How to Qualify New Leads Through Landing Pages

Finding a balance between gathering relevant information from your leads and not sacrificing your conversion rate can be difficult. You want to generate as many leads as possible while hooking your sales team up with information that will help them establish connections, build relationships, and close deals .  

One important factor that gets lost in this discussion of how many form fields to use on your landing pages is the quality of leads that you’re generating from those pages.  Clearly, when it comes to inbound marketing sheer numbers aren’t all that matters. That’s more of an advertising and cold calling motto. Lead quality and the end result are as important, if not more, than the overall lead number itself.  Low quality leads can cost precious sales time that could have been better spent on other prospects. A large number of low-quality leads is just be a pretty number in a marketing report.  At the end of the day, what truly matters is whether or not these leads are becoming customers.

So, how can we use the form fields needed to capture visitor’s information as a way to qualify leads and give your sales team great information ?

Find Out What Your Sales Team Wants To Know

You can’t properly come up with the right questions to ask and form fields to create without talking with your sales team.  What information helps them make that first connection either via email or phone?  How do they qualify the leads themselves and decide who to reach out to first or who is worth more of an effort? Understanding these critical information points will allow you to craft questions on the forms of your landing pages that will give your sales team a head start. And they’ll love you for it.

Craft The Form's Questions

This may be the hardest part. How the questions are presented and written greatly impact how they’re interpreted. The key in all of this is to limit the amount of anxiety a visitor has in filling out your form and answering the new questions you’re asking.  I suggest working with a team and saying the different qualifying questions out loud and seeing how they sound. If it’s too intrusive sounding then you try and devise another question or wording that will still get you the answers you want.  

Decrease The Physical Length of the Form

The actual physical size of the form can make a huge impact on visitor’s initial feelings when they get to your landing page. And, with all of the great questions you want to ask them the form could initially look big and be perceived as a daunting task. The size alone could deter some visitors and get them to abandon the page without even reading the questions. To combat this, experiment heavily with drop down menus.

Drop down menus allow the form to shrink even though the different options to the question include multiple choices. It also limits the amount of thinking the visitor has to do if the choices are laid out in front of them. Furthermore, asking questions in the form of drop downs allows you to segment your entire list of leads from this offer into smaller segment for more targeted messaging for your email marketing and lead nurturing efforts .

Test, Test, Test

You won’t know which questions on forms work to generate more qualified leads until you test. You can experiment with a number of different things from the questions you actually ask to the way they’re presented. Small tweaks to your forms with the understanding of what works and what doesn’t can lead to huge increases in conversion rates and impact your bottom line over time.

Note: If you’re just starting out generating leads through your website you probably shouldn’t experiment with asking too many questions to start. Wait until your lead flow is steady and that you’re in the position to sacrifice a bit of your conversion rate percentage. Or, if you’re finding that your current forms are not generating any valuable information for your sales team then you might experiment with this a little earlier.

What are some of the things you do to qualify leads for your sales representatives to be more successful?

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