You HAVE to start replying to your prospects ASAP - ideally within the first hour of their response - and this is exactly how to do it
We recently did research on the ideal response time at Expandi, and these are some interesting metrics that we found:
Leads answered within five minutes convert around eight times better than the same leads answered a day later. Teams responding to intent signals within 2 hours consistently hit reply rates of 20%+ independent of the industry.
This might seem like a “cool, but what do I do with this?” kind of information, but it’s far from that, and could genuinely change a campaign’s success drastically. As the GTM director at Expandi, I deal with a lot of questions about why the campaigns aren’t performing ideally, and my first instinct is now to look into the average response time instead of messages/targeting. Because if the baseline response time is 8 hours, there is no point in looking any further. By the time a prospect receives your message, they are long gone from LinkedIn, and the message will probably get buried under a pile of others.
Now, being honest about the five minute number - on LinkedIn this mostly fiction; impossible to reach. Nobody sits in the inbox all day, replies can often arrive while you are on calls, sleeping, or outside your working hours. The realistic version is hours instead of minutes, and that alone is enough to begin with because, as mentioned above, consistently replying to prospects within the first 2 hours greatly increases the performance of the campaign. Teams acting on engagement within about two hours tend to hold reply rates above 20%, which is roughly double what the same teams see on cold outreach. But if you really, really want to pull the most out of your campaign and optimize for responses under 1 hour, this is how you do it:
- Move LinkedIn notifications into whatever you already have open all day, usually Slack or a shared inbox. The LinkedIn app itself is rarely open all day, but Slack probably is. If you want to take it a step further, use another platform specifically for this with a distinct sound that your SDRs don’t hear all day because they’re not used to it and will instantly know what’s up when the notification comes. For example, you can set up a Discord server and push only the notifications from your outreach campaign there. The sound of the pings is different than Slack, so the SDRs will know instantly to jump in and check the response.
- Assign one named owner per account and write it down. Two reps each assuming the other has the thread is the most common way a warm reply dies, and it costs nothing to fix. The alternative is to create an option for the SDRs to check the replies they are handling, so the other ones can know if it’s taken care of.
- Split the queue in two. Someone who replied to you needs an answer today, while someone who only viewed a profile or liked a post can wait until tomorrow without any damage. Your focus should be on the ones who replied, and always make that a priority.
- Set a floor rather than a target. Every open thread gets touched within one working day, even when the honest answer is just a note saying you will come back to it properly. Early on, this probably won’t even be an issue, but as you scale and more responses pile up, it’s smart to categorize them. If there’s an urgent/hot conversation or a prospect interested in your product/service, that’s where you want your SDRs to be, compared to a prospect asking for a deck to read when they have time. There is a way to automate this actually, and it’s relatively easy to set up. Just funnel the responses to an AI agent first - you can create one with Claude - teach the agent to categorize the responses into, let’s say, 3 tiers based on priority, and have the agent funnel the already evaluated messages to the channel. This way your SDRs can just open the channel and instantly see what to jump on right away, and what can be handled later.
- Keep drafted responses for the handful of replies you can predict - pricing, timing, "send me something". This is very important because people get tired, and speed should not depend on whether the rep still has writing energy late in the day. Templates help them deal with that, and the more you have, the easier it becomes. Ultimately, you can set up AI SDRs to dynamically draft the messages based on the prospect’s responses, and the human SDRs just review, improve, and send. But this takes a lot of time to do properly, so early on, it’s best to handle it all manually.
- Check the age of your oldest unanswered thread once a week. That one number will tell you more about the system than reply rate does.
- None of this makes the outreach itself better. You still need to set up your campaigns properly, target the right leads, craft the right messages. This “just” stops losing the leads from the outreach, which for most teams I've looked at is the larger of the two problems.
So, if we go by the Discord example, this is how the final setup could look:
Fresh Discord accounts (we don’t want any random pings) + a fresh Discord server to ensure these pings stay unique and distinctive for the SDRs. A channel (or channels) to which all the prospects’ responses are pushed. The responses first get funneled to an AI agent that’s trained to 1) evaluate them; 2) draft a templated response (for the pricing, timing, "send me something" and similar messages). The agent pushes the evaluated leads to these Discord channels with a templated message in some instances. The SDRs pick the leads, check them to signify they are taken care of, and use the templated messages when needed. The response time drops to under 2 hours, and you suddenly can’t deal with all these leads and money.