# Playbook: Speed-to-Lead SLA

**School:** the Oldroyd play. Origin: 2007 MIT/InsideSales.com Lead Response Management study (Dr. James Oldroyd; ~15,000 leads, ~100,000 dials) — contacting a web lead within 5 minutes vs. 30 minutes raises odds of making contact ~100x and qualifying ~21x. Sharpened by the 2011 HBR study "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Oldroyd, McElheran, Elkington) — median firm takes 42 hours to respond, 23% never respond at all. Timing discipline layered from BJ Fogg's B=MAP (Stanford Behavior Design Lab, *Tiny Habits*, 2019): a prompt only converts inside a motivation/ability window.

**Deliverable type:** `automation-spec` for the automated first-touch, plus a `journey-map` stage entry stating minutes explicitly (MANUAL §8.2 — the inbound stage's SLA must be stated in minutes or it fails).

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## When to use this

- Any inbound web lead source exists at all — this is the single highest-ROI automation in the entire discipline (MANUAL §7.1). Build it before anything fancier.
- You have any mechanism to send an automated first-touch (email, SMS, chat) within minutes of a `lead_created` event.

## When NOT to use this

- The lead source is not time-sensitive (e.g., a referral introduced personally by a trusted party who already set expectations) — the 5-minute urgency doesn't apply and a fast robotic reply can feel off.
- You have no human escalation path at all — an automated ack with no human follow-up behind it just delays the 42-hour problem rather than solving it. Build the human task queue first, or in parallel.

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## Step-by-step build

1. **Instrument the two timestamps.** `lead_created` (the moment the form/event fires) and `first_touch` (the moment any contact — automated or human — reaches the lead). Both must be recorded on the customer-master record, not inferred.
2. **Build the automated first-touch action.** Fires on the `lead_created` event, target delivery **under 5 minutes**. Content: acknowledge receipt, offer the single easiest next step (Fogg's Ability term — one-click booking link, not a form to fill out again).
3. **Create the human task simultaneously.** A task assigned to the routing destination (per the lead-scoring-routing playbook or a default queue) with a due-by timer.
4. **Set the escalation timer.** If no human touch is logged within 1 hour, escalate: reassign, notify a manager, or fire a second automated touch. State the exact escalation chain — don't leave it as "someone should follow up."
5. **Write the mandatory EXIT condition.** Stop the SLA clock and suppress escalation the moment `first_touch` is logged, or the moment the lead unsubscribes/disqualifies. An SLA automation with no exit will keep escalating a lead who was already contacted — the single most common real-world CRM disaster (MANUAL §8.1).
6. **Instrument the distribution, not just the mean.** Track p50 and p90 of `first_touch − lead_created`. The mean hides the slow tail — a few 20-hour outliers can hide inside a healthy-looking average.
7. **Pair with the counter-metric.** Speed-to-lead alone can be gamed (auto-dial and hang up just to stop the clock). Pair with connect-rate / meaningful-conversation rate (MANUAL §7.7 Goodhart table).

## Worked mini-example

`lead_created` fires when a ZIION funnel form submits. Automated first-touch: an email/SMS within 3 minutes ("Thanks for reaching out — grab a time here [one-click booking link]"). Human task created for outreach-operator queue, due in 60 minutes. Escalation: if no `first_touch` logged by a human within 60 minutes, task reassigns to a backup queue and pings the owner via Telegram. Exit condition: any inbound reply from the lead, or a booked call, sets `first_touch` and cancels the escalation timer. Instrumentation: p50 first-touch = 4 min, p90 = 52 min — the p90 is the number that gets worked on next, not the mean.

## How the verify gate applies

The `automation-spec` linter requires: trigger (named event = `lead_created`), entry conditions, action steps, **mandatory EXIT condition**, failure path, idempotency note (what stops the automated ack firing twice if the form double-submits), owner, kill switch. The `journey-map` rubric separately requires the inbound stage state its SLA **in minutes** — "respond promptly" fails; "respond within 5 minutes, escalate at 60" passes.