Posted by: Sam Eidson, Partner

One of the tough things about lead generation registration is that it’s moving in two opposite directions.  On the one hand, as users get more experienced the amount of information they are willing to provide decreases. On the other, as marketing and sales hone their lead generation and closing practices they recognize the need for more information about a prospect. To prioritize leads and get to the right decision maker at the right time, Sales wants to know who they are, their role, their budget and where they are in the decision process.

The trend toward shorter registration forms is good for the user and good for registration form conversion rates. By reducing your form from a long, all-encompassing form to a quick contact info-only form, you can increase the conversion (people arriving at the form / completing the form) from an unfortunately typical 5% to at least 20%. That’s a 400% increase in conversions. The flip side is, you end up with a lot more unqualified leads, because you haven’t gathered enough information to determine whether the prospects are the right people to talk to, and whether they are ready to buy.

There’s no one answer to this problem, but there at least two approaches – and a straightforward way to figure out which one to pursue:

1) Ask the one to three qualifying question that matters. Ask the minimum of contact information, plus one to three questions that help you answer only the essential of these questions:
a. Is the organization likely to have enough of a budget to be a profitable customer to your organization, even  after requiring a potentially costly sales contact? (Sample question: “How many HR personnel in your organization  require training annually?” Note that the question “What is your annual budget” is rarely answered accurately and  is a privacy-based deterrent to others.)
b. Is this the person in the organization Sales should be talking to? (e.g., “What is your role in procuring power  transmission solutions?”)
c. Is your solution compatible? (e.g., “Is your organization Linux-based, Windows, a combination, other?”)
d. Does the target organization have a definite pain-point that your solution can solve? (e.g., “Are you satisfied  with your current IT vendor? If not, what could they do to better meet your needs?”)
e. Where is the prospect in their decision process? (e.g., “What is your timeframe for submitting an RFP?”

Use the one to three critical questions approach if you can accurately pre-qualify a lead for sales follow-up with those questions – plus the contact info questions and the data you get tracking their site usage behavior. If you can’t narrow it down to a few questions, or you’ve narrowed it down and are still seeing too much drop-off, try another approach.

2) Collect contact information only and then nurture all leads.  Just ask the minimum of contact information – it could be as little as email only – and use follow-up offers and communications to collect enough information to qualify the lead. There are several advantages to this method.  You increase conversion with a less cumbersome form. This is especially beneficial when you are using external media, where you pay for the contact and you just get one shot. Then you can do internal campaigns to your growing house list – these internal communications don’t cost any media dollars, they can be done more than once, and the conversion rate is five times that of an external campaign (since the user is more inclined to respond to an organization from which they have requested more communications). The downside is, it takes more planning and costs more marketing dollars.

This approach works well when you have a long sales cycle and you don’t have a sales follow-up process that focuses on nurturing longer-term leads through to sale. In that case, the marketing dollars are well spent, because you are increasing sales conversion while reducing the time that a valuable sales person spends on unqualified (or not yet ready) leads.