If marketers were superheroes, cookies would be their loyal sidekicks. More specifically, third-party cookies, which marketers have relied on since the 1990s. However, this marketer ally has been losing its power as privacy and data security concerns have arisen. 

Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers have already blocked third-party cookies by default. Google initially announced the phase-out of cookies by the end of 2024, but the company changed its mind. Instead, Chrome users can manage what cookies they allow. We know that this means marketers will have to start collecting zero-party data themselves — personal data that customers willingly share with brands. 

And we know all this leads to one conclusion: there’s too much variability, which can affect the quality of leads. One approach? Progressive profiling — collecting data gradually throughout a user journey. 

In this post, we’ll explore how multi-step forms can help B2B marketers capture high-intent leads and build detailed customer profiles, minimizing user overwhelm. 

The Challenges of Efficient Lead Generation

As third-party cookies lose their grip, the ripple effects are felt across the entire lead-generation process. When users decline cookies or limit them through stricter browser settings, marketers lose access to valuable behavioral data. This means fewer insights into how prospects interact with content, what pages they visit, etc.

Without this information, it becomes much harder to personalize outreach, segment audiences effectively, or even identify high-intent leads. The result? Marketers end up casting a wider net, hoping to catch the right prospects, but often pulling in poorly qualified leads.

The misalignment between marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads is probably costing your business big. When marketing passes leads that aren’t ready to buy, it wastes everyone’s time. Sales teams chase leads that aren’t ready to convert, while marketing teams wonder why their efforts aren’t translating into closed deals. This disconnect doesn’t just slow down the pipeline; it strains the relationship between sales and marketing, creating friction where there should be alignment.

Data quality is another silent saboteur. Even if you’ve captured leads, inaccurate or incomplete information can render them useless. Think of outdated contact details, misspelled names, or missing company info. These small data gaps lead to big inefficiencies—wasted emails, failed follow-ups, and missed opportunities. 

And then there’s the challenge of understanding the buyer’s journey. In B2B, this journey is rarely linear. Multiple stakeholders, long decision cycles, and shifting priorities make it hard to map out where a lead stands. Lead scoring becomes a guessing game without a clear understanding of this journey, and nurturing efforts risk missing the mark entirely.

Instead of relying on guesswork, marketers can turn to progressive profiling using multi-step forms to collect detailed information and build richer, more accurate customer profiles. This ensures that the leads passed to sales are genuinely ready to engage and fosters a more efficient handoff between marketing and sales teams. As a result, there’s less wasted effort, more meaningful conversations, and, ultimately, stronger revenue growth.

Progressive Profiling: The Solution for Zero-Party Data Collection

Progressive profiling is a strategic marketing technique used to gradually collect detailed information about leads over time rather than asking for all data upfront. This method enhances user experience by minimizing the initial data burden, thereby increasing the likelihood of form completion and engagement.

For example, you can ask for basic information during the first interaction and progressively request more specific details in subsequent interactions as the user engages more with the content or services offered.

Messaging that Resonates with Prospects

By gathering data in stages, marketers can personalize content and messaging to match a lead’s needs and interests. This targeted approach makes prospects feel understood, increasing their likelihood of engaging with future content or offers. In B2B marketing, personalization isn’t just a nice-to-have, now it’s a must-have. This is a landscape where purchasing decisions are often complex and involve multiple stakeholders.

When a company is shopping for software, for example, they’re not just looking for features, they’re looking for solutions that address specific business challenges. Personalized messaging that speaks directly to these pain points shows that you understand their needs, making your product more relevant and trustworthy. 

Progressive profiling provides the insights needed to create these personalized experiences, building trust with prospects and ultimately driving stronger, more meaningful customer relationships.

Better Quality Leads That Actually Convert

This approach also ensures that the leads moving through the pipeline are with high intent. Since information is collected based on actual engagement, marketers can better assess a prospect’s intent and fit for the product or service. 

Leads that provide more detailed information over time are typically more invested, making them more likely to convert. Sales teams, in turn, receive leads that have shown clear interest and meet key qualification criteria, improving conversion rates and reducing time spent on unqualified prospects.

Simplified Processes That Close Deals Faster

Additionally, progressive profiling streamlines workflows between marketing and sales. With a clearer picture of each lead’s interests and stage in the buyer’s journey, sales teams can prioritize outreach more effectively. 

This reduces time spent on cold leads and shortens the overall sales cycle. Marketing teams also benefit from cleaner, more organized data, enabling better segmentation and campaign performance over time.

Multi-Step Forms: The Key to Progressive Profiling 

Multi-step forms are effective tools for B2B marketers as they’re perfectly suited for data collection throughout the customer journey. Asking ten questions on one page is a surefire way to get lower conversions and abandoned forms. As the name suggests, this form is designed to collect information in a simple, step-by-step process. With fewer fields per step, prospects are more likely to complete the form, reducing abandonment rates. 

You’re giving users micro-commitments, bite-sized actions that don’t feel complex. It’s the same behavioral principle behind how Netflix automatically plays the next episode. With just one form shown at the right moment, you can gather all the information you need to see if the prospect fits your ideal customer profile.

Not only does this approach reduce form abandonment, but gradual data collection also improves data accuracy. Forms split into multiple steps see a 14% improvement in accuracy since people are less likely to rush or input false details. And accurate data is the foundation for precision targeting and personalization.

Multi-step forms can help score leads, assigning points for specific answers or behaviors, allowing you to prioritize high-potential leads. By using the data from multi-step forms you can see exactly who’s worth an email (and who’s not). A generic approach to follow-ups is so last decade. Smart segmentation is the new must, and multi-step forms make it simple. 

Data Collection with Multi-Step Forms

Let’s understand how a multi-step form works on an example. Let’s say we have a lead generation form that invites website visitors to join a webinar. The first step can focus on collecting simple details to encourage sign-ups without creating barriers. 

  1. Name and Email Address: Essential for confirming registration and sending reminders.
  2. Company Name: Helps identify if the registrant is from a company that fits your ICP.
  3. Job Title: Provides a quick snapshot of the attendee’s role and influence in the decision-making process.

Once the prospect is engaged with the basic step, you can gather deeper product preferences and behavioral insights to qualify the lead for post-webinar follow-up.

  1. Industry (Dropdown): Filters attendees by relevance to your target sectors.
  2. Company Size or Employee Count: Ensures the business fits within your target range, whether SMB, mid-market, or enterprise.
  3. Role in Decision-Making: Clarifies if the attendee is a decision-maker, influencer, or end-user, helping tailor your post-webinar outreach.

Finally, refine insights to personalize the webinar experience or future communications.

  1. What do you hope to learn from this webinar? (Open text or multiple-choice): Helps personalize webinar content or future follow-ups based on their interests.
  2. Are you currently evaluating solutions like ours? (Yes/No): Identifies high-intent leads ready for more immediate outreach.
  3. Consent for Follow-Up: Include a simple checkbox for consent to receive marketing communications or further resources.

Multi-step forms can also come with conditional logic to personalize the questions based on prior answers, improving both the user experience and the data quality. For example: 

  • If a lead selects “C-level executive” as their job title, the next question might ask about strategic goals or budget authority.
  • If the lead indicates they are currently evaluating solutions, you might add a follow-up asking about their decision timeline.
  • If the attendee’s company size is large (e.g., 500+ employees), the form might prompt questions about existing tools or systems they use.

Touchpoints to Use Multi-Step Forms for Lead Generation

Multi-step forms are go-to tools for lead generation, but they work even better when paired with smart and behavior triggers (Google’s data layer can be a great example here). Creating a form is just the first step. You need to present it to the prospect at the right moment to make the form feel relevant and increase the likelihood of conversion.  

Here are several ways to use multi-step forms more effectively for lead generation.

1. Product Demo Requests

When a user requests a product demo, it’s a clear signal of high intent. A multi-step form can start with basic contact information and progressively ask qualifying questions and specific pain points to address during the demo.

You can proactively collect these requests when website visitors show interest. Track interactions across your site such as visits to pricing or feature pages to use these events from the data layer in your display rules. 

3. Webinar Registrations and Attendance

Webinars are key lead-nurturing tools in B2B. Multi-step forms can sіmplify registration while collecting valuable data. After the webinar, you can use additional forms to gather feedback and follow-up engagement.

4. On-Site Search Queries

On-site search behavior is a goldmine for understanding user intent. For example, if a user searches on a case studies page for high-intent keywords like “enterprise,” or specific industry you can trigger a multi-step form offering a personalized consultation or free estimation.

Push search queries into the data layer and use them to trigger forms dynamically. For example, if a user searches for “enterprise solutions,” a form personalized to enterprise clients can be displayed, asking specific qualifying questions.

5. Video Engagement (e.g., Product Demos)

If a user watches a significant portion of a product video, it indicates interest. After the video plays, trigger a multi-step form offering a free consultation, trial, or in-depth research conducted by your company.

Track video engagement using data layer events like videoPlay, videoProgress, and videoComplete. For example, if a user watches 75% of a product demo video, a form can be triggered offering a personalized demo or pricing information.

6. Interactive Lead Magnets (Calculators, Price Estimators, etc.)

Tools like ROI calculators, pricing estimators, or product configurators attract users with specific needs. After interacting with these tools, a multi-step form can capture details like company size, budget, and specific product interests.

7. Newsletter Sign-Ups

Newsletter sign-ups may seem like a low-intent action, but they provide a valuable opportunity for gradual profiling and nurturing leads. First of all, with the multi-step form you can already gather some qualifying information and segment the prospect. 

Create funnels for each segment and nurture these leads with personalized follow-ups. Over time, you can use forms to collect more details and adjust your outreach to push leads down the funnel.

Adding a Touch of Fun to Lead Forms

Yes, your visitors might be professionals, but they’re also people who get bored just like everyone else. That’s the point of gamification, it turns filling out a form into a mini-challenge with a reward, one that keeps people engaged and motivated to reach the end.

1. Interactive Quizzes

Why it matters for your sales funnel: you’re not just asking questions, you’re guiding prospects through a process that pinpoints their needs, while simultaneously educating them on your solutions. Each question gets deeper into user pain points, giving you contextual insights for more targeted follow-up. And because people like finding out where they stand on a spectrum (“10 out of 10 readiness, why aren’t you scaling yet?”), completion rates go higher compared to the usual name-email-phone number routine.

2. Progress Bars and Visual Indicators

Progress indicators are essential as they create a sense of achievement and reduce the perceived effort. Overall, multi-step forms tap into the psychological principle of completion bias, the idea that people are more motivated to finish something once they see how far they’ve come. 

3. Reward-Based Mechanics

For B2B, it’s not always about flashy prizes. Business professionals are often looking for value — think in-depth knowledge, industry trends, or actionable insights that can help them solve specific challenges. Completing the form could give access to valuable content, like an in-depth report.

So if you want to keep them focused until that final ‘Submit’ click, come with a reward that actually matters to your potential buyer, whether it’s content, demo, or free trial. B2B buyers often want to test a product before committing, so this incentive will be very enticing.  

Integrating Segmented Leads into Your Sales Engagement System

Now we get to the practical part. Because leads are only as good as the follow-up, right?

Automation allows capturing, qualifying, and segmenting leads with way less manual effort. Your multi-step form captures the details and the system submits lead data to your CRM or email platform, allowing you to set triggers for personalized follow-up campaigns based on lead scoring. You can hook up the platform with your multi-step forms to your CRM and apply the point-based systems to score and prioritize leads based on their responses. 

High-potential leads, those that fit ideal customer profiles or show strong buying intent, can be automatically flagged for immediate follow-up. For example, a top-tier lead gets a super-personalized email from sales. Meanwhile, a mid-tier lead might get a relevant case study or an invite to a webinar. It’s about meeting people where they are in their journey, not outreaching them all down the same funnel. This saves the sales team’s time, as automation can filter out leads that aren’t truly interested and nurture those that need more engagement before converting.

So, how does this workflow actually look? You create a multi-step form using a tool like Claspo, setting up smart triggers and data layer settings to make sure the form reaches the right audience at the right moment. Once you’ve collected the leads, you instantly transfer the data to a platform like Reply, where you already have outreach campaigns set up to engage and follow up with those leads.

Let’s say a lead indicates they’re a SaaS startup with a limited budget:

  1. They get routed to a lower-tier product offering.
  2. They receive content focused on SMB challenges.

Parting Words: Automate Your Marketing for Better Lead Generation

Multi-step forms are a great tool for generating leads and learning more about potential customers. With their help, you can maintain high form completion rates and get more useful data for future marketing efforts. As a result, you end up with more accurate data. When visitors don’t feel overwhelmed, they’re less likely to skip or fill nonsense in your fields. That means better personalization of the outreach and more closed leads.

For marketing teams, they help organize and target leads more accurately. For sales teams, they help save time and effort by focusing only on leads that are more likely to turn into customers. In the long run, this not only makes the whole process more efficient but also helps reduce costs and increase profits for the company.