LinkedIn lead gen forms or landing pages for long B2B sales cycles?

With a 60-day sales cycle, I'd start with lead gen forms for volume. Prefilled name, email and company get you much higher completion rates than a landing page, but the lead shows up with almost no context, and sales usually calls those leads thin. Landing page leads convert less on the click, but they tend to arrive with more intent because the visitor had to read something first.

So judge the forms by booked calls and pipeline, not form fills. A cheap lead that never answers is just expensive noise. Has anyone run both against the same audience and seen the CRM agree with the platform numbers?

Judging by booked calls is the right call. One thing that helps on top of that: LinkedIn lead gen forms often pass job title and company size, so you can add a qualifying question right in the form instead of leaving sales to sort it out later. Just keep it to two or three questions, or completion rates slide back toward landing page levels.

Sasha, check where the job title and company size come from. Those prefilled fields are pulled from each member's LinkedIn profile, so a lot of them are blank, outdated, or not what someone would pick if they typed it in themselves. Before you build a qualifying question around company size, look at how often it's actually prefilled. If it's a small share, your question ends up doing the work the prefill was supposed to do, and you're back to the completion drop you mentioned.

The bigger lever on a 60-day cycle is getting the platform to optimize for the call, not the fill. If you send booked calls back as offline conversions and match them to the original lead, bidding can learn which profiles actually book. Without that, a cheap form fill still looks like a win to the algorithm, so it keeps finding more of them.

Agreed on the prefill. The blank fields are usually the ones you need most, because people with thin profiles tend to skip company size too. A qualifying question ends up hitting the same people the prefill missed, so you're asking everyone anyway.

On offline conversions, the match key is where it usually breaks. Say the form captures a work email, but the CRM ends up with a personal Gmail after the first call. Match rates drop and the algorithm learns from only a fraction of the bookings. Keep one email field consistent from form to CRM to upload, and check the match rate before you trust any of it.

With a 60-day cycle, the booked call is also too slow for early learning. Sending an earlier stage, like first meeting held, as a secondary conversion gives bidding some signal in week one.

For the secondary event, pick the earliest stage sales would actually call a real opportunity, and only if it usually happens within two weeks. A stage that sits out the full 60 days just brings the lag back.

Agreed on the two-week rule. The secondary event also has to mean the same thing every time, or the signal drifts. If one rep marks "meeting held" after a 10-minute intro and another only after a real discovery call, bidding ends up learning from two different events mixed together. Write the stage definition down, and make sure the CRM only fires the upload when that stage was actually reached, not when someone just edited the deal.