Speed to lead is the most consistently underrated variable on a forex sales floor. It costs nothing to improve, requires no new headcount, and the effect size is larger than almost any script change.
The decay curve
Contact attempts made within the first five minutes of a record entering your CRM connect at dramatically higher rates than attempts made in the first hour, and the gap between the first hour and the first day is larger still. The mechanism is not mysterious: the prospect is still at their device, still thinking about trading, and has not yet been called by three of your competitors.
Benchmarks worth holding your floor to
- First attempt within 5 minutes for any inbound or freshly delivered record.
- Six attempts across the first 72 hours, varying time of day. Most desks stop at two and leave the majority of reachable prospects unreached.
- WhatsApp within 10 minutes of a failed first call in GCC and LATAM markets, where message response rates comfortably exceed call pickup.
- Full disposition within 14 days, so replacement claims can be filed inside the guarantee window.
The operational fix
Most speed-to-lead failures are routing failures rather than effort failures. Records land in a queue, the queue is worked top-down, and by the time an agent reaches row 400 the intent has evaporated. Route by recency, not by list order, and measure time-to-first-attempt as a floor-level KPI rather than an individual one.