Why your Signup Form is your prospect’s biggest hurdle

How to turn your 100m Hurdles into the 100m Sprint

Attn: b2b demand generation marketers

“# of form fields” has been a discussion topic since the beginning of the web. Even before that with written sign-up forms on clipboards.

Just google: “What is the optimal number of form fields?”

It’s a hotly debated discussion even today between Marketing, Sales and Product leaders:

• Situation 1: If the inbound lead flow is low quality (low conversion rate for MQL to SQL), Sales will ask that more fields be put up in order to force higher quality. A common Sales Leader’s comment, “If the prospect really wants to talk to us, then they’ll give us a phone number”.
• Situation 2: If the inbound lead flow is just low (low MQLs period), then the Sales Leader will ask for less fields. “Just let them through and the sales team (SDRs) will qualify them. At least that gives our sales team something to chase which is better than nothing which is the current state. Just ask for email only and put up a requirement for @business emails only which will filter out the worthless @gmails.”
• Situation 3: If you have a developer focused product, then Product/Engineering will have a strong voice stating, “Zero form fields. We are attracting engineers and they do not want to give us any information. When they have a question we will engage with them on support”

“What If” you could automatically research and verify accurately based off of a prospect’s email only. Wouldn’t that be the ideal solution?

1. Prospect Wins: It reduces the most friction for a prospect
2. Marketing/Sales Wins: Marketing gets more MQLs inbounds with a wider net. Additionally you get more SQLs because you can filter these leads based on your top filters (# employees, location, industry, title, etc). If you need more SQLs, then simply tune the filters (ie add a new region, change the # of employees, etc). Sales is now your BFF.
3. Product/Engineering Wins: asking an engineer to enter only an email is palatable given you allow non-business emails. Engineering will be ok with this, but nothing more. .

We’re now in 2017 where technology exists to automate the research of any email, including non-business domains. Whalr’s technology is uniquely built to also identify non-business emails as this is the typical behavior of an enterprise prospect. The higher quality the prospect (ie Fortune 500), the smarter they are about controlling the sales process and not identifying themselves until they are prepared to have a sales conversation (ie. 80%+ of the way through the buyer’s journey)

Now that Whalr allows you help each of the 3 groups above, you can focus on generating as many MQLs as possible. Whalr will help you identify more SQLs in your current funnel automatically so in order to find more gold, you need as much top of funnel as you can get.

Keys to increasing your SQLs significantly?

• Reduce your signup form to 1 field. “email”
• Allow signups for both business and non-business domains
• Use Whalr

We’ve recently analyzed over 1M inbound b2b MQLs and have discovered there is a large % that are Decision Makers (ie title = CXO, VP, Director). Stay tuned for our next post as we dive into the data analysis in more detail.