Time and marketing: why the first hour decides the sale
By Makon Team · 3 October 2026 · 3 min read
Developers spend real money to make the phone ring: adverts, hoardings, exhibitions, posts. Then the call comes in at seven in the evening, or a message lands in a manager's personal Telegram, and nobody answers until tomorrow. The advert worked. The sale was lost in the hours after it.
What the research says
In 2011 the Harvard Business Review published "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. Studying thousands of companies, they found that firms which contacted a potential customer within an hour of the enquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that waited longer, and far more likely than those that waited a day or more.
The study was not about apartments, but the reason carries over. Interest is highest at the moment someone asks. Every hour after that, they are reading about another project, talking to another manager, or simply getting on with their day.
“Remember that time is money.”
Where the hours go
In most sales offices the delay is not laziness. It is structure: enquiries arrive in five places, nobody owns them, and the manager who answers has to check availability with someone else before replying.
- Calls and messages to personal phones, invisible to the rest of the team.
- No one named as responsible, so everyone assumes someone else replied.
- Availability that has to be checked before every answer.
- Enquiries after working hours that wait until the morning.
One place for every enquiry
The first fix is organisational: every enquiry is written down in one shared place, with a responsible manager, the moment it arrives. In Makon a new request is a client with phone details and a responsible sales manager, and it waits as an order until it becomes a sale — so a request can be handed over, followed up or checked by the head of sales, rather than lost in somebody's phone.
Answers that do not need a meeting
Most first questions are simple: what is free, on which floor, at what price. A manager who can see the live chessboard on their phone answers in a minute instead of promising to call back. And some buyers do not want to call at all: Makon's public Telegram bot lets them browse the available apartments at any hour, with your contacts and working hours.
Make follow-up a task, not a memory
A buyer who is not ready today may be ready in two weeks, if someone calls back. Follow-ups that live in memory are forgotten; follow-ups that are tasks get done. Makon's task board — to do, in progress, called, done — was built for exactly this kind of call, and the head of sales sees what is waiting without asking.
Measure it like any other result: how many enquiries came in this week, how many were answered the same day, how many became reservations. What gets looked at every Monday gets better.
Time is part of your marketing budget. An enquiry answered within the hour is worth several answered tomorrow — so give every enquiry one home, one owner and one deadline.
Further reading
The Millionaire Real Estate Agent
Gary Keller, 2004
The co-founder of Keller Williams on the models behind top property sellers: lead generation, budgets and the people you hire.
High Output Management
Andrew S. Grove, 1983
Intel's former chief on running a team like a production line: measure output, hold one-to-ones, run meetings that decide things.
The Goal
Eliyahu M. Goldratt, 1984
A novel about a failing factory that teaches the theory of constraints: find the one bottleneck, and everything else waits on it. True of sales offices too.