This is the first I’ve ever seen anything like this. Makes perfect sense …
Imagine a webform for your website that predictively fills itself, much like a Google search does nowadays. Your visitor types a couple letters, and their contact info and company information can automatically fill in.
We know that webforms are the biggest barrier to getting leads, making it super-easy to fill out is cool. Although some may find it creepy for their company name to show up after typing just two letters in the company field, like I was.
This is something casually introduced in a blog post by Demandbase called Six Steps for Simplifying your Web Forms.
And even cooler, is that the idea that once a user selects the company, the form can fill in other information into ‘hidden’ form fields, so you get even more detail than the visitor is entering.
Here, you can try it by following the link in this quote:
Check out how company autocomplete works by filling out this form. We’ll return the favor by sending you a more expansive eBook on this topic: Avoid the Lead Gen Tradeoff. You’ll also gain some additional insight into WHY we ask for so much information on our forms, and how to address these information requirements with your sales team.
Definitely an emerging and extremely beneficial concept here. Marketo uses a similar product from Reachforce and it helps append tons of firmographic information that we use for our segmentation, lead scoring, and lead assignments.
– Carol Tang at Marketo
Webform really helps a lot in making website form filling much easier. Many potential clients avoid filling lengthy forms for contacting us and in this way we lose lots of business but this kind of webform will help a lot in dragging leads to our business.