Notes for owners · Websites and conversion
What information should an SME collect through its enquiry form?
Five or six fields: name, phone, what they need, where they are, and one question that tells you whether this is a buyer, nothing more.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
Rules for this trade differ by state and professional body, and they change. Check the current position with your own council or adviser before you act on anything here.
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Five or six fields. The name, a mobile number, what they need, where they are, and one question that tells you whether this person can buy. That is the whole list for most small businesses. Every additional field costs you enquiries from people who were genuinely interested but could not be bothered. Almost everything else can be asked in the first two minutes of the call you were going to make anyway.
The trade-off you are actually making
A long form filters. A short form collects. Both are true, and the right choice depends on whether your constraint is enquiry volume or your team's calling capacity.
If you receive twelve enquiries a month and have two people to call them, collect more and filter on the phone. If you receive four hundred from Meta ads and one person to call them, the form has to do some of the work.
The mistake is choosing a long form for the wrong reason. Most nine-field forms exist because each department asked for a field, not because anybody uses the answers. Go through your form and ask who reads each field and what decision changes because of it. Fields that fail that test come off.
The fields that earn their place
| Field | Required | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Yes | You need something to say on the call |
| Mobile number | Yes | The only field that reliably lets you follow up in India |
| What you need | Yes, as a short text box or a dropdown of what you sell | Routes the enquiry and tells the salesperson what to prepare |
| Locality, city or pin code | Yes for anything local or delivered | Decides whether you can serve them at all |
| One qualifying question | Yes, and it differs by business | Tells you whether this is a buyer or a browser |
| Message or details | Optional | Serious buyers write more than you expect, and it is your best signal |
| Email address | Optional | Needed for quotations, but do not block the form on it |
| Company name | Only for B2B | Lets you check who you are talking to before calling |
| File upload | For technical businesses | A drawing or a plan turns an enquiry into a quotation |
| How did you hear about us | No | Unreliable, and your analytics answers it better |
The one qualifying question, by business
This is the field worth thinking about hardest, because it does most of the work.
A manufacturer or job work business should ask for the quantity or the drawing. Somebody who cannot state a quantity is not yet buying.
A real estate developer should ask the configuration and whether the buyer is looking for possession within a year, which separates the investor and the browser from the family that has to move.
An architect or interior contractor should ask whether the site or flat has been purchased, and the built-up area. A person without a site is nine months away from a fee.
A coaching institute should ask the student's current class, which decides whether this is a conversation for now or for next year.
A clinic should ask which treatment and which locality, so the front desk can offer a slot rather than take a message.
A services firm on contract work should ask the start date or the renewal month, because almost all of the business is decided in those weeks.
Things that quietly cost you enquiries
Nine fields on a phone screen, three of them dropdowns that are hard to tap. A required email field for a buyer who only uses WhatsApp. A visible captcha. A "Submit" button, which sounds like paperwork rather than a conversation, when "Send my enquiry" or "Request a quotation" describes what happens. No confirmation after submitting, so the buyer is unsure whether it went through and fills it again or leaves. A form on the Contact page only, so anybody reading a service page has to go looking. And the worst one, a form that emails an address nobody watches.
Also consider what happens next. An automatic acknowledgement naming the person who will call and the time they will call holds attention for the hour it takes to get to them. A blank "Thank you for your submission" does not.
A furniture manufacturer with an eleven-field form
For example, imagine a modular furniture manufacturer in Bengaluru selling to offices and to builders, with a website form asking for name, company, designation, email, phone, city, budget, project size, timeline, how they heard about the company, and a message. The details and figures below are illustrative. Eleven fields.
Illustrative arithmetic on 1,000 visitors to the enquiry page: an eleven-field form might produce 12 enquiries, and a five-field form 30. Of the 30, perhaps 18 are worth a call. That is already more than the 12 the long form produced in total, so the sales team ends up having 18 conversations instead of 12. Those numbers are an example of the trade-off, not a measured result. What changes in practice is that the qualifying now happens on the phone. A salesperson can hear hesitation and ask a follow-up, where a form only sees a buyer guessing at a budget band and giving up.
The same company's technical enquiries need one extra thing: a file upload, because a builder sending a floor plan at midnight is the best enquiry of that week.
Where the fields should go afterwards
Whatever you collect has to land in one place with the source and a timestamp, and it has to be the same place as your WhatsApp and phone enquiries. A form that emails two people and nothing else means nobody can answer the question of how many enquiries arrived last month, which is the question that decides your marketing budget.
Map each form field to a field in your CRM or your sheet before you launch the form. If a field has nowhere to go, it should not be on the form.
What to do next
Open your own form on a phone and fill it in as a customer would, then see where the enquiry lands and how long it takes for somebody to call. Then remove every field nobody uses. Most businesses can cut a form in half in twenty minutes.
