It’s tax season, so you’ve probably seen all the ads claiming that your neighborhood tax professional will complete your 1040EZ form for free. Instead of spending hours sorting receipts and itemizing deductions, someone will just take all that paperwork off your hands and do it for you… awesome! But why do they do it for free?
It’s because most taxpayers don’t qualify for the 1040EZ form. The people who do are typically single, have just one job, aren’t homeowners, don’t have kids, and make less than $50,000 annually. But the tax companies want to attract those people early, so that when they do get married, have kids, buy houses, etc. they’ll come back and pay the same tax accountant to complete their more-complicated tax forms. Pretty clever, huh?
But what does all this have to do with B2B lead generation?
Well, one of the rebuttals we hear from our customers most often is that they can’t reduce the number of fields in their lead gen forms because their sales team won’t allow it. Marketers want to offer the “1040EZ” form, but their sales team wants to collect more info than the IRS.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s time to turn back to your sales team and “sell” them on the benefits of a short form. Just like those tax companies, if you get prospects in your sales funnel early in the process, they’re much more likely to convert into paying customers down the road.
Studies show that adding additional fields to a form will reduce the number of leads that convert—anywhere from a 5-10% drop-off in conversions for each additional field added. If that’s not compelling enough of a reason to shorten your forms, use this five-step plan to convince your sales team that less is more:
1. Understand what information Sales needs to qualify a lead: Any good salesperson knows that the first step to making a sale is listening to your customer’s needs. If you’re going to sell Sales on the benefits of shortening your forms, you need to understand why they need all of that information in the first place. What do they do with all the information they’re currently getting from your lead gen forms? How would they rank the importance of each field, from most important to least important?
2. Come to a mutual agreement of the minimum amount of info they could handle: After you’ve heard their case for an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink form, it’s time to negotiate. Do they have to have all of this information the first time they reach out to a prospect? Would they follow up with someone the same way whether or not the prospect provided their fax number? Probably. That means fax number can be removed from your form. Go through this process with each field until you’re left with the minimum amount of fields that both teams feel comfortable with.
3. Leverage analytics to fill in the blanks: You may think after step 2 you’ve cut your form as much as you possibly can… but wait! There are probably more fields you can cut without losing any must-have prospecting info. For instance, many sales teams are split into geographical territories, so, in order to field leads out to the correct rep, you need to know where each lead came from. This causes many companies to put “Location” as a field on their forms. But most analytic programs and conversion tracking systems can automatically track the IP address of your leads, which will not only tell you their geographic location, but can also reveal their company name if they’re filling out the form at their office. Likewise, you don’t need to ask people “How did you hear about us?” on your lead forms. Most people won’t remember how they first heard of you anyway, and you can use conversion tracking on your form to determine which website referred them to your landing page.
4. Create subsequent nurture campaigns to collect “nice-to-have” info: If you had to fight hard to convince Sales to drop some fields in Step 2, you can reassure them that Marketing will nurture the leads to try to get more info after they first convert. For instance, you might only ask for a name and email address when a prospect downloads a white paper, but once you have their email address, you can follow up with another email that invites them to register for a demo. In the demo registration, you already know their name and email, so you can use that form to ask for additional info like their company name, phone number, and company size. This practice of collecting prospect info bit-by-bit is called “progressive profiling.” You’re probably not going to sell someone your software the first time they contact you, so you might as well hold some of your “nice-to-have” prospecting questions for later in the sales process.
5. Let the numbers do the talking: If you’re still seeing resistance to the idea of a short form, why not suggest a test? Direct half of your web visitors to the original long-form and the other half to a shortened version. The short form will ultimately drive more leads to your sales team, and once they start to see how many more leads they have in their funnel, they’ll likely change their tune. If they refuse to admit defeat, track the revenue yourself. Use your CRM to see how many leads converted from the short form – and how much they ended up paying- versus how many leads converted from the long form – and how much they ended up paying. If a short form makes your company more money, it’s pretty difficult to argue with that.
After going through this five step process, you’ll probably be an expert at selling the idea of a short form. If you’re feeling really confident in your selling abilities, maybe you can give the IRS a call and see if they’ll let the rest of us do the 1040EZ form too? K, thanks.
Have you had to fight to convince your team to shorten a form? We’d love to hear in the comments— what strategies worked best for you?