Every rep steps away. They go to the bathroom, take lunch, get stuck on a long call. None of that is a problem until a lead lands on their desk while they are gone and sits there, and on most floors nobody notices until it is cold. The fix is not a manager watching the queue. It is a rule that moves the lead on its own.
Why five minutes
| First contact | What the numbers say |
|---|---|
| Inside 5 minutes | Closes around 32% |
| After 30 minutes | Contact rate down about 60% |
| After a day | Around 12% |
These are industry-wide figures rather than MCA-specific ones, and the board says so; what matters is the direction, and the direction is steep. Alex’s own version is simpler: call the lead the moment they opt in and you get them on the phone about nine times in ten. Sixty seconds is the target, five minutes is the ceiling, and speed to lead has the fourteen-hour day that happens when there is no ceiling at all.
The workflow
- Trigger: a lead is assigned to a rep.
- Wait five minutes.
- Check: has a call or a text been logged on the lead? Opening the record does not count.
- If not, reassign it to the next user in the rotation.
- Notify the first rep that the lead moved, so it is visible rather than a mystery.
In GoHighLevel that is one workflow: wait five minutes, if no call or text on the lead, reassign to the next user and notify the first. Salesforce and HubSpot do the same with an assignment rule and a timed check. It sits behind the rule in CRM setup of assigning every lead to a named person on arrival, because a lead assigned to “the team” has nobody to take it away from.
Five minutes also makes the per-rep numbers honest. Once every stage carries a timestamp, time to first dial by rep shows who is losing leads to the rule, which is a coaching conversation rather than a guess.
Questions brokers ask
How long should a lead sit before it is reassigned to another rep?
Five minutes with no call or text logged. That keeps the lead inside the window where most merchants still pick up, without pulling leads from reps who are simply mid-dial.
How do I auto-reassign leads in GoHighLevel?
Build a workflow that waits five minutes after assignment, checks for a call or text on the lead, and if there is none, reassigns to the next user and notifies the first one.
How much does contact rate drop if you wait to call a lead?
About 60% after 30 minutes on industry-wide figures. Leads reached inside five minutes close around 32%, against roughly 12% for leads first reached after a day.
What counts as touching a lead?
A logged outbound call or text. Opening the record or changing a field does not count, because the merchant has not heard from anyone.
Do reps resent automatic lead reassignment?
Not if it is framed correctly. It only moves leads nobody has called, it notifies the first rep, and it protects the floor from the ten minutes someone is away from the desk.
Reference
Watch: six things the top MCA brokerages have in their CRMThe reassignment rule is number two, with the speed-to-lead numbers behind it.
Alex Makowski
Founder, Infinite Bookings
Runs the lead generation operation behind Infinite Bookings — paid traffic, the funding application, and the delivery pipeline that puts records into brokers’ CRMs.
Reachable directly at alex@infinitebookings.com or 732-609-7182.