You need to get information from your website into Salesforce, especially for Leads for new clients.
If you are on full WordPress you can use Gravity Forms for Salesforce plugin – it is a free plugin to Gravity Forms, and it can be used on all versions of Salesforce – with Web to Lead for the lower end versions of Salesforce, and Web to Anything, via the API with higher end versions of Salesforce.
If you are not using Gravity Forms, you can use the WordPress-to-lead plugin.
You can also use Integration services like Zapier, as detailed in my previous post on Integrations, however Salesforce is a premium pricing level in Zapier.
Wufoo Forms is another app that does Salesforce Integration, but not really very well. About the only time you would use Wufoo integration with Salesforce is if you were a NFP with a WordPress.com site. Wufoo is a great option for nice forms for a WordPress.com site (see my previous post on using Wufoo with WordPress.com), but as there are so many other options for full WordPress, I would not use Wufoo except for on WordPress.com.
Wufoo requires Enterprise version of Salesforce. So if you can afford Enterprise version of Salesforce, you can afford a website that can do forms that have better integration than Wufoo. NFP’s get 10 users on Enterprise version of Salesforce for free, and WordPress.com is free, so that is the only reason why the combination of using Enterprise Salesforce and WordPress.com would come up.
The biggest limitation in using Wufoo is that it can’t deal with Custom Fields at all. Yes, a Wufoo form can create a Lead in Salesforce and transfer the Name, Email Address and Phone Number fields directly into Salesforce in an instant and for that it is great! But, all of the other fields on your beautiful Wufoo form are only visible in a note attached to the Lead. So you have to spend a lot of time copying and pasting values from the note into fields in Salesforce. Is it worth it?
If you have to copy and paste so many fields anyway, you may as well just get all the details in an email, and copy and paste all the details into Salesforce. All of this copying and pasting has the potential to introduce errors, and errors introduced at the Lead stage will flow through your whole systems.
Of course, there are other ways to get Leads from a Website into Salesforce:
- Use the standard Web to Lead form that is created from Salesforce – see this video
- Use custom code see this post using curl
- Use a Salesforce App like Email to Something that takes a particularly formatted email and creates any object in Salesforce, but it is difficult to set up, and I did not find it 100% reliable.
There is a list of other Web to Salesforce options in this post by Cloud4Good and this post by the Salesforce Foundation and there are other apps on the App Exchange for doing Web to Lead.
So in summary, do set up a Web to Lead form at from your Website to Salesforce, but think about it, and use the right tool for the job. Unfortunately Wufoo is not really the right tool.
Another great application for processing forms from your website to Salesforce is FormAssembly.com
Not only can it create any Object (including custom objects and custom fields) it can check for existing records and update those (instead of creating duplicates). It can also create related (child) records after it has created/updated the parent. (i.e Create the Account, Contact related to the Account and an Opportunity related to the Account upon a single form submission.)
We have used it to manage events registrations creating/updating Campaign Member status to track who has accepted or declined an event.
Furthermore it can load files (pictures, resumes, etc) plus many other features.
You will need to purchase the professional edition at $39/month but there is a 30-day money back guarantee plus (non for profit organisations can get 3 months free).