Overview

Forms are effective tools in capturing information about your prospects as you attempt to convert them to opportunities down the road. Here’s the thing, though: there are really good forms out there and really bad forms out there. You know, the ones you see and don’t even attempt to fill out because they are so bulky. What good is a form on your website if nobody is filling it out?

But it doesn’t stop there. Not only is it important for you to follow best practices in the design of your forms (requiring only the most necessary information and displaying all the fields up front), but it’s also essential to have the right kind of forms in your arsenal.

Here are three types of Account Engagement forms you should either have on your website or be leveraging within your program templates today.

Form 1: Contact Us Form

Otherwise known as the “handraiser” form, this is a great way for potential customers to get in touch with you immediately. This type of form will usually be on your website’s homepage, but it can also be located on a variety of other pages across your website. Either way, ensuring people can get in contact with you with no barrier is critical to your success as a business.

As I mentioned previously, you may already know about general best practices as it pertains to forms, which is a great thing. But here are some other ideas to consider as you go about building and/or updating your Contact Us forms on your website:

• Add a “Reason for Contacting Us” field to your form. While there are many high quality leads that may come through this form, there is usually an equal amount of individuals trying to get in contact with your support team, looking for a job, or just straight up junk leads. Including this field on your form can help organize and route these leads accordingly using Completion Actions or Automation Rules. No more time wasted by your SDRs following up with folks who shouldn’t have been routed to them in the first place.
• Add a “How did you hear about us?” open text field on your form. Yes, you read that write – open text. B2B buying has evolved, and it’s plausible to assume the way you track attribution should as well. A lot is happening in the “dark social”, as the experts call it, and adding this open text field could open up your business to a treasure trove of valuable data. It may take some time to receive buy-in from the rest of the business, but at least introducing the idea and how you would operationalize it can provide a world of opportunity.
• Add a scheduling tool on the backend of your form when a prospect indicates they are interested in speaking with your sales team. Tools like Chili Piper and Calendly are great for these use cases and can result in more pipeline down the road. Remember, it’s all about creating the best possible experience for your end users. Having this functionality is a great way to do that.

Form 2: Webinar/Event Template Form

Even though B2B buying has evolved, webinars and events have stuck around and for good reason. Unlike other tools like Marketo Engage and HubSpot, Account Engagement doesn’t have the functionality to evaluate which webpage a form was submitted on. Because of that, there isn’t a great way to establish a global form strategy and limit the number of forms used across your instance. Not to worry, though.

By creating a webinar/event template for your online and in-person events, you enable your marketing team to work from a predefined template already configured with the pieces of information you consistently ask for from registrants. Obviously make changes to each form as each event warrants, but this allows your team to push out the promotion in a more efficient manner. Here are some ideas to think through as you go about building your webinar/event template form in Account Engagement:

• Have an honest conversation with yourself and others about which fields are absolutely necessary on these forms. So often I see webinar registration forms with numerous fields and I question how a company is using that information. The goal is to get people in the door and provide information to them about your product, not make the entire experience too “salesy”. Think about grabbing additional information later in the buying cycle using some more advanced form functionalities.
• Leverage Conditional Groups in your form Completion Actions. Oftentimes a single event can be offered at multiple times in multiple regions of the world. Since nobody likes creating five different forms for those five different showings, Conditional Groups can be used to apply specific actions (i.e. adding to a Salesforce campaign) to the appropriate individuals. Already having the Conditional Groups configured in this template can save you and your team some time down the road.

Form 3: Asset Download Template Form

Similar to webinars and events, canonical content isn’t dead and can be effective in educating your prospects. Although there has been a shift in un-gating more and more content for end users, I think it does make sense to gate the high-intent/bottom of funnel content behind a form. Similar to webinar and event forms, and arguably more of a frustration due to the volume of canonical content typically on websites, a global form strategy isn’t able to be leveraged in Account Engagement. Therefore, a template for this kind of use case is a must when building out your Account Engagement instance. Here are some of the practices I would go about following:

• Implement a naming convention for your asset download template forms and any versions you create from that template. There’s nothing worse than accidentally editing the template to be used for all other forms. Additionally, as you go about creating more forms from that template, utilizing a naming convention can help you keep your forms organized and understand what they’re used for when you need to edit or go back and audit in the future.
• Include a “Reason for downloading” open text field on your form. Hear me out. I know it’s best practice to limit the number of fields on your form, but having this information could be invaluable as your sales team follows up with the prospects who filled out the form. This could even be populated into an existing “Message” field in your Salesforce instance that your reps are already reviewing when other forms are submitted.

Conclusion

While there are many different types of forms in addition to the ones I mentioned above, I truly believe these three will be most useful as you continue to build out your Account Engagement instance and marketing strategy as a whole. In MOPs not only is it important to ensure people outside of your company have an extraordinary experience with your marketing content, but it’s equally important to ensure the people inside your company can have that great experience building the content. That’s where having a unique Contact Us form alongside template forms for your common marketing use cases can set your organization apart from others.