How is it possible that one of the most important parts of the funnel is so overlooked?
Easy.
Marketing teams work so hard to drive traffic to the website and generate leads.
Sales teams work so hard to turn Opportunities into Closed Won revenue.
But nobody is working to turn hand-raisers into Opportunities.
But this is arguably the most important part of your funnel.
Which is why we analyzed 4 million form submissions across Chili Piper’s entire customer base to find the average conversion rate from form fill to booked demo.
So you know how your conversion rate stacks up.
OK cool but why should I care about this random conversion rate
Woah woah, this is not a random conversion rate. This is the most important conversion rate.
It’s the conversion rate that tells you how marketing efforts are converting into actual, real-life pipeline.
It’s the conversion rate that proves marketing ROI to leadership.
It’s the conversion rate that helps you optimize your speed to lead (and yall we’ve been talking about speed to lead for 10+ years)
Responding to leads within the first minute increases conversions by 391%
90% of leads go inactive after 30 days
30% of your prospects will go to your competitor if you don’t respond quickly enough
But the TLDR is that the faster prospects can book a meeting with sales, the better your inbound conversion rates.
And we have the data to prove it.
“Speed to lead is important because your buyers are busy, they have options and when they request a demo, their excitement is at an all time high. Making them wait, 2-96 hours for someone to reach is going to kill momentum, fast” -Tim Davidson, VP of Marketing at B2BRizz
Why are sales and marketing so misaligned?
Before we get into the data, I think it’s important to get aligned on marketing-sales misalignment.
Because they ARE misaligned.
And it’s all because of ridonkulous funnels like this:
In this funnel, Marketing stops after a lead becomes an MQL. They toss their MQL over the fence and jump back into their MQL generating hamster wheel.
But we think Marketing needs to own everything until the moment a prospect shows up to a meeting with sales.
"Sales-marketing misalignment happens when marketing’s role is seen as supporting brand awareness, events, and content. To flip that on its head, alignment happens when marketing is actively managing the funnel." -Michael Maximoff, Co-Founder of Belkins
In doing so:
Marketing ties themselves to revenue
Marketing and sales are aligned around the same goal
Reps aren’t frustrated by tons of low-quality leads
More demand is converted to pipeline
That’s why we propose a new funnel:
In our new funnel, marketing tracks:
How many form fills are qualified vs disqualified?
Are the right people filling out our form? If not, maybe we need to change our targeting to make sure the right people are coming to our website.
How many form fills actually book a meeting?
Are the people who fill out a form actually booking a meeting? If not, maybe we can consider adding a loading screen animation.
Which leads us to the meat of our article:
Methodology
Yall, Chili Piper has been qualifying, routing, and booking meetings for sales for almost a decade.
When I tell you we’ve got data, WE’VE GOT DATA. Nearly 4 million form submissions of data (and that’s just from last year).
To determine form conversion rate benchmarks, we analyzed at nearly 4 million form submissions across our entire customer base (mostly B2B):
Distributed across these industries:
Demo Form Conversion Rate Benchmark Rate in 2024
To reiterate, the main points of the funnel that we’re examining are the moments between when someone fills out a form and when they book a meeting.
And what we find is quite interesting:
14.1% of people who fill out your form are not qualified
This includes:
Spam submissions
Personal emails
Anyone who doesn’t meet your qualification criteria
In total, Chili Piper disqualified 561,977 total people last year — that’s half a million disqualified submissions that our customers’ sales teams don’t have to waste their time on 👏
66.7% of qualified form submissions book a meeting
We have not seen much improvement in demo form conversion rates between 2023 and 2024:
The main trends we’re seeing:
We’re disqualifying slightly more people in 2024 than 2023. Overall this is a positive sign. The more people you’re disqualifying on the form, the fewer your reps need to disqualify manually.
We’re converting slightly more people to booked meeting in 2024. Also a positive sign. The more form fills that convert to booked meeting, the better!
How do you improve your conversion rate?
There are a few things that we see contributing to a high conversion rate from form fill to booked meeting.
1. Form Scheduling
Letting customers book a meeting with you immediately after form fill doubles your inbound conversion rate — from 30% to 66.7%, on average.
Prospect has option to schedule a meeting or connect via live call instantly
Boom
Customers that provide a live call option have a 69.2% conversion rate from form fill to booked meeting (well, in this case, live call), compared to the overall average of 66.7%.
This works out to a 3.75% increase.
If you’re driving 1000 demo requests every month, that’s an additional 40 prospects who get into a meeting with sales every month!
Check out Concierge Live for this one (add-on to Concierge).
3. Loading Time
If you’re using form scheduling software like Concierge, the longer it takes to load the scheduler, the lower your conversion rates.
Chili Piper’s calendar takes 3-4 seconds to load (and we’re constantly working to bring this load time down).
We’ve had customers move from competitors to Chili Piper after discovering load times of 30-45 seconds 🤯. If it takes longer than a few seconds, the prospect will assume nothing is happening and click away.
"The deal is usually won by the vendor that responds first. If you’re slow to follow up, you’re leaving pipeline on the table." -Kaylee Edmondson, Founder of DemandLoops
4. Double Form Fill
A huge conversion killer is asking your prospects to fill in 2 different forms — one to submit their information and one to book the meeting.
If you’re not sure whether you have a double form fill situation, go through your demo flow yourself to test it. We see companies increase conversion rates by 50% just by getting rid of that second form. We see this most often when folks upgrade from Calendly to Chili Piper.
Demo Form Conversion Rate by Industry
Something that’s really interesting is how dramatically these conversion rates change depending on what industry you’re in.
First up, form fill disqualification rate
Form fill disqualification is dramatically different depending on the industry:
Marketing software does not mess around when it comes to disqualifying folks on their forms — only 77% of form fills even get the option to book a meeting.
While Hospitality software is much more generous in who sees the calendar booking module — 94% of form fills have the option to book a meeting.
Our interpretation?
Industries like Travel, Hospitality, and Wellness; Legal and Compliance; and Healthcare and Medical Software often sell into smaller companies (that sometimes use personal email addresses).
Therefore, their qualification criteria are broader.
Whereas a B2B Marketing Software might disqualify someone based on company size, personal email address, and whether they use Salesforce CRM.
What’s the takeaway
If your qualification rate is above your industry average…
You might consider increasing your qualification criteria. You might ask yourself one of these questions:
Can you filter out spam submissions or personal email addresses?
Can you disqualify based on company size, region, industry or tech stack? (feedback from reps can be crucial here!)
If your qualification rate is below industry average…
You might consider widening your qualification criteria:
Look through your list of disqualified prospects. Should any of them NOT have been disqualified?
If in doubt, we recommend keeping your qualification criteria broad.
It’s better to have a few disqualified prospects slip through, than disqualify someone that should have been passed to sales.
Next, Qualified Booked Meeting Rate
When it comes to the Qualified Booked Meeting Rate, i tells a different story:
Our interpretation
The highest conversion rates are in Legal and Compliance Software, Healthcare and Medical Software, and Real Estate Software.
→ Our hypothesis is that these buyers might have just a handful of hours per day when they can work at their computers. So when they start something (like booking a sales meeting), they’ll finish it in the moment.
The lowest conversion rates are in industries like Customer Service Software, HR Software, Manufacturing Software, and Sales Software.
My hypothesis is twofold:
1. For companies selling into Customer Service or HR teams — these buyers are at their computers all day. They might start a booking flow and then get distracted by an email that just came in, and forget about it.
2. For companies selling into Restaurants or Manufacturers — these buyers most certainly do not live and die by their Google Calendars. They might book a meeting on their phone and then get distracted by work.
If your conversion rate is above industry average…
Get yourself a fancy beverage and give yourself a pat on the back. Nice job!
If your qualification rate is below industry average…
I’d recommend going through your demo booking flow yourself to make sure there aren’t any hiccups. Look for things like:
Slow loading time
Double form fill
Time slot availability
And, of course, if you don’t have a calendar booking solution like Chili Piper, what are you waiting for? Get a demo! 😉
Demo Form Conversion Rate by Month
There isn’t much discrepancy between conversion rate by month.
So the main conclusion is that there is never a bad time to start improving your conversion rate! It will have an impact any month of the year.
Demo Form Conversion Rate by Funding Round
Finally, we looked to see if form conversion rate changed depended on company maturity.
There isn’t a clear correlation between company maturity and conversion rate — it’s much more dependent on the buyer that you sell into versus the maturity of your company.
Final takeaways:
Don’t sleep on your hand-raisers
Hand-raisers are so interested in learning about your product they’re filling out a form to talk to sales.
They are not to be ignored.
Getting them into a conversation with sales ASAP is critical.
Speed to lead is still queen 👑
Without Chili Piper, only 30% of hand-raisers are booking meetings with sales. With Chili Piper, that number shoots up to 66.7%.
You need calendar booking behind your form if you’re going to win in 2025.
Or even better, add live calling to your forms to connect folks with sales ASAP.
The best time to improve conversion rates is now
Unlike other types of marketing activations, there is no bad time to start focusing on your conversion rates.
If you run a B2B marketing campaign over the last two weeks of December, you’re not going to drive much traffic — even if your messaging and targeting are absolutely spot-on.
But focus on your conversion rates? You’ll see impact right away.
"Marketing and sales fail to drive growth because they’re measured on different goals - marketing drives leads, sales chases deals. This misalignment creates a costly cycle of flooded pipelines and cherry-picked opportunities." -Liza Adams, Fractional CMO at GrowthPath Partners
What’s next?
See how Chili Piper can help and 2X your conversion rates 👇
How is it possible that one of the most important parts of the funnel is so overlooked?
Easy.
Marketing teams work so hard to drive traffic to the website and generate leads.
Sales teams work so hard to turn Opportunities into Closed Won revenue.
But nobody is working to turn hand-raisers into Opportunities.
But this is arguably the most important part of your funnel.
Which is why we analyzed 4 million form submissions across Chili Piper’s entire customer base to find the average conversion rate from form fill to booked demo.
So you know how your conversion rate stacks up.
OK cool but why should I care about this random conversion rate
Woah woah, this is not a random conversion rate. This is the most important conversion rate.
It’s the conversion rate that tells you how marketing efforts are converting into actual, real-life pipeline.
It’s the conversion rate that proves marketing ROI to leadership.
It’s the conversion rate that helps you optimize your speed to lead (and yall we’ve been talking about speed to lead for 10+ years)
Responding to leads within the first minute increases conversions by 391%
90% of leads go inactive after 30 days
30% of your prospects will go to your competitor if you don’t respond quickly enough
But the TLDR is that the faster prospects can book a meeting with sales, the better your inbound conversion rates.
And we have the data to prove it.
“Speed to lead is important because your buyers are busy, they have options and when they request a demo, their excitement is at an all time high. Making them wait, 2-96 hours for someone to reach is going to kill momentum, fast” -Tim Davidson, VP of Marketing at B2BRizz
Why are sales and marketing so misaligned?
Before we get into the data, I think it’s important to get aligned on marketing-sales misalignment.
Because they ARE misaligned.
And it’s all because of ridonkulous funnels like this:
In this funnel, Marketing stops after a lead becomes an MQL. They toss their MQL over the fence and jump back into their MQL generating hamster wheel.
But we think Marketing needs to own everything until the moment a prospect shows up to a meeting with sales.
"Sales-marketing misalignment happens when marketing’s role is seen as supporting brand awareness, events, and content. To flip that on its head, alignment happens when marketing is actively managing the funnel." -Michael Maximoff, Co-Founder of Belkins
In doing so:
Marketing ties themselves to revenue
Marketing and sales are aligned around the same goal
Reps aren’t frustrated by tons of low-quality leads
More demand is converted to pipeline
That’s why we propose a new funnel:
In our new funnel, marketing tracks:
How many form fills are qualified vs disqualified?
Are the right people filling out our form? If not, maybe we need to change our targeting to make sure the right people are coming to our website.
How many form fills actually book a meeting?
Are the people who fill out a form actually booking a meeting? If not, maybe we can consider adding a loading screen animation.
Which leads us to the meat of our article:
Methodology
Yall, Chili Piper has been qualifying, routing, and booking meetings for sales for almost a decade.
When I tell you we’ve got data, WE’VE GOT DATA. Nearly 4 million form submissions of data (and that’s just from last year).
To determine form conversion rate benchmarks, we analyzed at nearly 4 million form submissions across our entire customer base (mostly B2B):
Distributed across these industries:
Demo Form Conversion Rate Benchmark Rate in 2024
To reiterate, the main points of the funnel that we’re examining are the moments between when someone fills out a form and when they book a meeting.
And what we find is quite interesting:
14.1% of people who fill out your form are not qualified
This includes:
Spam submissions
Personal emails
Anyone who doesn’t meet your qualification criteria
In total, Chili Piper disqualified 561,977 total people last year — that’s half a million disqualified submissions that our customers’ sales teams don’t have to waste their time on 👏
66.7% of qualified form submissions book a meeting
We have not seen much improvement in demo form conversion rates between 2023 and 2024:
The main trends we’re seeing:
We’re disqualifying slightly more people in 2024 than 2023. Overall this is a positive sign. The more people you’re disqualifying on the form, the fewer your reps need to disqualify manually.
We’re converting slightly more people to booked meeting in 2024. Also a positive sign. The more form fills that convert to booked meeting, the better!
How do you improve your conversion rate?
There are a few things that we see contributing to a high conversion rate from form fill to booked meeting.
1. Form Scheduling
Letting customers book a meeting with you immediately after form fill doubles your inbound conversion rate — from 30% to 66.7%, on average.
Prospect has option to schedule a meeting or connect via live call instantly
Boom
Customers that provide a live call option have a 69.2% conversion rate from form fill to booked meeting (well, in this case, live call), compared to the overall average of 66.7%.
This works out to a 3.75% increase.
If you’re driving 1000 demo requests every month, that’s an additional 40 prospects who get into a meeting with sales every month!
Check out Concierge Live for this one (add-on to Concierge).
3. Loading Time
If you’re using form scheduling software like Concierge, the longer it takes to load the scheduler, the lower your conversion rates.
Chili Piper’s calendar takes 3-4 seconds to load (and we’re constantly working to bring this load time down).
We’ve had customers move from competitors to Chili Piper after discovering load times of 30-45 seconds 🤯. If it takes longer than a few seconds, the prospect will assume nothing is happening and click away.
"The deal is usually won by the vendor that responds first. If you’re slow to follow up, you’re leaving pipeline on the table." -Kaylee Edmondson, Founder of DemandLoops
4. Double Form Fill
A huge conversion killer is asking your prospects to fill in 2 different forms — one to submit their information and one to book the meeting.
If you’re not sure whether you have a double form fill situation, go through your demo flow yourself to test it. We see companies increase conversion rates by 50% just by getting rid of that second form. We see this most often when folks upgrade from Calendly to Chili Piper.
Demo Form Conversion Rate by Industry
Something that’s really interesting is how dramatically these conversion rates change depending on what industry you’re in.
First up, form fill disqualification rate
Form fill disqualification is dramatically different depending on the industry:
Marketing software does not mess around when it comes to disqualifying folks on their forms — only 77% of form fills even get the option to book a meeting.
While Hospitality software is much more generous in who sees the calendar booking module — 94% of form fills have the option to book a meeting.
Our interpretation?
Industries like Travel, Hospitality, and Wellness; Legal and Compliance; and Healthcare and Medical Software often sell into smaller companies (that sometimes use personal email addresses).
Therefore, their qualification criteria are broader.
Whereas a B2B Marketing Software might disqualify someone based on company size, personal email address, and whether they use Salesforce CRM.
What’s the takeaway
If your qualification rate is above your industry average…
You might consider increasing your qualification criteria. You might ask yourself one of these questions:
Can you filter out spam submissions or personal email addresses?
Can you disqualify based on company size, region, industry or tech stack? (feedback from reps can be crucial here!)
If your qualification rate is below industry average…
You might consider widening your qualification criteria:
Look through your list of disqualified prospects. Should any of them NOT have been disqualified?
If in doubt, we recommend keeping your qualification criteria broad.
It’s better to have a few disqualified prospects slip through, than disqualify someone that should have been passed to sales.
Next, Qualified Booked Meeting Rate
When it comes to the Qualified Booked Meeting Rate, i tells a different story:
Our interpretation
The highest conversion rates are in Legal and Compliance Software, Healthcare and Medical Software, and Real Estate Software.
→ Our hypothesis is that these buyers might have just a handful of hours per day when they can work at their computers. So when they start something (like booking a sales meeting), they’ll finish it in the moment.
The lowest conversion rates are in industries like Customer Service Software, HR Software, Manufacturing Software, and Sales Software.
My hypothesis is twofold:
1. For companies selling into Customer Service or HR teams — these buyers are at their computers all day. They might start a booking flow and then get distracted by an email that just came in, and forget about it.
2. For companies selling into Restaurants or Manufacturers — these buyers most certainly do not live and die by their Google Calendars. They might book a meeting on their phone and then get distracted by work.
If your conversion rate is above industry average…
Get yourself a fancy beverage and give yourself a pat on the back. Nice job!
If your qualification rate is below industry average…
I’d recommend going through your demo booking flow yourself to make sure there aren’t any hiccups. Look for things like:
Slow loading time
Double form fill
Time slot availability
And, of course, if you don’t have a calendar booking solution like Chili Piper, what are you waiting for? Get a demo! 😉
Demo Form Conversion Rate by Month
There isn’t much discrepancy between conversion rate by month.
So the main conclusion is that there is never a bad time to start improving your conversion rate! It will have an impact any month of the year.
Demo Form Conversion Rate by Funding Round
Finally, we looked to see if form conversion rate changed depended on company maturity.
There isn’t a clear correlation between company maturity and conversion rate — it’s much more dependent on the buyer that you sell into versus the maturity of your company.
Final takeaways:
Don’t sleep on your hand-raisers
Hand-raisers are so interested in learning about your product they’re filling out a form to talk to sales.
They are not to be ignored.
Getting them into a conversation with sales ASAP is critical.
Speed to lead is still queen 👑
Without Chili Piper, only 30% of hand-raisers are booking meetings with sales. With Chili Piper, that number shoots up to 66.7%.
You need calendar booking behind your form if you’re going to win in 2025.
Or even better, add live calling to your forms to connect folks with sales ASAP.
The best time to improve conversion rates is now
Unlike other types of marketing activations, there is no bad time to start focusing on your conversion rates.
If you run a B2B marketing campaign over the last two weeks of December, you’re not going to drive much traffic — even if your messaging and targeting are absolutely spot-on.
But focus on your conversion rates? You’ll see impact right away.
"Marketing and sales fail to drive growth because they’re measured on different goals - marketing drives leads, sales chases deals. This misalignment creates a costly cycle of flooded pipelines and cherry-picked opportunities." -Liza Adams, Fractional CMO at GrowthPath Partners
What’s next?
See how Chili Piper can help and 2X your conversion rates 👇
Madeleine Work is Product Marketing Manager at Chili Piper. She loves bringing people together, learning new things, and making hilarious jokes. When she's not typing away at her laptop, you'll probably find her running, hiking, or hanging out with her baby. Follow Madeleine for laughs and product marketing tips on LinkedIn.
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