Lead response time
Lead response time is how long it takes you to reply to a new enquiry — a form, a call, a message — measured from when it arrives to when a real reply goes out. It matters because someone contacting you is usually contacting two or three other businesses at the same time, and the order of replies decides who they talk to first.
How to measure it honestly
Measure from the moment the enquiry arrives, not from when you saw it, and count the first substantive reply rather than an automatic acknowledgement. Businesses that measure from when they noticed tend to report good numbers and lose work anyway, because the customer experienced the gap they did not count.
The usual cause of a bad number
It is rarely unwillingness. It is that enquiries arrive while somebody is with a customer, driving, or closed, and the ones that arrive at the wrong moment are the ones that get lost. That is why the fix is usually structural — a way for the reply to happen when nobody is free — rather than a resolution to be quicker.