Block New Leads from Filling Out Form

[Rachel_Noble]

Hi team,

My apologies if there's already a topic for this. I didn't really know what to search for. I have a form that will be on a page that will only be sent out to existing leads. I don't want any new leads ever created from this form. If (though unlikely) someone stumbles upon this form who isn't already in the system, I want to be able to display an error message letting them know that they can't fill out the form, and at the same time blocking the new lead from being created in Marketo. Is there any way to make this happen?

Thanks!

[Devraj_Grewal · Accepted solution]

Rachel,

What you could do is run a smart campaign with the trigger of "lead is created" and source is web form fillout. Also bring in the filter of "filled out form" and select this form. The flow can simply be to delete the lead. So any new leads created from filling out this form will automatically be deleted.

[Rachel_Noble]

Thanks Devraj. That's what I ended up doing just to get this rolling. Was hoping for an alternate option but this will have to work.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Also for the filter of "filled out form" make sure you use the constraint of "in the last 10 minutes" or so.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You don't necessarily need to do this in a flow.  If you're using a Marketo LP, if you include a hidden, prefilled field on the form (or just a token on the page) you can instantly know if the current web session is associated with a known lead.  Even if you aren't using a Marketo-hosted page, you can use the form's Known Lead HTML to detect the same (albeit in a more roundabout way).

However, these methods will also block a lead who stumbles across the form from an otherwise unused browser and, as far as the browser knows, is still anonymous before they fill out the form. If you need to allow anybody to fill in the form, only to validate it afterward, this has to be done in a flow as you and Devraj have discussed.

[Rachel_Noble]

Thanks! That's what we had originally tried to do, but we ended up with a lot of leads who were unable to see the form, unfortunately. Thank you all for your help. Maybe one day there will be a better alternative

[SanfordWhiteman]

There couldn't be a better alternative unless you looked up leads, from the browser, before submitting form data (you can't look up a lead before showing the form in a currently anonymous session, because you don't know who they are claiming to be yet!).

To do this, you'd consume all your API calls.  So... no.

[Anonymous]

I am going to try this out!