Why your "Get a quote" CTA is converting at 0.3%

Walk through almost any B2B tech website and you’ll find the same call to action repeated across every page. “Get a quote.” “Request a quote.” Sometimes “Get a free quote” with the word “free” doing surprisingly little. The team chose it because it sounds commercial. The data tells a different story. We’ve audited dozens of tech sites this year where the “Get a quote” CTA was converting between 0.2% and 0.5%, while a more thoughtful CTA on the same page would have done three times the volume.

The CTA isn’t the only problem on most underperforming sites, but it’s the one nobody looks at because everyone assumes it’s working. It usually isn’t.

What “Get a quote” actually asks the visitor to do

The phrase makes a fairly demanding request. To act on it the visitor needs to have decided you’re a likely supplier, be ready to disclose their requirement in detail, be willing to enter their work email and accept inevitable sales follow-up, trust that the quote will arrive and be useful and decide all of this in 30 seconds.

For low-consideration purchases, that bar is fine. For B2B tech buying, where the buyer is researching three or four suppliers and isn’t ready to negotiate yet, the bar is way too high. The CTA filters out everyone who’s at the wrong stage of the journey, which on most B2B tech sites is roughly 95% of the audience.

The visitor states the CTA needs to serve

Before fixing the CTA, the question is who’s actually on the page and what stage they’re at. Across the B2B tech sites we audit, traffic sorts roughly into:

• Researching for later (40 to 60%): the buyer is gathering options. They’re not ready to talk to sales. A CTA that demands a sales conversation gets ignored.
• Comparing options (20 to 30%): the buyer is shortlisting. They want proof, pricing context and reassurance about fit.
• Ready to engage (5 to 15%): the buyer has decided to talk to a few suppliers. This is the audience “Get a quote” theoretically serves.
• Existing customers and partners (rest): not the audience for the homepage CTA at all.

A single CTA serving all four states will, by definition, only serve one of them well. Most “Get a quote” CTAs serve the smallest segment.

The CTAs that consistently do better

We don’t use one universal replacement. The right CTA depends on what you sell, the buying cycle and where on the site the visitor is. The patterns we use:

“Book a 15 minute discovery call”

Specific time commitment, specific format. Lower bar than “Get a quote” because it doesn’t promise the buyer has to disclose detailed requirements. Works particularly well on services pages where the buying decision is consultative. We’ve seen this convert at 1.5% to 4% on MSP and IT services sites where “Get a quote” was at 0.3%.

”Request the [sector] benchmark report”

For sectors where buyers need data to build an internal business case. The lead gives you their email in exchange for genuinely useful information. Marketing automation can then nurture them. Works well for SaaS targeting enterprise where the cycle is six months long. We covered the wider mechanics in demand gen vs lead gen budget.

”See a live demo” or “Watch a 4-minute product tour”

For SaaS where the product can be demonstrated quickly. Lower commitment than “Book a demo” because it implies pre-recorded or self-service. The “4-minute” framing matters: it tells the visitor what they’re committing to.

”Get a price estimate in 60 seconds”

A productised mini-quote tool that asks 3 to 5 questions and gives a real number range. Higher conversion than a generic quote form because the visitor gets something useful immediately. Works for services with relatively standardised pricing.

”Read a case study from [sector]”

A softer next step. Keeps the visitor on the site, builds trust and feeds the retargeting pixel. We covered the role of case studies in case studies that close.

The CTA pair pattern

Single CTAs lose visitors who are at the wrong stage. CTA pairs solve this without diluting either.

The pattern that works on most B2B tech homepages and services pages:

• Primary: a low-friction, time-bound action for buyers ready to talk. “Book a 15 minute call”.
• Secondary: a value-give for buyers still researching. “Read our [sector] guide” or “See pricing”.

The secondary CTA captures retargeting cookies and feeds nurture sequences. The primary captures the small percentage ready to convert. We covered the broader homepage logic in designing the homepage hero for an MSP, but the principle generalises.

Where “Get a quote” can still work

The contexts where we’d leave “Get a quote” alone:

• The buyer arrived from a paid campaign with strong intent (“MSP cost calculator” search query).
• The site is a single, clearly transactional service page where the buyer expects a quote (e.g. a hardware reseller).
• The buyer is mid-funnel and has already engaged with the site multiple times.
• A/B testing has shown it actually works for that specific audience. (Sometimes it does.)

In every case, the CTA is responding to a buyer who’s ready for it. On most sites, that buyer makes up a small fraction of the audience.

The form behind the CTA

The CTA wording is half the battle. The other half is the form it leads to.

Forms that depress conversion:

• More than 5 fields.
• Free-text “tell us about your requirements” boxes.
• Phone number as a required field.
• A separate page just to host the form (rather than inline on the CTA page).
• No statement of what happens next (“We’ll respond within 24 hours” reduces drop-off).

Forms that lift conversion:

• 3 fields max for top-of-funnel CTAs (name, work email, company).
• Inline validation as the user types.
• A clear next-step statement under the submit button.
• HubSpot, Pardot or Marketo handling the data via API, not a generic mail-to inbox.

We covered the technical side of form handling in CRM and marketing automation website integrations and the pricing-page-specific failure modes in pricing pages for SaaS.

Tracking the CTA properly

A surprising number of teams complain about CTA performance without having the tracking to verify it. Before changing anything:

• Confirm the click event is firing in GA4.
• Confirm the form submission event fires after submission, not on the page load.
• Confirm the lead lands in the CRM with the correct source attribution.
• Confirm UTM parameters are persisting through the form.

We covered the tracking layer in conversion tracking for long cycles. If any of those four things isn’t right, the conversion data is unreliable and the CTA might be working better or worse than the analytics suggest.

Testing properly

CTA changes are one of the few areas where A/B testing genuinely earns its keep on B2B tech sites. The discipline:

• Test one element at a time. Wording or design, not both.
• Run the test long enough to reach statistical significance. For a low-traffic B2B site, that’s often 4 to 8 weeks per test.
• Test on a meaningful page. Homepage and key service pages, not the careers page.
• Don’t test seasonal language (“Get a Q4 quote”) because the result won’t generalise.

Tools like VWO, Optimizely or built-in HubSpot A/B testing all work. The bigger constraint is traffic volume.

A practical checklist

If your “Get a quote” CTA is converting under 1%, work through this sequence: pull GA4 and confirm the data is reliable, audit who’s on the page, replace the single CTA with a pair (low-commitment plus research-friendly), shorten the form, add a clear “what happens next” statement under submit, place trust signals adjacent to the CTA (we covered this in designing trust signals for IT directors), then wait 6 weeks and measure.

In our experience, this sequence lifts conversion by 2 to 5 times on most B2B tech sites. The CTA itself isn’t doing the work. The audience qualification is.

The takeaway

“Get a quote” is the wrong default CTA for most B2B tech websites. Not because the words are bad but because the action they ask for doesn’t match where most visitors are in their decision. Replacing it with a CTA that meets the visitor at their actual stage almost always lifts conversion, often substantially.

We’ve done this on a dozen tech sites this year. Get in touch if you’d value an outside perspective on yours, or see how we approach conversion-led design on our web design service page.