How fast should mortgage brokers call leads?

There is a version of this question that has a satisfying answer and is useless: someone quotes a number of minutes, everyone nods, nothing changes. There is a better version, which is what would actually be right for your firm, given who is enquiring, where they came from and what you promised them when they got in touch.

Be sceptical of specific figures presented as industry facts. A great deal of what circulates on this subject in the UK is borrowed from unrelated sectors, or from vendors selling the software that solves it. Your own data is more useful than any of it, and you can generate it in an afternoon.

Establish what you do now before deciding what you should do

Pull your last sixty enquiries. For each, note the time it arrived and the time somebody first tried to reach the person. Put the gaps in order.

Two things will emerge. First, your typical gap is probably worse than you think, because memory anchors on the good cases. Second, and more usefully, you can now compare the outcomes of the fastest third with the slowest third. If the fastest third reached more people and booked more appointments, you have your own evidence and it applies to your own audience. If the difference is small, your constraint is somewhere else and chasing minutes will not help you.

Sixty is a small sample and will not settle anything definitively. It is still better than a borrowed number, and it will tell you which direction to walk in.

The right answer depends on how the person arrived

An enquiry is not a single thing, and the urgency behind each one differs.

Someone who has just submitted a form on a comparison page or a directory is mid-decision. They are looking at other options in the same session, and the value of reaching them decays fast. Minutes matter here more than anywhere else.

Someone referred by an accountant or a past client is not shopping around. They have already decided to talk to you specifically. Calling within the working day is fine; calling within ninety seconds can feel oddly intense, as though you had nothing else on.

Someone who requested a callback for a stated time has told you exactly what they want. Honour the time they picked, and do not call earlier as a way of being keen.

Someone who downloaded a guide or subscribed to something has not asked to be phoned at all. Treat that as a different conversation entirely, and be careful about assuming permission you were not given.

What the person was told matters more than the clock

If your form says you will be in touch within the hour, the hour is the answer and anything else is a broken promise. If your acknowledgement says you will call the next working day, calling the next working day is a success, not a failure.

This is worth more attention than the raw speed. The gap between what you promise and what you do is what a client experiences, and under Consumer Duty the clarity and accuracy of what you tell people at the outset is part of the service, not decoration around it. It is entirely reasonable for a two-person firm to say it will call within a working day, provided it then does.

So set the promise at a level you can keep on your worst week, and beat it on the ordinary ones.

Reasonable hours and reasonable persistence

Speed is not licence. A few practical limits:

• Do not call before eight in the morning or after eight in the evening unless the person asked you to.
• If someone gave you a mobile number at eleven at night while browsing property, the morning is soon enough.
• Withholding your number to improve pick-up rates is self-defeating and looks evasive.
• Repeatedly calling the same person several times in an hour reads as pressure, and pressure is exactly the wrong first impression for a regulated adviser.

There is also a permission dimension. Calling a person who submitted an enquiry asking for advice is straightforward. Calling data acquired elsewhere, or ringing a number you were passed by a third party, requires you to know what that person actually agreed to, and to have checked whether the number is registered with the Telephone Preference Service where the rules on unsolicited marketing calls apply. Speed does not cure a missing basis for contact.

Spread your attempts rather than stacking them

If the first attempt fails, when you try again matters as much as how soon you tried the first time. People are reachable at different times of day, and three calls between ten and eleven on a Tuesday only tests one slot.

A workable pattern is: first attempt as soon as you sensibly can, a short message immediately after a missed call explaining who you are and why you rang, a second attempt at a clearly different time of day, and a third on a different day of the week. Then stop and move them to something less intrusive.

A default to start from

If you want a starting position rather than a philosophy: aim to make the first attempt on a form or directory enquiry within the hour during your working day, promise only what you can keep outside those hours, and make sure the person hears from you in some form the same day even if that is a message rather than a conversation.

Then measure it, as described above, and let your own numbers move you. The target is not to be fast. It is to reach the person while the question is still alive for them, and to be the firm that did what it said it would.