How to set up progressive profiling in HubSpot

You can only choose one: a lead with just a name and email address, or a lead that has a name, email address, job title and helpful tidbit?

As marketing and sales professionals, we all know which one we’re picking! Data is king when it comes to painting the perfect picture of your prospects.

But... How can you go about capturing better information, without overwhelming your users with a form that’s half the size of the page?

Enter: HubSpot’s progressive profiling tools. This is a hugely underrated feature that we see a lot of HubSpot users miss out on using – so read on for a quick round-up of what the tool can do and how to use it.

What is progressive profiling in HubSpot

Progressive profiling allows you to control what specific users see on forms, based on what you already know about them. You can ask the right questions, at the right time – massively helping improve conversion and avoiding repetition or dreaded form fatigue.

(Progressive profiling builds upon the Smart Content form features, where if someone has already filled out the form fields you're asking for, it will only ask for the critical information required.)

With progressive profiling, you can set up iterative forms where you select which questions appear, so that whenever a lead fills out a form, you’re progressively collecting different data points that allow you to paint that big picture we talked about earlier.

Most importantly, this is done in an unobtrusive and user-friendly way, so that your forms stay short and sweet, whilst you still pick up valuable new information – win-win!

How to set up progressive profiling form fields in HubSpot

To add progressive fields to a form in HubSpot…

1. In your HubSpot account, head to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms.
2. Select a form or create a new one.
3. In the form editor, scroll down to the Queued progressive fields section, and drag over any field(s) you want to show in place of a contact's previously captured fields. Queued fields will appear in this order if a contact has known values for any of your progressive form fields.
4. Then on your main form fields, hover over the field you want to make progressive and click the pencil icon.
5. In the left panel, select the Logic tab.
6. You can then choose to replace the field with a queued progressive field.
7. You can test this in the Style & preview tab to see what the form will look like depending on whether a visitor has already filled out certain fields.

Use progressive profiling to align your form fields with the buyer's journey – you wouldn’t ask your date to tell you their life story, so don’t ask your audience to answer form fields that might not be relevant to them right now.

As you gather more valuable information further down the funnel, your leads will become more qualified and in a better position to be handed over to your sales team, ultimately shortening your sales cycle.

Useful HubSpot articles:

Knowledge Base: How to use progressive fields 

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