Inquiry form questions that filter out bad-fit leads early

Ask about the goal, a budget range, the timeline, the scope, who decides, how they heard of you and their preferred way to be reached. Those seven questions, plus name and email, screen out most bad-fit leads before you spend an hour on a call. Keep the form short, make the budget a range, and read the answers against a fit rule you wrote in advance.

What a bad-fit lead actually is

A bad-fit lead is not a bad person. It is someone whose needs, budget or timing do not match what you sell. The usual shapes: a budget a third of your minimum, a deadline next week for work that takes a month, a request outside your service, a person gathering free ideas, a buyer who cannot approve the spend.

Each one costs you a call, a follow-up and a proposal. Few of those hours turn into revenue. A form that asks the right questions moves that screening from your calendar to the client's first two minutes.

HoneyBook's guide to qualifying leads recommends exactly this: attach a contact form that asks about the prospect's goals, price range and ideal timeline, and use it to filter out low-intent leads before starting conversations. It also advises raising cost early, since a budget mismatch makes the other details moot. Ignition's lead qualification guide suggests defining your ideal client first (industries, budget ranges, type of engagement) and then writing questions that reveal budget, timeframe, values and goals. Neither source offers hard numbers on how much this saves, so treat them as practice, not proof. The logic is easy to test in your own inbox.

Eight questions that do the screening

1. What are you trying to achieve? An open text box. It shows how clearly the person thinks about the problem. A vague "I need a website" and a specific "we sell to dentists and want more bookings from search" are different projects.

2. What type of service do you need? A dropdown of your real services plus "not sure". It routes the lead and catches requests outside your offer. If you do brand design and someone picks "tax filing", you know in seconds.

3. What budget have you set aside? Use ranges, not a blank number box. Pick bands that match your pricing, for example under 1,000, 1,000 to 3,000, 3,000 to 8,000, over 8,000, and "not decided yet". Make the bottom band honest: if you start at 2,000, the first band should say so. Budget is the strongest filter you have. People who skip it often cannot afford you.

4. When do you need this? A short list: within 2 weeks, within a month, in 1 to 3 months, later or flexible. It shows both urgency and whether your capacity fits.

5. How big is the job? Pages, sessions, guests, hours, units. The unit depends on your trade. A photographer asks for the number of hours and guests. A consultant asks for the number of people involved. Scope numbers feed the price you quote.

6. Who makes the final decision? "Just me", "me and a partner", "a team or board". A lead who needs a committee needs a longer sales cycle. You can still take them, but you will plan differently.

7. How did you hear about us? It tells you which channel works. It also helps you spot referrals, which close more often.

8. How should we reach you? Email, phone or WhatsApp, and a time zone or best time. It removes the first round of back and forth.

Put name and email first, and make everything else clearly required or optional. Label one or two fields as optional extras, such as a link to a brief or inspiration. Optional attachments tell you who does their homework.

How many fields is too many

Short forms get finished. Long ones do not. But the answer is not one field.

The research is mixed and mostly from vendors, so use it with care. A roundup of form statistics from Crazy Egg cites a 2022 study from Factors.ai, finding that demo-booking forms with 4 to 6 fields completed best at 51%, against 41% for 1 to 3 fields and 31% for 7 or more. It also cites Typeform data from 2025 finding that lead forms with 10 questions averaged about 28% lower completion than forms with 3. Those are marketing forms, not service inquiries, and the exact numbers come from different companies with different audiences. The shape of the finding is what is useful: too few fields lets everyone through, and too many scares off the people you want.

For a service business, 6 to 9 fields is a reasonable range, because each extra question saves you a call. Test it. If completion drops sharply when you add a question, move it to a follow-up questionnaire you send after the first reply.

What to leave off the form

Ask only what you need to decide whether to reply. Data protection rules back this up. The UK regulator describes data minimisation as collecting personal data that is adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary for your purpose, and warns against collecting data on the off-chance it might be useful later. The EU's GDPR Article 5 sets the same principle: data must be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary, and collected for specified purposes.

In practice, leave off:

• home address, date of birth and ID numbers, which you do not need to quote;
• anything about health, religion or family unless the service truly requires it, and then only with a clear reason on the form;
• a forced phone number when email will do;
• "company size" and "annual revenue" for a one-off job where they change nothing.

Add a line under the submit button saying what you will use the answers for and how long you keep them, and link to your privacy notice.

Read the answers with a rule you wrote in advance

A form is only a filter if you decide what a pass looks like. Write it down before the first lead arrives. A simple one:

• Good fit: budget in your range, timeline you can meet, service you sell. Reply the same day with a booking link.
• Maybe: a budget band just below your minimum, a vague goal, or a timeline that needs a rush. Reply with a question or a short package option.
• Not a fit now: budget far below your range, a service you do not offer, or an impossible deadline. Send a kind decline, a referral if you have one, and maybe a lower-cost option.
• Spam: discard.

A bad-fit lead is not always a dead lead. Someone who says "not decided yet" on budget may become a good client after a short chat. Someone who needs it in a week might hire you later. Put them in a "later" lane and check back in a month.

Reply fast to good fits. Speed wins more work than a perfect proposal. If a good-fit lead needs more detail before you can quote, a client intake questionnaire is the next step after the form.

Be careful with automatic declines. Never base one on a protected characteristic, and keep your rule about the work, not the person.

Make the form part of the process

A form that only emails you is a to-do list. A form that creates a lead, sends an immediate reply and sorts the lead for you is a system.

The immediate reply matters: it tells the person you received the inquiry, sets expectations about when you will respond, and can include your price range or packages, so people who cannot afford you opt out on their own. That is a quiet, polite filter.

How Delivvo turns an inquiry form into a screening step

Delivvo's inquiry forms are built to do this screening for you, then hand the result to the rest of your workflow.

You build the form with the questions above, with your services, budget bands and timeline options. Embed it on your site or share it as a link. When someone submits, the inquiry lands on your lead board as a new card with every answer attached, so nothing waits in an inbox and nothing is retyped. If your team is larger, a new inquiry can be given to a person or a team box, and the person gets a notice.

The lead is then sorted from the answers. In lead settings you can set a minimum budget and a booking window, and Delivvo scores the lead with the reasons visible on the lead page, so you can see why it ranked where it did. Spam is caught and set aside, and your automations never run on it.

The client gets an automatic reply with your price list and a booking link if you want to include them. A good-fit lead can book a call in the same minute. A lead that needs more detail can be sent a questionnaire before you write the quote.

When you decide to go ahead, the same record turns into a quote, contract, deposit invoice and project, so the answers from the form carry all the way through. Clients pay you directly through your own gateway and Delivvo takes 0%.

See the inquiry forms page and the lead board page.

Next, look at the lead board or how the CRM fits around it.

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