Q: How long do I really have until my online sales leads turn cold?

A: Not long — and you probably have even less time than you think. According to the Harvard Business Review, you have about an hour to take advantage of a potential customer’s initial interest: Harvard’s researchers found that businesses that tried to contact customers within one hour of receiving an online query were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead than those who waited even as little as an hour later.

And those fast responders were more than 60 times as likely to qualify the leads than companies that waited 24 hours or longer. The early bird really does get the worm, or in this case, the qualified lead!

So how do you increase your chances of getting to leads in a timely manner? The Harvard researchers offer a few suggestions:

• Salespeople should retrieve leads from CRM system databases continuously instead of once a day.
• Sales staff should act on customer-driven leads before contacting the leads they’ve generated themselves.
• Rules about how sales leads are distributed “fairly” among sales staff should never get in the way of someone contacting a potential customer right now.

In the Internet age, businesses have turned to online lead generation and poured money into online advertising. But there’s an urgency that comes with online lead generation: People expect immediate results and lose interest quickly. So keep your hot leads from going cold — do your best to act within the first hour after you receive a query.