It is 6.40am, he is holding a glove, and your form wants his job title

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17 August 2026 · Aston Gapes · about 5 minutes
Part of Get the enquiry

It is twenty to seven in the morning. A maintenance manager is standing next to a forklift that will not start, in a yard, in the cold, holding a phone in one hand because the other one is holding a glove.

He has found you. That is the hard part done and it cost you money to arrange. He taps Enquire.

First name. Last name. Company. Position. Email. Phone. Mobile. Suburb. Postcode. Which product are you interested in, from a dropdown of nine. How did you hear about us.

He rings your competitor.

Nobody put those fields there for a stupid reason

This is the part worth being fair about, because the instinct is to assume somebody was careless and nobody was.

Sales wanted the company name so they could look it up before calling back. Dispatch wanted the postcode because half the quotes were for places they do not deliver to. Somebody wanted the phone number because email takes two days and the phone takes two minutes. Marketing wanted how did you hear about us because nobody could tell them what was working.

Every one of those is a sensible request from a person doing their job properly. And in about six years, nobody has ever added them up.

The question is not whether a field is useful

Everything is useful. Of course you would rather know the postcode. The question is different and much harder:

Is the answer to this field worth the enquiries it costs me?

Because each one costs some. Not everybody — most people who have decided to enquire will push through a bad form. But some fraction stops, and that fraction is invisible, because a person who abandons a form does not appear anywhere in your business. There is no report of the enquiries you did not get. It is the quietest possible loss.

Our rule of thumb is that anything over about five fields is worth arguing about. Not because five is magic, but because it is roughly where a form stops looking like a way to get in touch and starts looking like an application.

Most of it can be asked in the reply

Here is the reframe that usually settles the argument internally. You are not choosing between knowing the postcode and not knowing it. You are choosing between asking now and asking in the first reply, when somebody is already talking to you and answering costs them nothing.

Name, email, and enough of a sentence to know what they want. That is an enquiry. Everything else is a conversation, and you are good at conversations — it is why you have a sales team rather than a shopping cart.

Two other things in the same five minutes

Try it on your own phone. Not a desktop window made narrow. An actual phone, standing up, in a hurry. It is remarkable how often something is wrong that nobody in the office has ever seen, because everybody in the office is sitting at a large monitor.

Then send yourself one and follow it. If your enquiry arrives as an email in one person's inbox, you have a different problem, and we wrote about that one separately.

The maintenance manager

He was not a difficult customer. He was not lazy, and he had not decided against you. He was standing in a yard at twenty to seven with a broken machine and about ninety seconds of patience, which under the circumstances is quite generous.

He was the easiest sale you will get all month, and the form asked him what his position was.