A team adds fields to the enquiry form because sales complain that leads arrive with no information. Company size, budget, timescale, role, how they heard about us.
Enquiries fall by half. The ones that come through are better qualified, so the form looks like a success on a spreadsheet of lead quality.
Nobody counts the half who left, several of whom were larger than anything in the pipeline and simply would not fill in fourteen fields on a Tuesday evening.
Step 1: stop treating the form as the qualification step
A form is a barrier placed before any value has been given. Qualification belongs after somebody has engaged, when answering questions feels like moving forward rather than paying an entry fee.
Step 2: reduce the form to the minimum
A way to reply and a sentence about what they need. Everything else can be gathered in conversation, and every field removed increases the number of conversations you get to have.
Step 3: decide what actually changes your behaviour
If an answer would not change who handles it, how fast, or what you say, do not ask it. Most forms collect fields that nobody has ever used to make a decision.
Step 4: ask about the problem before the budget
People will describe their situation readily and resist financial questions from a stranger. Understanding the problem is also what lets you judge scale without asking directly.
Step 5: establish timescale early
A live project and an idea for next year are the same enquiry on a form and completely different in a pipeline. It is the single most useful question available.
Step 6: establish who else is involved
Not to interrogate, but because knowing whether anybody else must agree shapes what happens next entirely, which is the ground in enterprise procurement questions on a b2b website.
Step 7: qualify scale indirectly
Number of people, locations, volume or whatever the natural measure is. These are easier to answer than a budget question and they tell you the same thing.
Step 8: give something before asking
An answer, a figure, a piece of genuine help. Reciprocity works, and an enquirer who has been helped answers questions willingly.
Step 9: disqualify politely and quickly
Somebody who is not a fit deserves a fast, courteous answer and possibly a referral. The time saved is real, and the goodwill occasionally returns later.
Step 10: capture it in a structured form regardless
The conversation should end with the same fields the form wanted, filled in properly and written to the same place. A conversation that helps somebody and leaves no record is worse than the form it replaced.
Step 11: route on what was learned
Territory, product line, size or specialism, which is the routing problem in local questions franchise websites fail to answer and partner and reseller enquiries from your website.
Step 12: qualify at the hour the enquiry arrives
An enquiry qualified at nine in the evening reaches a salesperson complete the next morning rather than starting a two day exchange.
Step 13: measure both halves of the change
Lead volume and lead quality together. Teams that measure only quality congratulate themselves on a form that is quietly costing them the top of the pipeline.
Step 14: let the conversation do the work
An assistant that asks four useful questions in a natural order, answers the enquirer's own questions along the way and hands over a complete record collects more information than a fourteen field form while losing none of the enquiries it would have deterred. That is exactly what qualifying leads automatically let the chatbot ask the questions sets out. Keep the short form itself at forms, see features, start at try, and the sector view sits under b2b.