Your B2B lead form may be costing you your best leads. Busy engineers visit your site to solve a problem, not to fill out a survey.

Here’s how to fix it:

1. Keep fields to an absolute minimum: every extra field adds friction, your goal is to start a conversation
2. Use a single-column form layout: straight down is the fastest path, multi-column forms make people zig-zag
3. Put labels above the field (don’t rely on disappearing placeholders): if the label vanishes when they start typing, they forget what the field was
4. Make it accessible and easy to operate: use autocomplete, readable text, and big tap targets: manufacturing users are often older and in distracting environments
5. Make validation clear and tie errors to the field that needs attention: tell them exactly what to fix and why
6. Prevent spam with Cloudflare Turnstile or reCAPTCHA v3: they score traffic without puzzles or “find all the traffic lights”
7. Capture intent on the form and enrich the rest automatically: name + email + reason for inquiry, then use tools like Clay or Apollo to enrich company details
8. Give a clear next step after submission (on-page and via transactional email): replace the form with a confirmation and send a transactional email (I use Postmark)
9. Avoid third-party form embeds: they often kill page performance so I build the form natively and send data to the CRM via API
10. Test forms manually, synthetically, and regularly: nothing is worse than discovering the form was broken and losing revenue

If your form feels like work, your prospect will not finish it. Make it effortless to start the conversation. Your sales team will take it from there.