Salesforce Integration: Make Every Form Submission Count

Once you have invested significant time and money and finally managed to bring visitors to your website to generate leads, what then? The moment a visitor fills out a website form, valuable information disappears.

Every form submission is an opportunity to understand the prospect, to measure your marketing performance, to personalize future interactions, and to move that prospect further down the sales funnel. For organizations that use Salesforce as their CRM, integrating their website with Salesforce ensures that this valuable information becomes actionable across the org (sales, marketing, customer service), instead of being isolated in the website. 

A Salesforce integration with your website transforms your website from a digital brochure into a powerful and intelligent business platform. Instead of treating these precious incoming forms as isolated events, each interaction becomes data with structure that fuels your marketing, sales, customer service, and executive reporting.

While many organizations use other CRMs or simply store form submissions within their website, this article focuses on orgs that have already invested in Salesforce and what to get more value from that investment.

Your Website Is Your Largest Source of Customer Data

Often, your website is where your relationship with a prospect begins. Visitors look around and browse your products and services, register, subscribe, or just ask for more information. Every click around your website is telling more of the story of this person and what they need.

But a form cannot capture the story by itself.

If Salesforce isn’t properly connected, then the sales team receives only the bits of information typed into a handful of fields. And we all remember that discussion where the fields were limited intentionally so as not to be a barrier to receiving any information at all.

Rather than scraps like a name and email address, your organization can have a more complete story, including where the visitor came from, what pages they looked at, what content most interested them, and how engaged they are. Instead of every visitor being thought of as an equally valuable lead, Salesforce can help the team determine who is just browsing and who is ready to “sign on the dotted line.”

Instead of just having some data points, Salesforce builds and stores a complete history of every customer relationship. 

Every Form Submission Should Tell a Bigger Story

A website form, instead of being viewed as the finish line of your marketing campaign, should be seen as closer to the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.

When your visitor completes a contact form, several things should happen.

The submission should create or update a record in Salesforce. Duplicate records are identified. The details of the campaign should be preserved. The prospect should be put into the appropriate lifecycle stage. They should be automatically enrolled in ongoing “nurture” campaigns, and the internal dashboards should alert the sales team to a new opportunity.

All of this should happen quickly, automatically, and without any human intervention.

When this integration between your website and Salesforce is set up and optimized, your team will spend less time entering data and more time building and sustaining valuable relationships.

Attribution Is More Than Knowing Where Someone Came From

One of the great advantages of Salesforce website integration is gaining an understanding of where exactly this lead came from.

That tells the marketing team which ad campaign generated the best opportunities, if the webinars were helpful in producing qualified leads, and how valuable the organic search results have been compared to all of that paid advertising. Without connected systems, answering these extremely important questions involves a lot of spreadsheets, too many assumptions, and gaps in understanding.

When Salesforce receives campaign information alongside the form submissions, your marketing team gets a clearer picture of the customer’s entire journey. Referral sources, landing pages, ad campaigns, email clicks, and even offline marketing efforts can be connected to this lead.

Instead of measuring the number of form submissions, your organization can measure the actual revenue generated by every marketing channel. This instantly changes how future monies are allocated. So, rather than investing based on clicks or impressions, your organization can invest in opportunities throughout the pipeline.

Lifecycle Stages Create Alignment across Teams

Another benefit of Salesforce integration is lifecycle management. We should no longer be looking at contacts as either leads or customers; the modern customer journey is more nuanced than that. For example, an anonymous website visitor may become a subscriber, download a few resources, attend a webinar, request pricing, speak with sales, buy, become a regular customer, and eventually become an active advocate spreading your praises all over their social media universe.

Each of these steps represents a different stage in the lifecycle of this person. Salesforce allows your organization to automatically update these lifecycle stages based on website behavior and form activity. Instead of relying on the time-consuming manual updates from the sales team, such movements around the organization become automatically charted.

The results, then, are that the marketing team knows when it’s time to nurture them. The sales team knows when they are ready to be reached out to, leadership gains increased visibility into the health of the pipeline at all stages, and all of this alignment saves staff time, improves response time, and enhances the customer experience, leading to more of the outcome the organization wants.

Intelligent Forms Improve Data Quality

Your visitors are unique individuals coming to your website for a variety of different reasons, so why should they all receive the same forms? Sure, first-time visitors may need to provide some basic contact information, but a returning visitor (known to Salesforce) shouldn’t keep filing out the same forms. Salesforce-connected websites can recognize existing contacts and progressively add more information on this visitor over time.

We can avoid overwhelming a first-time visitor and instead collect data gradually.

The first form might ask for their name and email. That’s painless.

The second might request their industry and company size.

The third could be looking for their ideal timeline.

Such progressive profiling both improves conversion rates through the building of a more complete picture of a potential client’s needs. The visitor gets shorter forms, and if they do engage more, they still get short forms, but sales receives what they need to serve the customer better. Everyone benefits.

Personalization Begins with Good Data

Website personalization has become one of the most effective ways of improving engagement. But personalization depends on data. You can’t wish them “Happy Birthday” every time they stop by. Eventually, you’ll be right, but still.

When Salesforce shares its rich database of customer information with the website, it can begin to tailor the customer’s experience based on many things, including their lifecycle stage, previous interactions, geography, and product interest. Instead of seeing the same messaging, a returning visitor can be greeted with new and more personal information. And we are also being respectful of their time by presenting them with relevant information rather than asking them to sort through the website on their own.

Automation Starts the Moment Someone Clicks Submit

One of the greatest strengths of Salesforce, and what happens when it gets integrated with your website, is the automation of sophisticated workflows that occurs immediately as a visitor submits a form.

• A salesman receives an instant alert.
• The marketing platform starts its personalized email journey.
• An account executive can get an alert if the lead score is high enough.
• The customer care team might get a nudge for support.
• An event registration can alert that team.
• The executive dashboards will get updated in real time.

These lightning-quick responses eliminate the delays that often cause even well-meaning organizations to lose qualified prospects. We all know from personal experience that the faster we are replied to, the more confidence we have in the business or organization we are looking at. By eliminating the need for manual intervention and leaning on the power of automation, the whole team is brought into the loop, and the prospect is much happier.

Better Data Leads to Better Decisions

Executives frequently ask questions that become difficult to answer when website and CRM systems are disconnected.

Which marketing campaigns generate the most revenue?

Which landing pages create the highest-quality leads?

How long does it take prospects to become customers?

Which forms have the highest abandonment rates?

Which industries convert most frequently?

Without integrated reporting, these answers require hours of manual analysis. With Salesforce integration, dashboards become significantly more valuable because every website interaction contributes to business intelligence.

Marketing leaders gain confidence in campaign performance. Sales managers understand pipeline health. Executives see revenue trends tied directly to digital initiatives. Instead of reporting activity, organizations begin reporting outcomes.

The Competitive Advantage of Connected Experiences

One of the challenges in a rapidly changing marketplace is staying up with customer expectations. Because the giants like Amazon have gone so far down the road with personalization and a curated buying experience, the average visitor to your website expects more of the experience than you may be aware of.

They expect you to remember their previous interactions, respond quickly, and provide information that’s relevant to them. They don’t know or care about your separate departments, systems, and databases that are preventing this from occurring. By integrating Salesforce with your website, you are in a much better position to meet these expectations.

And why wouldn’t you want to make them happier while simultaneously capturing and organizing valuable information that you can use to strengthen your relationship with a visitor into potentially a long-term relationship?

Turn Website Activity into Business Intelligence

Your website should be doing much more than simply collecting names and email addresses. It should be active in improving your sales and marketing strategy through feeding Salesforce meaningful and actionable data that supports every stage of the customer journey.

Instead of wondering which marketing efforts are working or which leads need follow-up, you’ll have the knowledge to turn interactions into profits while gaining happier team members and satisfied customers.

New Target has a great deal of experience in helping organizations build websites that work toward the bottom line, and by completing a Salesforce integration with your website, we can create a connected digital experience that improves conversions and strengthens the bottom line, whatever that means for your organization, be it a for-profit, nonprofit, or government agency. Contact us.