1. Smarter lead creation: Avoid duplicates, handle existing accounts.

A Web-to-Lead form once submitted automatically generates a new lead in Salesforce. But what if the company already exists in your system as an Account? Wouldn’t it be better to create a new contact and an opportunity instead of a Lead? With FormAssembly’s Salesforce integration, not only you can create a lead, but you can search existing records for a specific field then update an existing lead, create a new lead or create an altogether different object.

2. Record more data: Not just a lead. Add notes, attachments, tasks…

Every business has different needs and flexibility is key. Your web-to-lead can collect more data, using custom fields and attachments if needed. You can also create other objects at the same time, like tasks or notes. Something that would require coding a trigger in Salesforce can be done quickly and easily in FormAssembly.

3. Simple to setup: Zero to Collecting Data in minutes.

Forms created with FormAssembly work immediately. You can test them without having to mess with your website and HTML. Of course, if you want to, you can place the form on your own website when you’re ready. For more information, read how you can get your form up and running in seconds.

4. Customize your form: Look & Feel, Layout, anything…

No need to know HTML, javascript or CSS. Our web-based Form Builder and Theme Editor make it very easy to customize the layout and the look & feel of your forms to match your organization’s branding. Check out our documentation to learn more about the Theme Editor.

5. Work with any object: Go beyond leads.

Do you need to handle a relationship between your lead and another Salesforce record? Like a Campaign, or a custom object? With FormAssembly, you can use custom links and hidden fields to store references, lookups to find records and field mapping to set relationships. Your form can update or create any type of object and handle any dependencies.

That’s it! Hopefully, this helped you get a better understanding on how to get the most out of your time with FormAssembly. Feel free to contact us with ideas, questions or hit us up on Twitter.

In this post, I’d like to show how you can accomplish this with FormAssembly and Salesforce.  Salesforce holds the data we want to show and update. Salesforce also provides the email and mail-merge feature we’ll need.

While we focus on Salesforce here, the same approach is valid with other software solutions, as long as they can handle the mail merge functionality. Email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp would work as well.

Overview:

Here’s an overview of the process:

1. From Salesforce, you send out a customized email, based on a template you define. The email includes a link to your form*.
2. The recipient opens the email and clicks on the link to load the form in a web browser.
3. The recipient fill out the form and clicks submit.
4. FormAssembly process the data and updates the matching record in Salesforce according to the instructions you defined in the Salesforce connector.

Step by Step Guide:

To set this up, you’ll want to start in this order:

1. Build Your Form (in FormAssembly)

First, build your form using our web-based Form Builder. We won’t go into too much details here, but you can visit this page if you need more information on building web forms.

Note that you often need to keep track of some unique identifiers that will let you link the submitted response back to the original record in Salesforce. Sometimes an email address can serve this purpose, but it’s often better to rely on a more unique identifier, like Salesforce’s internal record IDs. Those IDs are long and meaningless and don’t need to be visible in the form, so you’ll want to add a hidden field to store that ID. We’ll see in the step 3 how the correct value is populated.

2. Configure the Salesforce connector (in FormAssembly).

This is how the form will “close the loop” and update your records in Salesforce. You can see a 2mn screencast of this process here, or check out a more detailed documentation here. If you have defined in step 1  a field in your form to store the record’s unique identifier, you would configure the connector to look-up which record to update, based on the field value.

3.  Set up your email template in Salesforce.

Once you have set up your form, you are ready to set up your email template.  You will find that option in the left navigation column in Salesforce setup (Personal setup> Email> My Templates). Here you can compose your letter using the Salesforce merge fields to customize your template, but also prefill the form with the desired data.

To compose your email, you will need to know how to craft the link to your form. In FormAssembly, head to the ‘Publish‘ tab for the desired form and click the ‘Show how to prefill form data dynamically‘ link.

Your link will typically look like this:

http://www.tfaforms.com/90?tfa_Company={!Lead.Company}&tfa_LeadId={!Lead.id}

This form would be prefilled with the correct Lead ID (for tracking) and the company name. Which the respondent can choose to update if needed.

See also: How to populate a form with Salesforce data

In the the image below, the last name field in your form is represented by “tfa_LastName” and will be filled in by Salesforce once the email is sent.

In this example, the image below is what your respondent will see in their inbox.

We already know from the data we have that the respondent answered yes to question 1 and that her last name is Walker. By clicking on the link, these fields will automatically be filled in.

Hopefully, this will give you an overview and some understanding of the whole process. If you get stuck at any point while trying this out, please email us or open a support request and we’ll be happy to help!

This tool will let you pick any Salesforce object, including custom objects, and select which fields you’d like to see in your form. The form will be created as you go and will be ready to use as soon as you click ’save’.

You can check out the instructions here or try it for yourself (FormAssembly Professional Account and Salesforce account required).

If you tried this tool before, we just updated it today to ensure that it works with our latest Salesforce connector and the latest version of the Salesforce API, making the newest Salesforce field types available to the tool.

And if you’re familiar with our Salesforce integration but haven’t used this tool before, check it out, it’s a great time saver as it builds your form and set up your connector at the same time.

Example: Create Opportunity records with a simple web form. (field selection)

Example: Create Opportunity records with a simple web form. (form preview)

As always we welcome your feedback. Leave us a comment below, send us an email, leave a suggestion on our UserVoice forum, or follow us on Twitter. Thanks!

In the Salesforce Connector (version 2), it is now possible to use multiple choice fields as a parameter in lookup and update queries. For instance, if your form contains a drop-down menu, named “Color” with the possible values “Red”, “Yellow” and “Blue”, you can now ask the connector to find a Salesforce record where the Color field matches the submitted value.  Moreover, you can map each option to a different value if needed  (if, say, ‘Blue’ actually corresponds to ‘Navy Blue’ in Salesforce).

We’ve also made a significant update to what was previously called the HTTP POST Connector. You’ll notice now, if you look at the “Connectors” panel, it’s now called simply “HTTP Connector.”

We changed the title because the connector can now handle both the POST and GET methods. POST is still the default setting, but GET is available in a dropdown selector.

In addition, when set in “Interactive” mode the connector will handle errors from the remote service as if they are form submission errors. The respondent will see the error message that the remote service returns.

We’re working on a separate post that includes an example of using the new GET capabilities of the HTTP Connector.

If you have any comments on these updates, we’d love to hear them! Leave a note below, throw us a tweet, or send us an email.

Note that the connector will still show an error if the respondent fills out some, but not all, of the required fields for an object in the form. The connector will only skip an object that has no data whatsoever. If you don’t want respondents to be able to submit the form without certain information, be sure to mark those fields “required” when building the form in Form Builder.

We hope this update improves your experience with FormAssembly and the Salesforce Connector. We love to hear from you, so feel free to leave a comment below, say hi to us on Twitter, or just send us an email.

Merging Fields to Salesforce

We’ll assume that you have already selected the object type you need to create in Salesforce, so we’ll skip to selecting the Salesforce field within that object where you want to map the multiple form fields. Select the field from the list, and in the “Get Their Value From:” column, select “a formula.”

You need to know the aliases of the form fields you are merging. You can always check the aliases for your form fields by opening http://app.formassembly.com/forms/definition/FORM_ID (be sure to replace FORM_ID with your form’s ID number). Once you have the aliases, use the following formula:

@CONCATENATE(%%tfa_field1%%," ",%%tfa_field2%%)

Click “OK” to finalize the mapping.

This strategy is good for combining separate first and last name fields, or combining a three-field phone number collection into a single field.

Conditional Mappings

You can also use a formula to achieve some simple conditional behavior with your mapping. For example, if you have a conditional field on your FormAssembly form, you may want to send that field to Salesforce when it is filled out, but substitute a different field if it is not filled out. Start the mapping as above, by selecting the Salesforce field to which you wish to map the form responses, and then select “a formula.” In the formula box, use this formula:

@IF(%%tfa_field1%%, %%tfa_field1%%, %%tfa_field2%%)

This formula means, “If tfa_field1 is filled in, send tfa_field1 data, otherwise send tfa_field2 data.” This will prevent error messages that might otherwise occur if you mapped the two fields separately.

For example, see this sample form. This form gives the respondent the option to gift a membership to the sample organization. If the respondent selects “Yes” from “Is this a gift membership,” conditional fields appear to collect the recipient’s first and last name. If these are filled out, a Contact record should be created for the recipient. If the membership is not a gift, the Contact record should be created with the respondent’s answers in “Your Information.”

These formulas are not limited to Salesforce; you can use them with any of the other FormAssembly connectors as well.

1. You can now prevent overwrite with empty values.
2. The connector no longer stops at the first object creation failure.

Prevent Overwrite with Empty Values

We’ve added an option to prevent overwriting existing data with empty fields when updating a record. Previously, when updating a record, any field left blank in the FormAssembly form would cause existing information in Salesforce to be overwritten by the blank field. You now have the option of disabling this behavior, to ensure that existing information is not deleted.

To prevent existing data from being overwritten by blank fields, check the “Prevent overwrite with empty values on updates” box in the Salesforce version 2.0 connector.

Connector No Longer Stops at the First Object Creation Failure

Previously, if the connector was configured to create several Salesforce records, it would abort if one creation failed. For example, if a file attachment was mapped but not required, the connector would fail if no attachment was added by the respondent. Any remaining object creation would be skipped.

With this update, the connector will only skip dependent objects and  will attempt to create any other records defined in your mapping. Note that when the connector is set run in “Interactive” mode, the respondent would still see a message about the failed creation.

Thanks for your input regarding this new connector. We always love to hear from you, so feel free to leave a comment here, follow us on Twitter, or make a suggestion on our UserVoice forum.

We’d like to continue to encourage you to try the new connector, and now we’d also like to get your feedback through a survey. The survey is short and shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes (unless you provide very detailed answers, which we also love!). Your response will help us continue to improve the connector.

As always, if you find an issue with the connector, feel free to let us know by opening a support request or by joining the discussion on the forum.

This screencast features a simple web-to-lead form with an attachment, but you should be able to get a feel for how the new connector works. We’ll post a more complex example soon.

We’ve worked to make the new version of the connector more intuitive and more flexible. Here’s a quick overview of the main improvements:

• Improved user interface
• Improved lookup and deduplication abilities
• Better handling of object relationships
• Support for recent Salesforce updates, like rich text fields and Salesforce Content Library
• Allows creation of multiple records of a same object

Click the links to jump to individual descriptions.

Improved User Interface

We focused a lot on making the new connector easier to understand and use quickly. We started at the very beginning of the connector, and added a second field for the Security Token. You’ll now type your password and security token in separate fields. (As always, if you’ve set the appropriate login IP range in Salesforce, there’s no need to use a security token.)

The workflow for creating objects is also, hopefully, easier. You’ll choose the object you want to create first, then map fields to that object directly, without having to choose the object type for each mapping. We’ve also ensured that the required fields for each object appear automatically, so you can be sure that you don’t miss any.

In addition, it is no longer necessary to reset your credentials to refresh the Salesforce schema after making edits within Salesforce. At the bottom of the connector, you’ll see a link, “Refresh Salesforce schema.” Clicking this will reload the schema and make your changes visible in the connector.

Improved lookup and deduplication abilities

We’ve added a powerful lookup functionality. You can search for a record based on any field, with a number of different operators (equals, not equals, less than, greater than, and more). The connector can then execute different actions based on the result of the lookup.

For instance, you may want to create a Contact record only if an Account exists for the given Company name, or create a Lead otherwise. This is now possible using the branching logic associated with lookups.

Better handling of object relationships

As part of the new user interface, the relationship between parent and dependent objects is now visible. The connector will help you set the relationship correctly and will maintain it even in complex situations, for instance when a repeated section is used to create several different objects.

Support for recent Salesforce updates, like rich text fields and Salesforce Content Library

The new connector uses the latest version of the Salesforce API, so updating rich text fields and other new features like Salesforce Content is now possible.

Allows creation of multiple records of a same object

The new connector also addresses a limitation of the previous version. You can now create multiple instances of a single object without the need for a repeatable section.

We’d love to hear from you

We’ll put up a survey to get your reactions in a few days, but in the meantime, let us know if you have any problems. Also let us know if you create a setup you’re particularly proud of, or were unable to do previously. We’ll use your comments to continue to improve the connector. You can let us know in the comments, in the user forum, via Twitter, or through our contact form.