What did this study measure?

Three dimensions: Speed (time from inquiry to first response, against the 5-minute response window benchmark), Persistence (follow-up touches over 14 days, against the 12-touch benchmark), and Coverage (after-hours and weekend response capability, against 24/7). Together these define the 5/12/24 Standard™.

How were the gyms selected and contacted?

~10,000 gyms were audited for online findability. ~1,000 were then mystery-shopped with standardized membership inquiries submitted through each gym's available inbound contact channels — web forms, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, or online chat, as available per location.

What was the observation window?

14 days from the moment of inquiry submission. Touch counts are reported at both the 7-day and 14-day marks.

What counts as a qualifying response?

Any human or automated reply addressed to the substance of the inquiry. Auto-acknowledgment receipts are logged separately and excluded from response metrics.

Who funded this study and how is the conflict of interest handled?

HireAiGO funded this study. This is disclosed in full. The complete methodology was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/w7jev/) before any results were viewed. Pre-registration is public and timestamped.

Where can I read the full methodology?

The complete pre-registered analysis plan is available at https://osf.io/w7jev/ on the Open Science Framework.

The State of Gym Lead Response 2026

Why this study exists

The industry spends billions generating leads. No one has ever measured what happens when those leads reach out.

The fitness industry spends billions generating leads every year — paid social, local SEO, referral programs, community events. What happens when a prospect actually reaches out has never been measured at scale. Not once. Not in any peer-reviewed study. Not in any industry report. This study measures it.

The last major lead response audit of any industry was conducted in 2011 by Oldroyd et al. in the Harvard Business Review: 2,241 companies studied, an average first response of 42 hours, and 23% of companies that never responded at all. That study covered B2B companies across multiple industries. Fitness has never been measured at scale — until now.

This study treats the problem the same way any serious research would: standardized inquiries, a pre-declared methodology, a fixed observation window, and a public pre-registration before any results were viewed. The goal is a replicable benchmark that the fitness industry can hold itself accountable to — and build against.

What we measured

Three dimensions. One benchmark.

5 min

Speed

Lead to first response. Every minute past 5 reduces your odds of connecting by 10×. After an hour, most leads are effectively gone.

Benchmark: 5-minute window

12×

Persistence

12 contact attempts across the 14-day window — phone, SMS, email. Most gyms stop at 1 or 2. The benchmark is 12.

Benchmark: 12-touch standard

24/7

Coverage

Leads arrive evenings, weekends, and late nights — when most gyms are closed. 24/7 response without automation is effectively impossible for one location.

Benchmark: 24/7 availability

Together these define the 5/12/24 Standard™ — the benchmark this study tests the fitness industry against.

5 minutes — Response speed. The probability of connecting with a prospect drops by 10x after the first 5 minutes. After an hour, the conversation is effectively over. The 5/12/24 Standard™ defines a qualifying first response as one delivered within the 5-minute window from the moment of inquiry.

12 touches — Follow-up persistence. The 7–12 Rule holds that most people require 7 to 12 contact attempts before making a buying decision. A single follow-up is not follow-up. The 5/12/24 Standard™ requires 12 documented contact attempts across the 14-day window before a lead is considered fully worked.

24/7 — Coverage. Consumer fitness inquiries peak in the evenings and on weekends — the windows most gyms are closed or unstaffed. A business that only responds during business hours is invisible to the majority of its incoming leads. The 5/12/24 Standard™ requires 24/7 response capability: no inquiry goes unanswered because of the hour.

Methodology

How the study was designed and run.

Plain-English summary. The complete pre-registered plan — including stopping rules, exclusion criteria, and statistical approach — is available at https://osf.io/w7jev/.

What was sent to each gym

Each gym received a standardized membership inquiry submitted through the gym's available inbound contact channel — web form, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, or online chat, as found on the gym's public presence.

The inquiry text was standardized across all contacts. Substance was identical: a prospective member asking about pricing and how to get started. Formatting was adapted only to match the channel (e.g., plain text for Messenger vs. a web form field). The exact inquiry text used is documented in the pre-registration.

Channels used and how gyms were selected

~10,000 gyms were first audited for online findability — whether they could be discovered, and through what channels, by a prospective member searching locally. From those, ~1,000 were selected for the mystery-shopping phase.

Channel availability is itself a findability finding. If a gym had no accessible inbound contact channel, that absence is recorded as a data point, not an exclusion. The contact channel used for each gym is logged in the dataset.

The 14-day observation window

Each gym's observation window is 14 days from the exact moment the inquiry was submitted. All contact attempts from the gym within that window are logged and counted. Touch counts are reported at both the 7-day mark and the 14-day mark.

A qualifying response is any human or automated reply that is addressed to the substance of the inquiry. Auto-acknowledgment receipts (e.g., "Thanks for your message, we'll be in touch") are logged separately and excluded from qualifying response metrics.

Pre-declared exclusions

All exclusions were declared before data collection began and are documented in the pre-registration. No outcome-based exclusions exist or will ever exist — no gym is excluded because of how it performed.

Every post-collection exclusion of any record requires a documented reason in the cleaning log: record ID, reason, and the pre-declared rule authorizing it. The complete exclusion list, including test sends from system build and verification (tagged test_send=true), will be published with the dataset.

Conflict of interest handling

This study was funded by HireAiGO. HireAiGO is an AI service provider that sells to fitness businesses. This creates a financial interest in the study's findings.

The methodology was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework before any results were viewed. Pre-registration locks in the analysis plan — the hypotheses, the metrics, the stopping rules, and the exclusion criteria — before anyone sees the data. This is the same mechanism used in academic research to prevent researcher degrees of freedom from distorting findings. The pre-registration is public, timestamped, and permanent.

Full pre-registered plan:
https://osf.io/w7jev/

The State of Gym Lead Response.

The industry spends billions generating leads. No one has ever measured what happens when those leads reach out.

Three dimensions. One benchmark.

How the study was designed and run.

Grade Your Gym in 3 Minutes.