A client recently posted details on their integration with Sales Force within the forums and wrote up some instructions that can be helpful to others… Below is that tutorial, and a BIG THANKS to Justin for spending the time to write this up.
If you’re in the business of creating web sites, you’ll want a way to quantify what you’re doing. That way when a client comes snooping around and asks what you’ve been doing for the past month, you can easily show them how you add value to their business.
Among all the things that you can do to justify your existence, one of the best tactics you can employ is to sync their website up with a CRM (customer relationship management) system. This will allow you go aggregate anything from web forms to recorded phone calls in one centralized location. In this tutorial, we’ll be syncing Salesforce (a brand of CRM) with an existing website running on the DotNetNuke platform.
1.) Sign up for a free trial of Salesforce.
a. We’ve opted for the Enterprise Edition of Salesforce.
2.) Purchase, download, and install Dynamic Forms 4.0 for DotNetNuke from Snowcovered.com.
3.) Install the Dynamic Forms module.
4.) Build your form
a. After you’ve inserted the module on a given page, use the “Manage Questions” option to create new fields. Obviously, you’ll want to have in mind what the client wants to capture from their web presence.
b. Create new Dynamic Fields and place them throughout your form.
5.) Once you’ve got your Salesforce and Dynamic Forms deployments all set to go, you’re ready to take advantage of Salesforce’s Web-to-Lead feature.
6.) Navigate the App Setup section on your “Setup” Page.
7.) Use the toolbar on your left to take advantage of the Web-to-Lead feature:
8.) This feature will create a basic, featureless HTML form that you’ll find acceptable if you’re living in 1998… but we’ll still utilize it to capture our input IDs so we can use them in the HTTP Post completion event in our Dynamic Forms module.
Essentially, you’ll want to match up what fields you have on your Dynamic Forms with what you’re storing in Salesforce. If they don’t exist in either one, create them. In Salesforce, you can easily create new fields, just keep in mind that if you create a custom field, it’ll likely have a bizarre input ID.
9.) Here’s what I’m setting up to capture on my website:
10.) So here’s what I’ll capture setup my Web-to-Lead form to capture:
11.) This will auto-generate some code for me that is essential for crafting an HTTP Post event in Dynamic forms… I usually like to copy over this info into Notepad so I can pull out what I need.
12.) The fields of interest to you will be the input IDs… make note of them for all of your fields. You’ll also want to take note of the form action=”” URL at the top…
13.) Setup a new form completion event in Dynamic forms. Choose “HTTP Post” in the Event Type.
14.) For the HTTP Post URL, make sure you use the URL that was created at the top of the Web-to-Lead form.
15.) Now craft your HTTP Post… The formatting is pretty simple here. Use your Salesforce input ID first, followed by an “=”, followed by the variable being used on your Dynamic Form. Separate fields with an “&” sign. Here’s an example of my HTTP Post:
TIP: You can grab your Dynamic Forms variable / parameter names from an Email completion event page.
NOTE: I can add in static fields, like “00N30000007hdsQ” (Salesforce input ID for the field “Divison:”) and input plaintext instead of a parameter. This lets me know which page on my website the form is coming from.
16.) After all is said and done you should be set to go capturing leads in your Salesforce account!
Hopefully you found this article helpful. I’m interested in new / exciting ways people are using their web properties to quantify leads and generate revenue for their clients. This includes all aspects of inbound marketing. Please feel free to leave a comment below… and follow me on Twitter (@justin_bonanno)!