Lead capture forms

A clipboard at a tradeshow gets you forty names in handwriting you cannot read, and you retype them on Sunday night. A hosted lead form replaces the clipboard: the person fills it in on their own phone, and the lead is in your pipeline before they walk away.

Find them on the Leads page under Lead Forms.

Building one

Start from a template, then change anything. The fields come from a fixed palette: name (always on, because every lead needs one), phone, email, address, service wanted, and a free-text message. You can rename any label and decide what is required.

The palette is deliberately fixed rather than a build-your-own-field system. Every field maps one to one onto a column on the lead record, which is what keeps your pipeline searchable and filterable later. A custom "What is your dog's name?" field would land nowhere useful.

Keep the form short. Fewer questions means more people finish.

Making it yours

Pick one of four looks, add a banner photo if you want one, and your logo and brand colors are applied either way. The live preview beside the builder is exactly what the customer sees, so there is no publish-and-check cycle.

Two switches worth knowing:

• Kiosk mode clears the form a few seconds after each submit, so a tablet propped on your booth table is ready for the next person without anyone touching it.
• Text consent adds a checkbox. Turn it on if you plan to text these people. It only appears when you are also collecting a phone number.

Getting it in front of people

Every form has a public link and a QR code you can download as PNG or SVG. Beyond that there are six print-ready PDFs, already branded with your logo and the form's headline:

Download, send to any print shop, done. The truck magnet is the quiet winner: your van sits outside a customer's house for an hour a week in a neighborhood full of pools.

Ripple effects

• A submission becomes a real lead immediately, tagged with the form's name as its source. That is how you find out the expo produced 31 leads and the website produced 57.
• The free-text message becomes a note on the lead, so the pipeline card stays clean while the detail survives.
• Phone numbers are normalized on the way in, so texting works without you reformatting anything.
• Submissions are immutable. Editing or even deleting the lead later never changes the original record, which matters because that record is also your consent proof.
• Consent carries to the customer when you convert the lead, as long as the phone number still matches the one that was submitted. See text consent and compliance.
• Deleting a form that has never been used removes it. A form with submissions is archived instead, because those submission records have to outlive it.

About spam

Forms are public, so they carry a honeypot field, a minimum time-to-submit (bots fill forms faster than humans can read them), and per-IP rate limiting sized so a whole tradeshow on one venue wifi still gets through. There is no CAPTCHA, deliberately: nothing kills a booth conversion like asking a sunburned homeowner to identify traffic lights.

The efficiency trick

Make a separate form per channel rather than one form everywhere. One for the website, one per show, one per partner. The forms are free and the source tag is the only honest answer to "which of these is actually worth doing again next year".

For partner-tagged forms that also track what you owe a referrer, see Business Partners.