Any inbound marketer knows that forms are an essential element of a good lead capturing strategy.

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Forms gate your premium content offers and allow you to capture essential details about your leads. A well-structured form can provide your marketing and sales teams with the key information to help them close the deal.

Unfortunately, many marketers seem to be unaware that form strategies aren't exactly one-size-fits-all. Countless companies make the mistake of serving the same exact form over and over again, on pieces of content throughout the funnel. This is a critical error that can ruin your lead generation efforts.


Using HubSpot's best practices will set your team up for inbound self employed database lead generation success. Your forms must mirror the detail and value of their associated content offer and their position in the buyer's journey. Creating your forms with content value and buyer stage in mind will promote lead generation and help shape the way your marketing and sales teams engage with these new leads.

To begin creating a form strategy, you must make sure you have a comprehensive understanding of the inbound buyer's journey in conjunction with the sales funnel. These two models work cohesively to help unify the efforts of your marketing and sales teams.

Inbound Buyer's Journey
The stages of the B2B buyer's journey can be broken into three parts: awareness, consideration and decision. Each section of the buyer's journey corresponds with two sections of the sales funnel.

Buyers in the awareness stage are in the top of funnel as visitors or leads. In this stage, the buyer is realizing their problem and starting to research potential solutions. This stage of the buyer's journey is primarily educational and research-based.

Buyers in the consideration stage are considered to be in the middle of the funnel. In this stage, the contact is classified as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). At this point, the buyer begins to evaluate potential solutions to the problem they researched in the awareness stage.

Last is the decision stage, where buyers are considered an opportunity or customer. This stage of the buyer's journey signifies that the user has decided on a solution for their problem, they are ready to purchase and now they are considering a specific brand or provider.