When most people talk about getting quality lead information from forms, they usually talk about one tactic: changing the length of the form. The longer the form, the better quality the leads will be … right?
Truthfully, it’s not always that simple. For most businesses, changing the form length is a great way to get started with increasing lead quality — but at a certain point, you’re going to need to experiment with other form conversion optimization tactics to get better information about the people filling the form out.
At HubSpot, we’ve had a long lead generation form on our website for a while, but it wasn’t quite getting us the best results we needed to effciently rotate the right leads to Sales. Below is what we tested to help improve the quality of our form submission data — all without adding a single form field.
The Problem
Like we mentioned above, we’ve always had a long lead generation form on our landing pages — we’ve wanted a decent amount of information to properly qualify incoming leads for Sales. Here’s the type of information we typically ask for:
- Your name
- Your email
- Your company name
- The number of employees at your company
- The URL of your company’s website
- Your role
- Your department
- Which CRM you use
- Your biggest Marketing and Sales challenge
- Whether your company is a marketing agency (or sells marketing services)
The last bullet is one of the most crucial to ask. We sell HubSpot both directly to businesses and through our Partner program, so we use this question to route new Partner leads to a certain team in Sales. To make sure that sales team is always getting the right type of leads, if someone says that they are a marketing agency, they go into a special queue. In that queue, the website is manually checked to confirm the lead is actually an agency, and if so, is sent on to our Partner sales team.
About a year ago, we realized that our manual checkers had to still do a ton of filtering to get the proper leads to the proper teams. We discovered that of those people who said “Yes” (they could be a Partner agency), 60% of them were in reality not an agency. So if 10 people said “Yes” on the form, only 4 of them would be a marketing agency. As you can imagine, that manual data scrubbing takes time, and isn’t an efficient way to scale. So we decided to run a test on the form to see if we help people better identify themselves as a partner agency from the get-go.
The Methodology
The test all revolved around testing the form copy. Here’s what the original question said:
Control
In our experiment, we ran an A/B test on one of our landing pages comparing Treatment A and Treatment B against the control — the only difference between the landing page versions was this question. You can see below that we played with copy changes as well as visual presentation in the form field.
Treatment A
Treatment B
Next up is what we found.
What We Found
Both treatments had a huge improvement in data accuracy from our original 60% error rate. Treatment A had a 26% false positive rate (meaning of 100 people saying “Yes” on the form, 26 of those people were NOT an agency) while Form B had a 22% false positive rate. After testing for statistical significance, we decided to replace this question on all our forms with Form B’s field format. Since replacing this form field, the false positive rate has gone down even further.
While this may seem like a trivial test, it’s had a huge impact on our business. Now, instead of getting caught in this data-scrubbing bottleneck, more leads are going to the right sales reps faster. And the faster they can respond to a qualified lead, the more relevant conversation they can have with the lead. So this didn’t just help us get cleaner data at scale — it helped make our sales process more lovable. Talk about a win-win!
