LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: prefilled fields for volume or custom questions for quality?

Has anyone actually measured what LinkedIn's prefilled Lead Gen Form fields do to lead quality on a B2B account? The form pulls name, company and job title straight from the profile, so friction drops and volume goes up. My worry is that plenty of people fill it in with two taps and no real thought, and sales ends up with a list full of students, freelancers and people with no budget. I'd rather take fewer leads with one short custom question, like "What's your current team size?", even if CPL looks worse on the dashboard. It does depend on deal size, though. If your average contract is small, volume might still win. If anyone has run both versions and compared pipeline rather than just form submissions, I'd like to hear how it played out.

It doesn't have to be either/or. A multiple-choice question with team-size buckets keeps most of the two-tap speed, and it still filters out students and people with no budget, since they tend to pick the smallest bucket or skip the question.

What matters most is how fast sales can score each lead against real outcomes. If the list only gets reviewed weeks later, you're really choosing on CPL. If you can compare SQL rate between the two versions within a few weeks, the test answers itself.

My rule of thumb: the qualifying question pays for itself when a rep's time per lead is the real cost. If someone spends ten minutes on every lead, cutting volume by a third to drop most of the junk is a good trade, even if CPL looks worse. If leads only get an automated email, or a call from whichever reps score well, prefilled fields are probably fine, and you judge both versions on SQL rate. Sales hours are what decide it, not the form.

Marco's right that sales hours decide it. I'd go with multiple choice over free text for the qualifying question, because you can map each answer to a lead score in the CRM before anyone looks at it. That way the qualifying step runs itself and reps only see leads that cleared the bar. Free text mostly ends up unread in a column, so you pay the friction cost without getting the sorting benefit.

Mapping answers to a score is the right move, but the buckets are where it usually goes wrong. People pick the flattering option, so a solo freelancer ticks "51 to 200" and the score treats them as a strong lead. The cut-off line also tends to get drawn by gut feel.

A better way is to pull the team sizes from your last 20 or so closed-won deals and set the qualifying bucket at the smallest size that actually signed. Then recheck it after a quarter, because the question only sorts well if it still matches who's buying.

Agreed on the flattering-answer problem. Whether 20 closed deals is enough depends on your sales cycle, though. With long cycles you might only have a handful of wins, and then your smallest signed size is really just one or two companies, which isn't much to build on.

A short win list doesn't make the question unanswerable, it just means you're measuring the wrong outcome. Opportunities that got to a real meeting or a qualified stage usually outnumber closed-won deals by a good margin, and they show which team sizes sales can actually work with. I'd also steer clear of using the smallest signed size as your cutoff, since one odd company can set that number. Look at where most of your qualified pipeline sits instead.

Agreed on not using the smallest signed size, one odd company can really set that number on its own. I'd also split qualified pipeline by lead source before picking a cutoff. Prefilled-field leads and question-gated leads usually come from different audience slices, so a team-size band that dominates your pipeline overall might be mostly one version of the form. If you pool them, the cutoff gets blurry and you end up tuning the question to whichever form brought more volume.

I'd keep the two form versions in separate campaigns or ad sets rather than just tagging them in a column. LinkedIn attaches the form to each ad, so the source stays clean from the start. Once the versions get mixed in the CRM, they're hard to untangle later.

For the cutoff itself, compare the self-reported team size against the size range on the company's LinkedIn page. Say a prospect picks "51 to 200" but the page says 11 to 50. That's the flattering-answer problem Iris described, and it's easy to spot in bulk. A high mismatch rate in the question-gated version means the bucket is sorting less than you think. A low rate means you can trust the answers more. It won't catch everyone, since a company page can be out of date, but it gives you a rough read on how far to trust the question before you tune the cutoff around it.

Leads with no company page at all might be a stronger junk signal than size mismatches, since solo freelancers often don't have one. They're probably easier to filter too. Are you running the page check as leads come in, or in a batch later?