Phil Risher argues that responding to leads within minutes, not hours, is what builds trust and books appointments. Delayed responses make you look unprofessional and send prospects to competitors. If your ads aren't converting, the problem is usually slow follow-up, not the ads themselves.
Speed to lead is the number one way to build trust right away with a cold audience. When you get a lead that comes into your business and you don't respond for hours or days, do you think the customer feels like, wow, this is a professional company, they're getting back to me so quickly? No. When they go to someone else, and even if they're smaller than you, and they respond right away with a text and an email and asking questions and trying to get them on the books, do you think that they feel like that's a professional, good interaction? Yes. This is why if you're spending money on ads and you're running them to a landing page and they're filling out a form or calling your business and you don't have a way to to start that conversation immediately, you're gonna feel like ads are not working because cold audience identify trust with speed.
