The last screen gets the least attention
Teams spend months on the homepage and inherit the form from whatever the CRM generated. That is backwards: the form is the only page where a visitor has already decided to act, so friction there is the most expensive friction on the site.
Every field costs completions
Each additional field gives someone another reason to stop, and the fields most likely to cause it — phone number, company size, budget — are the ones added for internal convenience rather than for the buyer. Ask what you genuinely need to reply.
Every field you add to qualify a lead removes some of the leads you were qualifying.
Qualify after, not before
Budget and timeline questions are better asked in the reply than on the form. You lose nothing — an unqualified enquiry costs one email — and you gain the enquiries that would have abandoned at the budget dropdown.
Say what happens next
A line stating who replies and how quickly measurably reduces abandonment, because the anxiety at a form is uncertainty about what you are signing up for. It is also the natural place to promise no sales sequence, if that is true.
Design the failure states
Validation that rejects legitimate phone formats, a submit button with no loading state, an error that clears the message someone just typed — each of these silently destroys completed submissions. Test them deliberately; nobody reports the form that ate their enquiry.
And confirm delivery reaches a human
A form that returns a success screen while the notification silently fails is the worst outcome, because the visitor believes they contacted you. Monitor the delivery path itself, not just the form — the same reasoning as showing the exception rather than the aggregate applied to your own lead flow.