Ask most sales leaders what their biggest lever on revenue is, and they’ll talk about lead volume, or messaging, or pricing. Almost nobody says response time — and almost every study on the subject says they should.
A lead contacted within the first minute converts at dramatically higher rates than one contacted an hour later. Past thirty minutes, the odds drop close to zero. Most CRMs aren't slow because of technology; they're slow because a human has to notice the lead exists before anything happens.
Automating that first response — not replacing the salesperson, just removing the gap between inquiry and acknowledgment — is consistently the highest-ROI change we make in a new engagement.