How fast should you answer a sales enquiry?

Fast enough to be first. For a considered purchase - a garden room, a run of lighting, an outdoor kitchen, a trade account - the supplier who replies first is usually the one who frames how the buyer judges everyone who replies after. Speed is not a customer-service metric here. It is a positioning advantage that expires within hours.

That is a strong claim, so let me be precise about the mechanism rather than wave a statistic at you.

What actually happens after someone sends an enquiry

A buyer researching a €12,000 purchase does not send one enquiry. They send four or five in a single sitting, because that sitting is when the job is at the top of their mind. Then they go back to their life.

Whoever replies while that window is still open gets three things at once:

The first conversation. They ask their real questions of you, not of a competitor.
The frame. The specification you describe, the way you break down the price, the constraint you flag - that becomes the checklist they take to everyone else.
A live human relationship, at the only moment they were actively thinking about the project.

Whoever replies on Tuesday gets a colder buyer who now has a shape in their head, formed by someone else, and is asking you to fit it.

This is why response speed matters far more in a considered sale than in retail. In retail a slow reply costs you one transaction. In a considered sale a slow reply costs you the ability to define the terms of the comparison.

The weekend gap

Enquiries do not arrive during business hours. They arrive when someone is at home, thinking about their garden, with a browser open - evenings and weekends.

So the single most expensive gap in most home & garden brands is between Friday evening and Monday morning. An enquiry that arrives at 8pm on Friday sits for roughly sixty hours. By Monday the buyer has three replies from suppliers who answer at weekends, and yours arrives into a conversation that has already started without you.

Nobody plans this. It is simply what happens when answering enquiries is a person’s job and that person, quite reasonably, has a weekend.

So what does “fast” have to mean?

Two different targets, and it helps to keep them apart:

An acknowledgement that does real work: minutes. Not “thanks, we’ll be in touch” - that buys nothing. A useful first reply confirms you can do the thing they asked about, answers the one or two factual questions they raised (dimensions, lead time, whether you deliver to them), and asks the question you need answered to go further. That is a reply an agent can produce correctly, at 8pm on a Friday, from verified product knowledge.

A considered human response: same working day, ideally. Pricing, drawings, judgement about whether their site works. This needs a person, and it should arrive while the buyer still remembers writing to you.

The mistake is collapsing these into one and calling it “we reply within 48 hours”. That policy loses the first conversation to protect the second.

Why I am not quoting you a statistic

You have probably seen the number about leads being many times more likely to convert when contacted within five minutes. It comes from research into US B2B software and web leads. The mechanism is real and it travels - but the specific figure was measured in an industry that does not sell garden rooms, and I am not going to dress it up as though it were about ours.

What we do not have is a credible benchmark for our own sector: how quickly home & garden brands actually answer, how many never reply at all, how many follow up a second time. So we are measuring it. We are sending realistic enquiries to a large sample of UK brands and recording what happens, and we will publish the distribution - not the names.

When that is done, this post gets the numbers it deserves. Until then, the argument stands on the mechanism, which you can test yourself in an afternoon: send an enquiry to five of your competitors and see who replies, how fast, and what they say.

The uncomfortable version of this

If you run a brand and you want to know where you actually stand, do that test on yourself. Send an enquiry through your own website form on a Friday evening, from an address nobody recognises, and see what arrives and when.

Most people who run this test discover something they did not expect - a form that routes to an inbox nobody owns, an auto-reply promising a timeframe the team does not hit, or simply silence. It is a cheap experiment and it usually changes the priority order for the next quarter.

What we do about it

This is the problem Rikke exists for: she answers enquiries when nobody is at the desk, from verified product knowledge, in the language the customer wrote in - and hands a qualified conversation to a person rather than a name and an email address. Anders makes sure the follow-up that should happen on Wednesday actually happens on Wednesday.

Neither of them replaces the human conversation that wins the deal. They protect it, by making sure it is still available to have.

The short version

In a considered sale, the first useful reply frames the whole comparison.
The expensive gap is evenings and weekends, because that is when buyers write.
Split your target: a useful acknowledgement in minutes, a considered human answer the same day.
Test your own brand before you fix anything - most surprises are found in the first hour.