Create your Web Form

For the purpose of this tutorial, we are going to use a template from the Form Library.

Make sure you are logged on and have subscribed to the Form Assembly Professional plan ^*.

If you are familiar with the Form Builder, you can customize the form now, otherwise simply move on to step 2.

On this page, you can review the different setup options or keep the defaults for now. You can always change them later.

Salesforce Connector Setup

You first need to select which type of access you will want us to use to insert leads in your Salesforce application.

API setup

This applies if you have selected the ‘API’ connector type.

Step 5. Enter a valid Salesforce username and password.

You can use one of your existing Salesforce account, but it is preferable that you create a specific ‘API’ account and restrict its access rights to the lead object only (for instructions on how to do that, please refer to the Salesforce documentation).

Step 6. Press the ‘continue’ button. If the connection is successful you will be presented with the field mapping section.

Web-To-Lead setup

This applies if you have selected the ‘web-to-lead’ connector type.

Step 5a. Go to your Salesforce account and generate the default web-to-lead form.

Step 5b. Copy the HTML and simply paste it in the box provided.

Step 6. Press ‘continue’.

You do not need to do anything else with this HTML. The Form Assembly will automatically extract the information needed.

Field Mapping

Now your form is ready and the connection with Salesforce is working. You need to specify which field of your form corresponds to which field in Salesforce.

Here is more information on how to map your form fields.

How to Handle Picklists

Some Salesforce fields have a predefined list of values, or picklist. For instance, the picklist for Salutation contains ‘Mr.’, ‘Ms.’, ‘Mrs.’, ‘Dr.’, etc… If you match a multiple-choice question with a picklist, you can specify what choice corresponds to what item in the picklist. Most of the time, the labels will be identical, but that is not necessary.

How to Merge Fields

You can merge several of your form fields in one Salesforce field. For instance, if you had three fields for the phone number (US format (555) 555-5555), you would map all of them to the ‘phone’ field in Salesforce.

How to Use Conditional Sections

The form used in this tutorial contains a ‘other / please specify’ combo (in the product interest question). This allows the respondent to provide a free text answer when none of the predefined choices is relevant.

To map those fields correctly, first map the multiple-choice question to the Salesforce picklist (here product interest). Map each available choice, except the ‘other’, which remains ‘not exported’. Then move on to the next question - ‘please specify’ - and map it to the same Salesforce field (’product interest’).

That’s it! Feel free to post your comments below.

Technorati Tags: Salesforce, Web-to-Lead, Web Forms

Salesforce has provided for quite some time a tool called ‘web-to-lead’. It generates a simple contact form that you can place on your site to capture data about potential customers - or leads in marketing terminology.

The Form Assembly now offers a great alternative. You can design your form with the Form Builder and each submitted response will automatically create a lead in your Salesforce application.

I put together a sample form that illustrates some of the benefits our service offers:

Salesforce Web-to-Lead example.

This form uses two important features:

• A repeateable section to capture several phone numbers.
• A “other/please specify” combo in the “product interest” question, using a conditional trigger.

Of course, you benefit from our other services as well: RSS feed, spam control, input validation and many more…

If you would like to test the Web-To-Lead connector, email me your username (create an account if necessary). This service is free for the duration of the beta test.

Technorati Tags: Salesforce, web-to-lead, form builder