Lead intake via web lead forms can be tricky for organizations that have a fluid and evolving funnel where lead generation, nurturing, re-marketing, and offline activities are combined within the Salesforce Lead object.
Salesforce features a simple web-to-lead function that makes it incredibly easy to push leads into your Salesforce org. However, left unmanaged, pumping data into Salesforce without a plan can quickly turn the Salesforce Lead object into a data wasteland with duplicate Contacts, Accounts, and Activities.
There is more than one approach to managing Lead intake in Salesforce. For organizations that manage their marketing and sales within Salesforce, I have run into three approaches over the years deployed with varying levels of success:
- Marketing automation platforms: These are used to generate and handle incoming records from form submissions before they become Lead records in Salesforce.
- Manage Lead records in Salesforce: Web-to-lead forms directly insert data into Salesforce. Lead records are then processed and managed within Salesforce using one or a combination of Flows, AppExchange apps, and end-user intervention.
- An API or data staging approach: Implemented to connect to Salesforce, in this scenario, web-to-lead data is pre-processed and validated before reaching Salesforce.
No solution is perfect – and that’s okay.
In this article, we are going to focus on the third approach, where data from web forms are pre-processed before web-to-lead using Zapier, a workflow automation tool.
Note: This article is not an advertisement or endorsement for Zapier, and there are many alternatives, free and paid to accomplish similar data automation workflows.
What is Zapier?
Zapier is a workflow automation tool that processes and moves data between multiple cloud apps – essentially stitching different tools together in a “if this, then that” way. They have multi-path flows that I have found particularly useful for designing and communicating my Lead intake process.
You can see an example of this mapping canvas below:
Creating (or Repairing) a Web-to-Lead Process
Before I jump into the technology nuts and bolts, it’s critical to start with the process, goals, business semantics, and definitions. No code solutions allow for the fast and easy creation of data workflows, but like any technology project, you need clear requirements.
The following topics of conversation need to be clear to the marketing and Salesforce teams to gain their approval, to avoid implementing a technology solution that compounds Lead data quality problems.
- Identify Lead record types: What is the definition of a Lead record semantically and what kind of Lead record types exist?
- Identify a qualified lead criteria: What is the criteria for a qualified Lead where it advances in the funnel after it is loaded into Salesforce?
- Identify Lead conversion criteria: What qualifications need to exist to convert a Lead to an Account/Opportunity?
- Identify “lead sources”: What “lead sources” are truly unique in their behavior and treatment? What web-to-lead forms exist to support those sources?
The resulting classification of Leads as they move through the top of your funnel, “lead sources”, and conversion criteria is a useful knowledge asset that will help you define complete requirements.
Align Lead Intake and Handling
With the requirements complete, now we get into the process responsible for inserting leads into Salesforce.
At the end of this exercise, you may discover rogue processes pumping leads into Salesforce that no one uses. If clear definitions are missing, I would start with the following as a grounding exercise.
- What process and web-to-lead forms are inserting records into Salesforce?: Ask for an inventory of “lead sources” and what actions are driving traffic to the web-to-lead forms. I typically like a mind map as a simple visual to get everyone on the same page. This is a point in time when you may have to engage your web development team.
- Call to Action Origin: A call to action drives prospects, leads, and customers to your website and can result in a web-to-lead form submission. This information is helpful as many duplicate data problems can be circumvented by modifying the call to action in your remarketing and nurturing activities.
- New Lead: The first time a Lead enters the funnel with new contact information and new needs and expectations.
- How do you determine what makes a Lead unique?: This is particularly important for designing rules for “duplicate” Lead submissions and how to match new web-to-lead form submissions to existing records in Salesforce.
- Duplicate Lead: When you determine what makes a Lead unique, you can back into what makes a Lead a duplicate. This is a generic definition that I use as a starting point: a duplicate Lead should be handled when a Lead attempts to enter Salesforce when they have the same contact information and have the same needs and expectations from the first web-to-lead.
Building Lead Intake Control with Zapier
Documenting this information can be laborious, but presents a great opportunity to bring your marketing, web development, and Salesforce teams together to refine an important series of information assets.
Using Zapier, I constructed a new process that inserts Lead records into Salesforce that are ‘aware’ of the potential existence of the person filling out a new web-to-lead form.
In this scenario, I am either updating a Lead that already exists with supplemental information, creating a new Lead, or generating a new activity for a Contact record that already moved through the sales funnel.
Step One: Search for Existing Records
First, Zapier is connected to my web form tool as the triggering event. In other words, when someone fills out my web-to-lead form, Zapier receives the data and executes the workflow in real-time.
Once the data is received, Zapier searches Salesforce for an existing Contact record followed by a Lead record. Zapier provides methods to search by a single field for single or multiple records. In my own business, I use email as a “lead identifier” to solve over 90% of the use cases.
I am using Zapier formatters to handle calculating the days since the last Lead and pull the domain for referral traffic so I know which domain(s) leads are coming from (Google, Bing, Reddit, etc).
Step Two: Build Paths Based on Customer Relationship
The paths in this example were designed on the existing relationship with the customer where I have three potential outcomes:
- Update an existing Lead
- Create a new Lead
- Log activity for a Contact
I select a path that updates the existing Lead if it is not converted, and was created within 30 days. You can add more conditions for more fine-grained control, but it can quickly become unmanageable as the benefits of “no-code” start to diminish. I recommend simple and easy-to-explain patterns.
Step Three: Track Multiple Web-to-Lead Submissions
One question that inevitably arises when suppressing web-to-lead form entries is how to track and determine multiple web-to-lead submissions. Campaigns/campaign member is a Salesforce-native mechanism to create one-to-many relationships between a Lead and unique Campaign activities.
In my case, I have a second custom object called Web Source Details that holds all of the marketing tracking data. That way, when one Lead submits multiple web-to-lead forms, I can keep track of Salesforce’s multiple submissions from the Lead or Contact, based on the “lead source”. I can also retain all of the UTM and referral source information so I know what marketing activities are working independently.
Summary
The end result of using Zapier or any similar data automation is cleaner data with fast and flexible configuration. Having an easy visual to explain every web-to-lead path into Salesforce is very useful in combination with other documentation assets in this article. Hopefully, this end-to-end example helps you as you design and implement your web-to-lead funnels with marketing teams inside of Salesforce.
Feel free to share your experiences and tricks using Zapier and similar data automation platforms in the comments below!