Lorna Li, an Online Marketing Manager at Salesforce.com reached out to me on a definitive list of must-have WordPress plugins for her green marketing blog and other websites she was working on. During our conversation about the world of WordPress plugins, I thought, wouldn't it be great to have a contact form builder that captures leads and delivers them directly into Salesforce CRM?
At OrangeValley, we're avid users of Salesforce CRM. We tend to use it most for lead tracking, and until a few weeks ago, we had this really weird workflow: we'd let people enter their credentials in web forms, which would then turn into emails, after which we'd copy paste the contents of those emails into Salesforce. So we decided there should be a better way of doing this, thus, WordPress-to-Lead was born.
From Lorna's perspective, WordPress-to-Lead is great contact form solution for all the small business owners who use WordPress as their CMS. WordPress plugin installation and activation is relatively simple, for many low tech people, way simpler than cutting and pasting the right code in the right location, which is the current way you would add a Salesforce integrated web lead form to your site. However, other contact form plugins for WordPress route lead information into your email inbox, where they can get buried, and not to a CRM system, which is a far better way of managing leads and customers. Because the WordPress-to-Lead plugin had the potential to really help their SMB customers, Salesforce.com enthusiastically offered to sponsor the program.
So, we've done it: we've created a new plugin called WordPress-to-Lead for Salesforce CRM, with an awesome array of options to create and modify your lead form and insert it into your posts & pages or even your sidebar.
Want to see it in action? Check out the cool video Lorna made:
If you're still stuck, like we were, getting leads through email and are having issues following up and taking care of those leads correctly, this could very well be the solution you need.
How WordPress-to-Lead works
If you are already a Salesforce CRM user, just follow these easy steps:
- Download, install and activate the WordPress-to-Lead for Salesforce CRM plugin (just search for Salesforce in your WordPress Admin Plugin Install panel, or on wordpress.org.
- You go into your Salesforce account and find your Salesforce.com Organization ID (you'll find it under: Setup » Company Profile » Company Information). You enter that ID into the WordPress-to-Lead admin panel.
- Configure your contact form the way you want it and insert it, either into a post or page with a simple shortcode, or into your sidebar using the widget that comes with the plugin.
- You're done. All leads will now flow into your Salesforce.com account.
Not a Salesforce.com Customer?
If you're not a Salesforce CRM user, be sure to register for a free trial of Salesforce.com for WordPress before downloading the WordPress-to-Lead plugin. Salesforce CRM is a great way to:
- Track all conversations and interactions
- Organize your contacts and tasks in a single spot
- Easily synch with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!, and more
Trivia
Is this plugin GPL?
Of course it is!
Did you get paid for building this plugin?
Yes.
Will you be maintaining this pluign?
Yes, feel free to leave all your questions in the support forum.
just one remark regarding 'Easily synch with Outlook'. As of today, the outlook plugin of salesforce
isn't spectacular. if you sync both ways, you end up with duplicate contacts (one with salesforce category, one with bank category). it requires some cleaning/pre-work if you want something neat.
don't know the proportion of small businesses using outlook though. Not a lot i guess. who wants to pay for mail servers now.
in summary, when it comes down to email synchronization, they're better with things remaining the web/cloud.
Hey Shoogle, as you can imagine, I'm not Salesforce support :) I'd be very curious about what you think of the plugin though :)
lol, i know ur not salesforce support. it was just a remark about the feature. this being said, their approach (crm/big businesses/small businesses/developers/free edition/etc...) rocks.
Unfortunately, that's a problem not unique to Salesforce either. We see the same issue with Zoho, and I'm sure other CRMs have the same tendencies.
Great idea, it helps Salesforce and wordpress users
I'm launching a new blog next month and I think this plugin just became part of the plan. At the very least it will get a serious test. Great idea.
I love the idea but we use Zoho CRM and would hate to move at the moment...I think I will be heading over to Zoho -CRM right now to put in my vote in for a Yoast powered Plugin!
Thank you, thank you. I've been looking for a solution for requiring fields in a web-to-lead form and this is by far the easiest.
I'm not sure why the lead owner is one of our administrators? Can you set the lead owner? Also, how can you edit the email text that the user gets when submitting a contact form? I can't seem to find that field in the plug-in settings options.
Thanks for your help!
The user (I guess you mean the submitter?) doesn't, as of yet, get an email when he submits a form. You cannot set the owner indeed, but that's a very good idea, I'll look into that.
You can set a Default Lead Owner within Salesforce if you always want a Web-to-Lead to be assigned to the same person. Alternatively, you can use Assignment Rules.
Also, you can set an Auto Response Rule coupled with a Template or Templates within Salesforce to control what email content goes out to the user from within Salesforce.
I am on the same situation as Niall, Zoho CRM user. Hope one time you are bored and want to fill your time coding a Zoho-wordpress plugin...
The only thing I can say to you and Niall is, well, switch to Salesforce ;)
I went to the Gourmet site, typed in my email and the submit rejected me as invalid email address. Is it because I'm sitting in Schwetzingen attempting to contact a SF USA business? How does the form validate me as a real human? I love your work. Thx much!
Hmm which email address, the one you used for this comment? Sure you didn't make a typo?
Joost, I'm concerned as this email Kevin Fritz kmfritz84@gmail.com was constantly rejected as not a valid email address. Any thoughts as to whats going on in the background. Much Thx
stupid bug in there, just submitted 1.0.3 that fixes it :)
Any chance this plugin will also available as an add-on for Gravity Forms?
I would like to second that request - having it as an add-on for Gravity Forms would be extremely helpful. Particularly since many of us purchased Gravity Forms based on your recommendation:).
I'm certainly looking into it, currently we only support a specific set of values though, so we'd have to do something like the MailChimp addon, but it's certainly something I'll discuss with Salesforce.
Sounds good - look forward to seeing what you can come up with :).
Keep up the good work.
All the best,
Moshe
Wow! Very cool!! Thanks OrangeValley.
Zoho users - This plugin is GPL. It can't be that difficult to shoehorn it into the Zoho API. Someone will get to it. It might even be worth asking Zoho to look into it. They're pretty responsive.
Your Thoughts?
Fatal error: Class salesforce_wordpress_to_lead_widgets: Cannot inherit from undefined class wp_widget in /homepages/27/d93377841/htdocs/bikerkickstandpad.com/wp-content/plugins/salesforce-wordpress-to-lead/salesforce.php on line 455
which version of WordPress are you on?
I am using v. 2.7.1
So, which part of "Requires WordPress Version: 2.8 or higher" didn't you understand? :)
nice work.keep it up.
Joost,
Thanks for this. I was considering moving from my current CRM platform to SalesForce just because of your plugin. Unfortunately, according to SalesForce, your plugin requires their "GroupAddition" which is $25 per month. Their $5/month option isn't supported. Can you confirm?
It sure would be nice if it worked with the $5/month option. Any chance of that happening?
The $5 a month option needs some work to work with the plugin (it's another API), but we're definitly looking into it to see whether we can do it.
Joost, works great and glad you added email validation. Two questions, 1) Does Akismet, a honeypot or any other Spam filtering get employed? 2) Any chance you might work some Ajax into it so that the page doesn't refresh on validations and submittal?
Appreciate the plugin as I was going to have to build this form manually. I'd already done it for my Facebook offerings but not for WP.
Hi Jeff,
the answer to 1) is no, but both are good ideas for new features, I'll add them to the list!
I was looking to develop something along these lines as I am currently using an external form to capture lead information which sends the data off to SalesForce directly. Will have to investigate it further. Keep up the good work!
Nice work! A great enhancement would be the ability to have different shortcodes for different pages, such that the Lead Source field in Salesforce would inform a user of the exact page a visitor was on when they submitted the Web-to-Lead form.
For example, a shortcode of [salesforce1] would be correlated with a Lead Source of "Web - Product A" and [salesforce2] would be correlated with a Lead Source of "Web - Services", etc. We currently accomplish this with hidden fields on manual Web-to-Lead implementations.
Hi,
Thank you for this plugin. It is something that I have needed for a while. IS it possible to create a multiple check box for the form? And radial button selections? How can I do that?
Sincerely,
James
There's no option to make custom form fields yet, unfortunately.
Terrific start but one item which is really necessary is the ability to add hidden fields to the form. Most SF.com forms employ hidden fields in addition to the "lead source" field that is currently supported by the plugin. So hidden fields are essentially a requirement here.
Also, there is a SERIOUS form spam issue with Salesforce web-to-lead forms, an issue that Salesforce has refused to address for years. Your WordPress-to-Lead plugin - once it supports Askimet - will make many people VERY happy...
Thanks for this great plugin, I do hope there is active development.
Eric
Salesforce did not fit our company and they would not allow us to leave even though it was not a good fit. They keep saying you got a contract and such and say there is nothing they can do except have you pay out the contract. Do not work with them! Plus if you want your data they charge for it! Stay away! Here was the rep we had that is doing his best to not help at all. Was nice in the beginning but now we see what he really is!
Doug Baudler
dbaudler@salesforce.com
Account Executive
Salesforce.com
T: 415-836-2210
F: 650-376-9859