How many leads do you think you've lost to bad form data?

Question

Honest question for agents here: when someone submits an inquiry through your site, does anything actually check that the email's valid or that every field got filled in? Or does it just land wherever it lands, and you only find out something went wrong when a lead you never followed up with mentions it weeks later?

I got curious about this and started digging into my own process recently. Turns out it's a bigger gap than I expected. Curious how others here handle it — anyone tracking this, or is it just accepted as a cost of doing business?

Michael Eskenasy · Answer

The email field being valid is almost the least interesting failure mode here.

The bigger question is: does the system know whether the lead successfully made it through every handoff after the form was submitted?

I’d treat a lead form like a transaction boundary, not a contact form.

Submission should create a durable record with a unique ID. Then every downstream step should produce state:

received → validated → normalized → deduped → routed → assigned → acknowledged → contacted

Now you can distinguish very different failures that otherwise all look like “we lost a lead.”

An email can be syntactically valid and still be undeliverable. A phone number can have ten digits and belong to nobody. A perfectly valid lead can arrive twice, get assigned to two agents, or get overwritten by an existing CRM record. The form can succeed while the CRM write fails. The CRM write can succeed while the notification fails. The notification can succeed while nobody actually follows up.

That last one is especially important because delivery is not execution.

I’d also put an SLA clock on the record. If a lead enters at 2:14 and nobody has produced a contact attempt by whatever threshold you define, that should become an exception automatically. Same with failed writes, missing required fields, bounced email, duplicate identity, or a routing destination that disappears.

And I wouldn’t silently discard incomplete submissions. Preserve what you received and mark what’s missing. Half a lead with a working phone number is considerably more valuable than a perfectly validated record that never existed because the form rejected it.

The metric I’d want isn’t just conversion rate.

I’d want:

submitted leadsminus successfully reconciled leads= unexplained loss

If that number is anything other than zero, there should be a record explaining why.

That’s the part I think most systems miss. They validate the input, but they don’t maintain proof of continuity from the moment somebody raises their hand until a human actually responds.

Bad form data is a problem.

Unobservable failure is the expensive problem.

Ken M. · Answer

I'm not an agent, but at my website, when someone omits a field, it's an excuse for me to contact them and have a conversation.