internet lead management, dated June 2008. Leads360 was a Los Angeles lead-management software company; it changed its name to Velocify on June 19, 2013 (National Mortgage Professional). The executive summary says: "Contacting leads quickly is more important than ever. In some industries, 78% of buyers close with the company that contacted them first. Can you afford to be second?" The paper's web page asked the same question (landing page, archived).

The only support is on page 4: "In real estate, for example, Andrew Coleman of LeadQual notes that buyers choose the first agent that contacts them 78% of the time." So the 78% is a remark, passed on second-hand, from the founder of a vendor whose own website said 58%. The paper gives no study, sample or year for it, and its two charts are labelled "Source: LeadQual 2007". The same paper also cites the real 2007 MIT/InsideSales decay study, so from its first appearance the unsourced 78% travelled next to genuine research.

July 2011: InsideSales takes it to B2B

The number reached B2B sales through an InsideSales.com webinar for the B2B Lead Roundtable in July 2011, titled "Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions". CEO Dave Elkington's slide read: "For inquiries submitted on the web 78% of sales go to the first company to respond! Source: Leads 360" (slide deck, archived November 2011). The written recap dropped both the source and the "inquiries submitted on the web" scope, and added that the sales go to the first responder, "not to the company with the best or cheapest product" (CustomerThink recap, July 25, 2011).

That webinar title helps explain why the 78% now travels with Harvard and MIT. Elkington is a co-author of the 2011 HBR article, and the 2007 MIT study was run with InsideSales, but neither contains the 78%. The slide itself credited Leads360.

2016: the trail is still visible

A July 2016 blog article still named the chain: "For product and service inquiries submitted online, 78 percent of the sales go to the first company that responds", calling it a statistic "from Leads360 (now known as Velocify)" and tying it to Elkington's presentation. After that, the Leads360 credit disappears from the copies we read, and a new name takes its place.

What is the Lead Connect study?

There is no Lead Connect study. "Lead Connect" is a label with nothing behind it: no title, no year, no sample and no link, in every copy we found.

Where the label first appears

The earliest dated "Lead Connect" credit we found is LeanData's June 2021 speed-to-lead infographic: "78% of customers buy from the company that responds to their inquiry first (Lead Connect)" (LeanData infographic, PDF). The same sheet credits the 21x figure to "LeadSimple" and the 391% figure to "Velocity"; the real sources are the 2007 MIT/InsideSales study and Velocify. LeanData's solution brief repeats the line with the same bare label (LeanData brief).

Survey Booker, a UK property-tech firm, opened the page for its 2020 study of 132 surveying firms with the same line credited "(Lead Connect)", and further down the same page credited it to "(Lead Response)"; the earliest copy of that page we could date is from 2023 (archived copy, December 2023). The live page no longer carries the 78% line. Its own result is worth more than the borrowed one: of the 132 firms it contacted, 9.8% replied in under five minutes and 15.9% never replied (Survey Booker, live page). That is a small vendor test, but its method is disclosed.

How the citation loops

Vendasta's lead response article (first published 2022, updated August 2025) calls it "a Lead Connect survey" and links the word "stats" to a LeanData blog post (Vendasta). That LeanData post, as it reads after an April 2026 rewrite, does not contain 78% or Lead Connect at all (LeanData blog). So the trail runs from Vendasta to LeanData, and LeanData's own material says only "(Lead Connect)".

Did a Lead Connect company ever publish research?

We checked the obvious candidates:

• leadconnect.com never hosted a company or a report in any archived capture from 2008 to 2026. It was a parked page from 2008 to 2017 (2016 capture), "This website is for sale!" in 2018 and 2019 (2019 capture), a redirect to a domain-sale page in 2021, and a for-sale listing in January 2026 (2026 capture). We opened 13 home-page captures and listed all 19 archived leadconnect.com addresses; none is a report. Even a February 2026 capture of the guessed address leadconnect.com/lead-response-study/ is only a redirect to the parking page (capture). Today the domain redirects to a domain marketplace.
• leadconnect.io was a call-tracking login page in 2016 and has been a LinkedIn outreach automation tool since 2019 (2019 capture, live site). There is no research, survey or 78% on the site.
• A UK call-back product happens to be called Lead Connect. Its pages cite the MIT 21x figure, not the 78%.

Later copies have since given the phantom source invented years: 2019, 2020 and 2024 all appear. None of them links to a Lead Connect report.

Is the 78% figure from Harvard, MIT or InsideSales?

No, not from any of the three.

• MIT / InsideSales, 2007. The Lead Response Management study (three years of data across six companies, more than 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts) contains no 78% and no share-of-sales claim. It says so itself: "This study did not address close ratios" (MIT/InsideSales study, PDF). It measured contact and qualification, which is where the 100x and 21x figures come from; our audit of the 5-minute lead response study covers them.
• Harvard Business Review, 2011. "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington contains no 78% figure. Its findings include a 42-hour average first response among firms that replied within 30 days, and that firms responding within an hour were nearly 7 times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that tried an hour later (HBR, March 2011). The 2011 webinar title may help explain why the 78% gets attached to it.
• InsideSales.com. InsideSales spread the number, but its CEO's slide credited Leads360. InsideSales' own Annual 2014 Lead Response Report, a secret-shopper test that reached the web forms of 9,538 companies, has no first-responder share either; it found that 4,472 of those companies, or 47%, never responded to the test lead (InsideSales 2014 report, PDF).

Do 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first?

There is no study for that either, and it has the same shape as the 78%. The figure appears on InsideSales.com's own blog in July 2010, introduced only as "Sales studies consistently show that anywhere from 35 to 50 percent of all sales go to the agent who makes first contact" (InsideSales, July 19, 2010). No study is named or linked. Two months later the same blog, under Ken Krogue's byline, gave a different range, saying "most sales industry studies" show the first respondent gets the sale "between 30 and 40 percent of the time" (InsideSales, September 28, 2010).

So within 12 months InsideSales published three different first-responder numbers: 35 to 50 percent, 30 to 40 percent, and 78 percent credited to Leads360. None came with a study.

How the 35-50% got its modern wording

• October 2013: a marketing-agency blog fixed today's wording, "Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. (Source: InsideSales.com)", with no link (BAI Marketing, October 12, 2013).
• 2015: a blog post placed the figure right after a white paper by Google and CEB, which made it look sourced (Fronetics, October 2015, archived). That white paper, CEB's 2012 "The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing", surveyed more than 1,500 customer contacts for 22 large B2B organisations and found that "customers progress nearly 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales rep" (CEB, 2012, archived PDF). It contains no 35-50% figure and no first-responder claim.
• 2017: a New Zealand business site asked "Did you know that 35 to 50 per cent of deals go to the vendor who responds first?" with no source (NZ Entrepreneur).
• 2026: a ZoomInfo statistics list credits the 35-50% to HubSpot, with no link (ZoomInfo), and a sales-AI blog carries both the 35-50% and the 78% with no links at all (regie.ai).

Who gets credited for the 78% today?

Between 2022 and 2026 the 78% kept changing hands. In the copies we read, it is now credited to:

• Vendasta. A 2024 sales-software blog post (edited in April 2026) cites Vendasta for "78% of B2B customers buy from the vendor who responds first". The word "B2B" is new: the 2008 original was about B2C internet leads, mainly in real estate.
• "Lead Connect", now with a year. A 2025 UK white paper on lead response lists "Lead Connect & Vendasta Speed to Lead Research (2019)" in its references. Statistics pages from AI lead-response vendors write "(Lead Connect, 2024)", or "A study by Lead Connect found that 78%" with a link that goes to Vendasta.
• The 2007 MIT study. One 2026 vendor page credits "78% of customers buy from the first business to respond" to the Lead Response Management Study by Dr. James Oldroyd. That study did not measure closed sales.
• The National Association of Realtors. One 2026 page turns it into "78% of buyers work with the first agent who responds", credited to NAR's 2025 report, and on the same page cites "Lead Connect (2020, B2B buyer survey)". The NAR report has no such figure (see below).

One 2026 vendor page is more candid than most and calls the figure "a widely-cited lead-response benchmark". That is the accurate description: it is widely cited, and no one has published a measurement behind it.

What does real research say about the first vendor winning?

The closest real data measures different things. Each finding is useful, as long as you say what it actually measured.

6sense 2025: the buyer usually contacts the favourite first

6sense's B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025 surveyed nearly 4,000 B2B buyers in North America, APAC and EMEA, plus a companion survey of 766 responses. Buyers already have a favourite before they talk to any vendor, "and that pre-contact favorite wins the deal roughly 80% of the time". In 95% of cases the winning vendor is already on the buyer's Day One shortlist. Buyers started 79% of first engagements themselves, against 82% in earlier years, and they now make first contact at about 61% of the way through the buying journey, down from 69%. 6sense draws the causal line explicitly: "being the first vendor contacted is an indication that you are the preferred vendor, not the cause of becoming the preferred".

That runs the other way from the 78% story. In 6sense's data the buyer decides whom to contact first, and the vendor they pick first is usually the one they already preferred. It is about which vendor the buyer calls, not which vendor answers a form first, and it covers B2B only. Confidence: Medium (a vendor survey with a large disclosed sample and a partly disclosed method).

NAR 2025: one agent, one contact, and responsiveness matters

The National Association of Realtors' 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report (5,390 responses from primary-residence buyers who bought between July 2023 and June 2024; the survey was mailed to 167,750 recent buyers) has no "78% pick the first agent who responds" figure. A full-text search of the report for "78" finds only unrelated values. What it does show:

• 75% of buyers interviewed only one agent (Exhibit 4-6).
• The median buyer contacted their agent once before getting a response (Exhibit 4-5).
• 95% rated responsiveness "very important" in an agent (Exhibit 4-8).

Interviewing one agent is not the same as hiring whoever answered first, so this cannot stand in for the 78%. It does say something practical: most buyers do not shop around between agents, most got a reply to their first contact, and 95% rate responsiveness very important. Confidence: High (primary survey, disclosed method), for a different claim. For brokerages that want every enquiry answered at once, see our page on AI voice agents for real estate brokerages; for loan officers, our mortgage lead response time statistics cover CFPB data on how many lenders borrowers actually consider.

Velocify 2012: a lift for calling fast, not a share of sales

Leads360 (renamed Velocify in 2013) analysed nearly 3.5 million leads from more than 400 companies on its platform and found that "making a call attempt within a minute of receiving a lead increases conversion rates by 391%" ("The Ultimate Contact Strategy", 2012, archived PDF). That is real platform data, rated Medium. But it is a conversion lift for calling fast, not a share of sales that goes to whoever responds first. The same company that published the unsourced 78% in 2008 published this measured figure four years later.

Does responding first still matter if the 78% is a myth?

Yes, for a narrower and better-sourced reason. Speed decides whether you reach the lead at all and whether the conversation qualifies, and those effects are measured:

• Calling within 5 minutes rather than 30: the odds of contact are 100 times higher and the odds of qualifying 21 times higher (MIT/InsideSales, 2007).
• Responding within an hour: nearly 7 times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that tried an hour later (HBR, 2011).
• Calling within a minute: conversion up 391% (Velocify, 2012).

Many businesses answered slowly when tested: in InsideSales' 2014 report, 47% of the companies tested never answered the test lead, and HBR's 2011 audit found a 42-hour average first response among those that did reply within 30 days. The 6sense finding adds a second reason to be fast. If buyers usually reach out first to the vendor they already favour, the enquiry you are slow to answer may well come from a buyer who already prefers you.

“Our research shows that most companies are not responding nearly fast enough.”

The practical problem is capacity, not knowledge. Leads arrive while the team is on other calls, in meetings or off for the night. One way to close the gap is to let an AI agent make the first call the moment a form arrives, so the same team can serve more leads and spend its time on the conversations that need a person. For lead forms specifically, see AI call-backs after a Facebook or Google form; for B2B teams, see AI voice agents for B2B sales teams. For calls that were already missed, missed-call recovery rings the caller straight back. To see what fast first contact looks like on real projects, read our anonymised case studies.

If you want to work out what instant first contact would change in your own lead flow, book a free consultation.

What should you cite instead of the 78%?

If you need a number for a deck or a business case, use one that names its sample, and say what it measured: