Salesforce is the leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform for businesses and non-profits and WordPress is the leading content management system (CMS) in the world, so it only makes sense to leverage the power of both of these outstanding platforms together by using your website to collect and manage incoming customer sales leads. There are a number of different methods to achieve this.
Salesforce Web to Lead
The simplest, but also the least flexible, is to utilize Saleforce’s native ‘web to lead’ form generator and then insert the provided HTML code onto the WordPress page where you want to capture the leads. The primary limitation of this is that it does not give you much flexibility over the look and feel of the form, and as a result can clash with your existing WordPress theme. Additionally, this method only allows you to populate leads in Salesforce, not any object like some of the other options described below.
Salesforce Web to Lead WordPress Plugin
A more seamless way to utilize the native web to lead form for Salesforce is to use the WordPress plugin: Brilliant Web-to-Lead for Salesforce which allows you to create the form in the comfort of your WordPress dashboard, better integrate with the look and feel of your site, and put the form anywhere you’d like on your site via a shortcode or widget. However, in addition to the same limitation as the stand alone web to lead form on populating objects, there is also the chance that this plugin could eventually cease active development, forcing you to adapt another method. This is always a risk when using any plugin besides the absolutely most established and widely used of the bunch. Think monthly updates, over a million total users vs. this plugin which as of today hasn’t been updated in a year, and has only 8000 total users.
Gravity Forms Salesforce Plugin Add on
We’ve been ranting and raving about the ease of use, flexibility, and power of Gravity Forms recently, so what better way to integrate with Saleforce than to use the best WordPress form builder available. Though the implementation is a bit more involved than using the web to lead options presented above, there is a greater ability to feed salesforce with additional data, including populating any standard or custom object with data, not just leads, and you’re able to enjoy all the many fabulous features Gravity Forms offers.
There are a couple of different ways to achieve this. If you search for ‘Gravity Forms Salesforce plugin’ you’ll likely stumble upon the following plugin in the WordPress plugin repository: Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-on. This may seem like the most straight forward way to integrate Gravity Forms and Salesforce, but upon closer inspection, you’ll see that as of this writing, the plugin has not been updated in over 4 years, which in the world of the web, is a lifetime. Until this plugin is updated and regularly supported again, we advise you to use at your own risk (or better yet, don’t use at all). There is a newer fork of the plugin which is not in the WordPress plugin repository, but appears to be actively supported at this point, so this would be a safer bet if you opt to go this route.
Our recommended method is to utilize the popular Zapier Gravity Forms add on and to take advantage of the pre made template for integrating Gravity Forms with Salesforce. It is worth noting that this is the method recommended by Gravity Forms, as well as one of a number of methods recommended by Saleforce. With this approach, you are relying only on Gravity Forms and Zapier, both of which are well established and robust tools, and the pre-existing template for using the two to integrate with Salesforce makes the process fairly straight forward.
Third Party Form Builders
If you require greater power than Gravity Forms provides, and are willing to shell out for the substantially greater cost, Form Assembly is a stand alone powerful all-in-one form creation tool that also integrates well with Saleforce and WordPress, and allows for some additional features such as bidirectional integration between the two platforms.
Which Salesforce and WordPress Integration to Choose?
The above methods are just a sampling of the many ways to connect Salesforce and WordPress, and it’s worth mentioning that we have plenty of experience building custom integrations as well. If you have an existing Saleforce account that doesn’t play well (or at all) with your WordPress site, or if you’re curious how you might leverage an existing form on your WordPress site to start a sales marketing campaign via Saleforce, please get in touch, and we’ll be happy to listen to your needs and help work out the best solution for you.
