WordPress is the most used CMS and SalesForce.com (SFDC) is the largest CRM, so inevitably a lot of companies use both of these tools and wish to integrate their WordPress websites, especially their web forms, with their SalesForce CRM. This integration is straight forward and easy to do and allows potential customers to enter their contact information on a website form and have it automatically populate into SalesForce. However, a lot of companies we work with get stuck when customizing and styling the look and feel of their SalesForce lead web forms on WordPress because these forms are often static, visually unappealing, and poorly designed for lead conversion.
Note: Although this blog post refers directly to SalesForce, the concepts of custom-styling a web form equally applies other CRM web forms, such as customizing NetSuite web forms, styling Microsoft Dynamics forms, or even integrating Oracle or SAP forms on WordPress.
I. Overview of WordPress / SalesForce Web Form Plugin Options
The most common and cost-effective way to integrate your WordPress website’s form with SalesForce is to use a plugin. The most common SalesForce form plugins are:
1) Native Salesforce Form Create Tool – This option is available by default in your SalesForce.com implementation and for most accounts it allows you to submit up to 500 leads per day. The benefit of this option is there is no cost to use this tool The disadvantage is you will need to use JavaScript to enable this functionality, which requires someone with coding experience. (shameless plug: if you want to use this option and don’t do development, we are happy to help you).
2) WordPress-to-Lead for Salesforce CRM Plugin – This is a light weight plugin that is free and fairly straight forward to set up. It has more than 8,000 installs and has good reviews. The disadvantage of this plugin is that it is difficult to customize and that as of writing this blog post, it hasn’t had any active development or a new release in more than one year.
3) Gravity Forms Plugin – This is one of the nicer and more popular plugins on the market and it is created by the company that makes the popular Gravity Forms plugin. The primary disadvantage of this plugin is the lack of support for non-paying Gravity Forms users.
4) Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 is arguably the most popular contact form plugin for WordPress. It is possible to integrate Contact Form 7 with SalesForce with a bit of custom coding. The best article explaining how to do this is here.
II. Common Customization Requests
The most common requests for SalesForce form customization that we receive from customers are the following:
• How do I change the fields of my SalesForce website form?
• How do I change the color, font and styling of my SalesForce web form to match my websites style guide?
• How do I validate data from my website’s web forms before populating it into Salesforce.com?
• How do I custom modify my WordPress to Salesforce.com web form plugin to add additional functionality that it currently doesn’t have?
Via consultations we are able to help on any of the above points. The first step is always to sit down with you to map out the process for how you want leads to be submitted into SalesForce. Because before you do any customization of your WordPress to Salesforce.com form, you will want to make sure that all the company stakeholders have agreed on the process.
(Note from personal experience: whenever we do CRM projects things tend to get sticky between different parties who have different objectives for what the CRM should be doing – always get buy-in from all groups before starting development or you’ll waste money changing scope mid-project).
III. Customizing a WordPress to SalesForce Web Form
There are 4 primary skillsets we use for integrating, styling, and customizing a Salesforce web form:
1. HTML – This is used to style the visual components of the web form.
2. CSS – Like HTML, CSS is also used for the front-end form customization that the end user will see when they fill out the form.
3. Javascript – This is used for enabling front-end validations, controlling pop-ups if you use a form that acts as a pop-up, and for other custom development.
4. PHP – All major WordPress / Salesforce plugins are built in PHP, so we use PHP when custom modifying these plugins.
If you need help with any aspect of integration, styling, or customization of your CRM form with your WordPress website in order to improve your leads and website conversion, please contact us using the form on the right.
