Eleven required fields and no leads
Open your most important lead form and count the required fields. First name, last name, company, title, industry, employee count, phone, country, revenue band, “How did you hear about us,” message. Eleven of them. At some point sales wanted better qualified leads, marketing dutifully bolted on fields, and since then hardly anyone fills the thing out.
The logic sounds reasonable at first. Anyone who fills out eleven fields is serious. That’s even true. Except you’re not measuring buying intent, you’re measuring pain tolerance. The CEO of an 80-person machine manufacturer reviewing your offer on his iPad at ten in the evening is not going to hunt for his revenue band in a dropdown. The student researching a term paper does it patiently. You are filtering exactly backwards.
Then there’s the actual punchline: almost everything you ask for can be enriched automatically. From a company email address, an enrichment tool pulls the company, from that the industry, employee count, location, the tech stack if you want. That happens in the background, in seconds, before the lead even lands in the CRM. You are making prospects type in data an API has long been able to deliver. That’s not qualification. That’s offloading work onto the customer, and the customer isn’t playing along.
Every field costs, not anecdotally but measurably. The numbers vary by industry and traffic source, but the direction is always the same: per additional required field you lose roughly five to ten percent conversion. Scale that up to eleven. Of a hundred visitors who would have submitted a one-field form, maybe thirty are left. The other seventy weren’t unqualified. They just couldn’t be bothered.
So what remains? Email as a required field, done. Maybe an optional free-text field for context, which incidentally delivers the best qualification signals, because it contains sentences instead of dropdown values. Everything else you enrich, and whatever can’t be enriched, sales asks in the first conversation. They can do that, it’s their job.
The usual objection comes from the sales team: then we’re calling people we know nothing about. It’s the reverse. After enrichment you know more about the lead than before, when he filled your eleven fields with “asdf” and a throwaway address. Because that’s exactly what’s happening right now, look at the data.
How many good deals died on field number seven this year? You will never know. Abandoners don’t show up in any report.
