Most franchise development teams manage speed to lead through manual rep follow-up — and the results are poor. According to the FranFunnel Franchise Lead Response Time Study (530 brands, fielded March–April 2025), 28% of brands sent no response whatsoever after a web inquiry, and 44% never sent a personal reply at all. Among the brands that did reply by email, the average time to a first email was 9.1 hours.
The typical approach looks like this: a lead fills out a franchise inquiry form, lands in the CRM, and sits there until a rep notices it in their queue. Some brands configure automated acknowledgment emails — a receipt that confirms the form was submitted but invites no response. That explains the gap between the two key figures from the study: 28% sent nothing, and 16% sent only an automated acknowledgment and stopped. Combined, that is the 44% who never sent a personal reply. The acknowledgment went out fast. The conversation never started.
Teams that perform better usually have one of two things in place: a rep whose sole job is same-day outreach, or some form of automated first text tied to the CRM. The rep-only model breaks at nights, weekends, and any time volume spikes. The automation-only model breaks when it is generic — a form receipt does not move a candidate toward a discovery call. The brands that consistently hit the industry best-practice benchmark of under 5 minutes do it with a system that sends a personal, candidate-specific text automatically, without relying on a rep to be at their desk. FranFunnel does this in under 60 seconds, and that first text is written to the candidate and asks a question — it is automated and personal, not automated and generic.
The best-performing franchise development teams have stopped treating speed to lead as a rep discipline problem and started treating it as a systems problem — and franchise lead response time research covers the full data on where brands stand and what the gap actually costs.