Do you want to collect prospect info? If so, you need to do it right.

Content marketing is growing by leaps and bounds, with good reason.  Prospects are looking for information and not interruption while engaged in your B2B lead generation programs.  For more information, go visit the experts over at Junta42.

But if you are a marketing starting to publish content, you’re undoubtedly thinking about capturing prospect information.  After all, you cannot start lead nurturing without prospect information.  However, you must be careful.  Here’s an example of what not to do in your lead generation programs.  This is an actual registration form for a white paper from Oracle Corporation.  Shame on you, Oracle.

Please note that I once started to complete this form (and there’s even more here than in this image) but I abandoned it halfway through.  Very few people will fill out a form like this today.

To paint a picture, let’s say you are traveling and at dinner you meet a very attractive person of the opposite sex.  Regardless of your intentions, you’ll like to talk to this person.  But she does not know you.  How do you start a relationship?  If you ask her dozens of prying questions, you’ll be labeled a jerk.  That’s exactly the mistake in this form.  Oracle looks like jerks.

So what is a marketer to do?  I recommend you capture the bare minimum and let the “progressive profiling” in marketing automation systems build the rest over time. In each subsequent visit, we present another field or two - to gently add to the prospect record.

I suggest you collect just three fields the first time a prospect engages with your lead generation programs:

1. First name
2. Last name
3. Email address

That’s all you need to start building a relationship.  Good marketing automation like Marketo, HubSpot, or Eloqua all support progressive profiling.  What is Progressive Profiling?  Let’s use the definition from the experts over at MarketBright:

“In a nutshell, Progressive Profiling allows you to set up display rules for surveying and generating registrations based on the presence or absence of particular prospect details. It automatically changes the questions on forms as a customer answers them. For example, if your prospect visited your Web site last week and filled in a form to get access to a white paper, providing only their name and company to do so, the next time they visit they would be asked for a job title or area of industry instead. Each new interaction with your Web site allows you to glean more information from the prospect and build their profile, without bombarding them with onerous account registrations.”

Don’t drive away your prospects.  Gently gather information and rely on progressive profiling to capture the rest.

We also invite you to check out our blog on B2B sales, the B2B Sales Lounge.

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York. Follow Jeff on Twitter or download the free white paper on lead generation.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 150 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers using the form below.