We’ve been equally as guilty as other agencies in designing lead generation forms with an American bias. This is not entirely awful if your target customer/prospect resides in the US; but it is annoying for the non-American end user to have to shoehorn their information into an Americanized format. To the defense of the agencies, many of these fields are dictated by the client to match with their existing CRM systems. In my experience these forms get over-engineered by attempting to adapt the “address information” to fit a non-existent international standard.

I’ve seen complex lead generation forms which contextually alter the address fields to comply with each country’s standards. This is fantastic for the user but it doesn’t help to standardize lead information in the client’s CRM system, plus it becomes unnecessarily complex to maintain from a code/versioning perspective. If there was one field in particular that gunks up lead generation, it’s STATE.

I believe it can be eliminated and the complexity of lead generation forms could be reduced.

Take the typical lead form, such as this one:

This form is entirely too long. The number of required fields could turn-away potential conversions. In this form there is one area that is interesting when you look closely. STATE is based on the COUNTRY selection. Conceptually this interesting, but in this particular instance STATE only becomes REQUIRED if the user selected “United States” otherwise the field is optional.

Why not eliminate the STATE field altogether? I’d bet for most B2B type clients the lead gen forms feed into a sales database and the address information never is used for mailing purposes. So why ask for it?. EMAIL is certainly valuable, as is COUNTRY, NAME, POSTAL CODE and COMPANY. Otherwise I’d argue that the rest of the information is optional or could obtained when someone contacts the lead.

Based on that criteria, let’s shorten this form. We can eliminate STATE because ADDRESS and POSTAL CODE should get us enough information to auto-determine STATE. At a minimum POSTAL CODE is enough to geocode the lead unless they are from Ireland or Panama.

This layout may convert more users, but I’d argue that the form still looks intimidating regardless of the optional fields. If the goal is to convert, then we still need to simplify.

Here’s another approach.

For the bulk of situations this gets the information a sales person needs to follow-up on a lead, and increases the likelihood that the user will convert to a new customer.