We realize that sometimes help documentation isn’t quite enough, and you just want someone to walk you through a process once or twice. We can’t do exactly that, but hopefully this tutorial will be able to bridge the gap for you.

A web-to-Lead forms is an essential component of marketing and sales automation. Its purpose is to capture data submitted by website visitors, such as contact information and product interest, and store it as a “Lead” record in a CRM product, in this case Salesforce.com.

Before you start this tutorial, you’ll need a FormAssembly account (if you don’t have one yet, you can sign up for our Professional Plan here) and a Salesforce.com Professional Edition (or above) account.

To simplify this tutorial, we’ll use this Salesforce Web-to-Lead template.

Create your form.

1. Open the Sample Contact Form in the Form Builder.
If you would like to customize the form, do so now. If you don’t need to customize it, move on to Step Two.

2. Click the “Save” button and exit the Form Builder.
If you need to change the display options (save & resume, preview response, SSL, or CAPTCHA) or notifications options (thank you page redirects, auto-responders, and email notification), go ahead and do that now. You can also do this later if you find your needs for your form change.

3. Open the Connector tab.
Click the “configure” link next to the Salesforce connector.

Salesforce Connector Setup

Enable the Salesforce Connector
To enable the connector, change the “run mode” option from “disabled” to “interactive”.

Enter Salesforce credentials
Enter your Salesforce username. In the password input, enter your password and your security token. You can obtain a new security token by selecting “Setup” within Salesforce, then “Reset your security token.” Once you’ve entered this information, click “Check.”

Map fields
Once your Salesforce credentials have been accepted, you’re ready to start mapping the fields in your form to fields in Salesforce. In the “Source Type” column, select webform. The “Source” column will be populated with a dropdown menu of all the fields in the form. In the “Salesforce Object” column, select the Salesforce object you want to create or update with the connector. A form can edit or update more than one object. In the “Salesforce Field” menu, select the field that corresponds to the form field in “Source.”

Click “Map a new field” as necessary to map all the web form fields to Salesforce.

Save your connector
Click the save button and you’re done setting up your Salesforce connector for this form.

Start using your form
Once you’ve finished setting up the connector, you’re ready to test your form and get it out to your customers. To do this, go to the “Publish” tab, and click the link to go to your form. Fill out the form and click submit. Within a few seconds you should see the new data in your Salesforce account. Once you’ve confirmed that the form is properly connected to your Salesforce account, your form is ready to be used.

Web-to-lead is one of the most common uses of FormAssembly’s Salesforce integration, but you can also use FormAssembly to update or create almost any type of record in Salesforce. Our documentation provides ideas for other ways to use FormAssembly and Salesforce, as well as providing help for advanced procedures.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Documentation, Salesforce Integration, Tips and Best Practices, Web Form Creation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.