For a B2B company, there is actually very little more important than the web form. That undoubtedly sounds like a somewhat exaggerated statement, but it is indeed true. Without web forms, there are no leads and thus much less business. Without web forms, you can shut down the marketing department, and the sales team will be twiddling their thumbs. It is high time to give your web forms the time, love, and attention they deserve. And to turn them into web forms on steroids with which you turn your entire business operations upside down in a positive way.
The paradox of the web form
Web forms are the ultimate paradox. The marketer's interests are directly opposed to those of the (potential) customer who fills it out. The marketer wants to know as much as possible. Their ideal form has 33 fields and would preferably tell someone's life story. The person filling it out, of course, sees it completely differently. They only want to fill in the bare necessities. Name, email address, and company name. That's all you get.
The big data issue
The winner is clear. As a marketer, if you have to choose between ten completed forms with little data or one with a lot of data, you always choose the first option. However, this shifts the problem to the marketer responsible for lead processing.
With marketing automation , it's a breeze to process incoming leads fully automatically and transport them to the right 'station', provided you have enough information. In the case of a filled-out quote or demo request, there's no big issue—you simply drop it directly to the sales department. The real challenge lies with all other leads, such as free trial requests, whitepaper downloads, or webinar registrations.
The only thing the marketer can do in this case is validate them based on engagement. Therefore, leads often receive a barrage of emails initially. If they show enough opens and clicks, they are then "qualified" and passed on to sales.
That sounds nice in theory, but in practice, sales often dislike this approach. Sales rarely considers the engagement of a lead. Their qualification of a good lead is quite different: a good SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a company, not just a person, that has a need for their product or service, has sufficient budget available, and intends to make a purchase within a reasonable timeframe. Engagement measures primarily reflect interest or need.
The solution
To solve this, as a marketer, you ideally need to have all the necessary insights about the company before passing the lead on. In an ideal scenario, you would know the approximate annual revenue, number of employees, industry sector, and whether the lead's company is already an existing customer or not. Once you have this information, you can build the perfect flow as a marketer to direct leads directly to the right salesperson or department and provide them with all the information they need for an initial assessment.
While it may sound like a nice but somewhat unrealistic dream, it's actually quite feasible. Through automatic data enrichment on your web form, it's straightforward to include all this data (and much more) directly into your marketing system and/or CRM.
At Altares Dun & Bradstreet, we designed a special API link for that purpose. In the image below, you can see how that works.
When you type in your company name, a dropdown menu appears where you can select your company. All these names come from a global database. Once you've chosen one and submit the form, all the data about this company is automatically pulled from the database and via 'hidden fields’ sent to your marketing system.
There, it looks something like this:
And now that you have this data, as a marketer, you can really go to town with marketing automation. If you're in industry A, well then we welcome you to the corresponding nurture flow that corresponds with that industry. If you have a revenue of over 100 million, sales would like to do a direct check themselves. If you're an existing customer, the account manager would like to know that someone has downloaded a new whitepaper.
The possibilities are endless. Moreover, in a CRM, we can further enrich the data with information such as the corporate family structure, credit data, and compliance data. This allows you to significantly streamline internal business processes and lay the foundation for a fully integrated marketing and sales department.
Want to know more? Check out our special CRM-page
