Consultancy questionnaire - when to ask for contact information?

Question

In short, we are creating a free questionnaire that allows possible future clients (companies) to see a detailed report about their organisational pain points. During these approx. 35 multiple choice questions, we gather information based on their input, from which we automatically generate a report.

This way:

1. We gather information from the questionnaire and create a report;
2. We ask them to fill in their contact information (name and email address only);
3. They can easily analyse the results based on their input;
4. We can actively and effectively consult these companies.

Thus, the following question arises: when should we ask them for their contact information? Before starting the survey or upon completing it?

Our main goal is to collect contact information from future clients without making them feel obstructed because of this. When asking in advance, we might not be able to collect any questionnaire information but when asking afterwards, we might miss out on contact information.

Answer 1

You could also consider a third option to the two that you've proposed. When the user completes the questionnaire, show them a useful summary of their results on the web page. You can then prompt them to enter their email address so that they can be sent the full PDF report. I've seen this work well as it doesn't annoy the user by answering 35 questions and getting nothing, yet they're still likely to put in their email address as they've already put the effort in.

This is always a challenging question and I don't believe there is a one size fits all solution as it depends on the the audience and what they're filling in. If it's an option, then for something like this it'd be best to release both options, measure the results, and then compare. Ideally you would do this by A/B testing.

Hope this helps!