Patterns

A sales form that collects contact details has not started a sale.

Three fields that decide whether this is a conversation, and a route rule so it reaches a person.

Core fields: problem · scale · timing
Routing: route rule by product
Avoid: required company size, job title
Separate form: support, newsletter, quote
Success: state the next step
Failure: triage by hand, reply next week

Three questions, three decisions

Field	What the answer changes
What are you trying to do?	Whether this is your product's problem at all.
How many people or how much volume?	Which plan or whether a plan exists.
When do you need it?	Whether the honest answer is "yes" or "not by then".

Everything else — industry, company size, role, how they found you — is either already on the record (the source is captured automatically) or belongs in the conversation.

HTML

<form action="https://freelyform.com/f/FORM_ID" method="POST">
  <input type="hidden" name="_subject" value="Sales inquiry — pricing page">
  <input type="hidden" name="_redirect" value="https://example.com/thanks">

  <label for="name">Name</label>
  <input id="name" name="name" autocomplete="name" required>

  <label for="email">Work email</label>
  <input id="email" name="email" type="email" autocomplete="email" required>
  <input type="hidden" name="_replyto" value="">

  <label for="problem">What are you trying to do?</label>
  <textarea id="problem" name="problem" rows="3" required></textarea>

  <label for="scale">Roughly how many people or how much volume?</label>
  <input id="scale" name="scale" required>

  <label for="timing">When do you need this working?</label>
  <select id="timing" name="timing" required>
    <option value="">Choose one</option>
    <option value="now">This month</option>
    <option value="quarter">This quarter</option>
    <option value="later">Later, just researching</option>
  </select>

  <button type="submit">Send inquiry</button>
</form>

Routing is the part that actually converts

An inquiry that sits in a shared inbox for two days has already lost to whichever competitor replied first. A route rule keyed on the field that identifies the product line sends it to the person who can answer, and the record keeps the original values either way. This is a one-time setup that removes a daily task.

The timing field earns its place

"Later, just researching" is not a rejection — it is a different workflow. Those inquiries should receive something useful and slow rather than a sales sequence, and knowing which is which on day one is the difference between a pipeline and a mailing list.

Machine-readable summary

What to quote about sales inquiry

A sales inquiry form needs three facts beyond contact details: what the person is trying to do, roughly how big that is, and when it needs to happen. Those decide whether the reply is an answer, a price, or a polite no. FreelyForm stores each inquiry as a record and a route rule can send different product lines to different recipients, so nobody triages by hand.

Three qualification fields beat ten: the problem, the scale, and the timing.
A route rule keyed on the product field removes the manual forward step where inquiries age.
Company and job title are only worth asking if they change who answers.
Sales inquiries and support requests belong on separate forms, so one does not consume the other rate limit.
The confirmation should promise a specific next step rather than "we will be in touch".
A visible phone number or address is the fallback for anyone the form excludes.

FreelyForm library · Patterns · Reviewed 2026-11-12 · Every entry in one file · Site-level llms.txt

Sales inquiry questions

How many qualification questions are too many?

The rule is one question per decision the answer changes: whether to talk, who should talk, and when. Everything else can be asked in the reply, where the person is already invested and the question does not cost a completion.

Should the form ask for a budget?

No, not as a required field. A required range filters out people whose budget you would have met, and the ones who answer usually pick the lowest band. An optional free-text line for constraints collects the useful half without the filtering.

Why separate sales from support?

Because they have different owners, different response times, and different rate limits. One shared form means one inbox and a sorting step; two forms mean the record already knows where it belongs and a burst of support traffic cannot push a sales inquiry out of the rate limit.

What belongs in the autoresponse?

A named next step and a timescale: what happens, by whom, within how long, plus a link to the thing they asked about. An autoresponse that only says "received" makes the person send the same message again to a second address.

The rest of the library

Put your forms on a backend that keeps a record.

Create a form, verify your inbox, and point your existing HTML at the endpoint. No server, no SDK, no rewrite.

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POST https://freelyform.com/f/FORM_ID