How to wrangle a cross-functional marketing campaign—without meeting fatigue 

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Contact forms can be a powerful tool for B2B marketers to drive their sales pipeline. But for them to work, marketers have to strike a delicate balance: 

• gather sufficient qualifying details, so the sales team can follow up appropriately 
• avoid an annoying or invasive experience that makes the prospect abandon the form entirely

Meg Gowell, Director of Growth Marketing at Typeform, knows a bad form when she sees one. Fortunately, with an extensive background in lead gen, she also knows how to fix it.

Form pain = no pipeline gain 

Enterprise contact forms can get real results. According to Meg, “Our enterprise ‘Contact us’ form is a significant source of pipeline for sales-led revenue.”

But the first time she saw the form, she knew it wasn’t optimized to convert. 

Meg identifies a few common pain points for enterprise contact forms: 

These pain points create unnecessary friction for potential customers, resulting in abandoned forms, unqualified leads, and inefficient sales processes.

The strategic form two-step

Many companies treat contact forms as a catch-all. Whether a current customer needs support with a current feature or a brand-new prospect is interested in a demo, they all end up in the same place: a messy, overcrowded hay stack for the sales team to find needles in.  

Strategic form design makes for a better experience for both companies and prospects. Meg’s two-part thesis for creating effective forms is simple: 

1. Make forms easier to fill out

2. Route leads to prioritize sales effort

For Typeform, Meg explains, “We streamlined the questions we asked, we deleted the ones we didn’t need, and we used questions about the user to route qualified leads to sales.” 

By balancing these two priorities, Meg was able to improve both qualification (collecting the info Typeform’s sales team needed to proceed) and conversion (making it easy for prospects to take the next step).

How to create contact forms prospects will actually fill out 

Below, we dive into Meg’s step-by-step approach to updating Typeform’s enterprise contact form to accomplish her two-part strategy. 

1. Cut questions aggressively 

“Only ask for what you actually need,” says Meg. Questions she cut to streamline Typeform’s form include: 

Questions that don’t impact routing: The old form asked for the user’s country. If they put USA, it followed up by asking for their state. But Typeform’s sales team isn’t split up by region, so state didn’t actually matter for the qualification process: SDR call prep would be the same regardless. So, Meg’s team axed the state question. 

Questions that don’t get a response: In the old version, if a customer used what looked like a personal email (like a Gmail or Yahoo address), Typeform followed up by asking for a business email a second time. “Only about 5% of people gave us a legitimate business email the second time we asked,” says Meg. No new useful info? Snip snip. 

Required questions: Don’t force someone to answer an open text field for no reason. If a question isn’t mission-critical for contacting or routing the prospect, leave it as optional. 

Mergable fields: An easy update was asking for First Name and Last Name in a single field. 

Meg also recommends using partial submit functionality to capture data even if users don't complete the entire form. Even incomplete data can offer enough information to move forward.

2. Create a logical flow‍

The order of questions in your form is just as important as the content. 

One of the first things Meg did to improve her form was split tracks between people who wanted to talk to sales and people who wanted to talk to support.

In the old form, the “Do you want to talk to sales or support?” question came in at the halfway point—after users had already filled in a lot of information. Users who selected “support” were then sent to a whole new form to fill out. (Terrible experience.)  

They moved this question up to the top, saving time and sparing users from having to say the same thing twice. 

‍

3. Segment responses  

The most valuable questions allow you to segment responses and move leads down your sales pipeline more quickly. Some useful qualities to identify: 

• Company size
• Geography 
• Email type (personal vs. professional)
• Language
• Legal requirements (e.g., if a company doesn’t accept your privacy policy, filter them out) 

For example, identifying users by location allowed Typeform to pair prospects with SDRs in complementary time zones and with appropriate language skills (like francophone sales reps for France-based prospects). “Those language options dramatically reduced the fear people had of booking a live meeting,” says Meg. 

4. Use the “Thank you” page to accelerate sales 

Meg’s team now routes high-potential prospects to a “Thank you” page with a Calendly link to directly book a demo. 

“If a company meets certain criteria that suggest they’re a fit for our Enterprise plan, we surface a Calendly link right in the form to streamline booking with an SDR,” she explains. “Otherwise, we route them through a qualification step to preserve team bandwidth.”

This means that instead of waiting for an SDR to reach out, high-potential prospects can now book immediately, slashing lead-to-meeting time.   

“Thank you” pages can also be personalized based on location, language, and industry, even linking to additional relevant content. 

The next step 

Better segmentation makes it easier to identify high-value prospects—and to follow up with them. 

By making these simple tweaks to their contact form, Typeform’s lead-to-opportunity rate increased 40%. In the US, 67% of qualified prospects immediately booked a meeting with the Calendly link. 

“One of our biggest challenges was too much time between initial lead and that first moment of sales contact,” explains Meg. “Embedding Calendly in the form means a prospect books immediately, vs. getting an email later when they’ve already forgotten about us.” 

Remember: Your contact form isn’t just a data collection tool. It’s the first conversation you’ll have with a potential customer. 

Make it count by keeping it simple.