Many people might dismiss Salesfore as something that isn’t important; however, that being said as a front end web developer this is something you will encounter, and you should learn and fully figure out how to use. I won’t be able to post screenshots from the Salesforce Dashboards because it could reveal sensitive information and can’t have that.

Moving On…

What is Salesforce…

Salesforce is a CRM system which stands for Customer Relationship Manager. It is a way for companies, who collect a lot of user data, to analyze their audience and get information to them. For the companies that collect this data, this can help them analyze and improve customer relations.

What will I do with it?

You will have to learn how to set up lead forms. This is probably the most important thing you will have to learn, setting up web to lead forms. This is the way companies get users. Where are these lead forms on websites? These are filling out sign up forms and contact forms. Its all there. Salesforce allows for a simple export as a HTML form where you just select all the fields you want, and it exports it in a table. Now what you can actually do is customize this to your liking.

Integrations??? Maybe…

Salesforce has a ton of integrations, there are several plugins for wordpress, and many upon many CMS systems. Even MailChimp and Shopify. There are so many different plugins that will connect it to everything and anything. Usually some of these integrations will allow the users to choose what data they want to collect and having to set it all manually through Salesforce is not necessary.

Some Things To Note

Now some of the things you will have to stay focused on are the field types and the data that is collected through them. Cause I recognize that what people will do is have a field type set to something like a regular text field but the data type is set to drop down. That is probably one of the biggest reasons why people don’t collect data from certain fields or Salesforce renders the lead bad cause its not collecting the field types.

Another error I have run into from time to time, is the lead sources which basically tell the company where the hell are all these sign ups are coming from. Well its simple, they are set by the lead sources. Now how do you set them while they are in a dropdown form? Simple really, you hide them! you just assign them in the form fields and then you hide them! simple really.

A error that can pop up on occasion is if lets say you set up a form, it works, it collects data and then…it stops…For a word to wise, this can be if the plugin you are using needs to be updated and changes the way the data is called or even if someone decides to change the form data type, it will reflect onto whatever form you had set up. So if you switch a dropdown to something else, it will and can cause the form to break.

In Closing…

Salesforce is one of the top and most widely used programs for collecting leads. This is something you will run into sooner or later and taking the time to learn it will definitely raise some eyebrows and if you move into companies that sell stuff this will more than likely be something you will HAVE to use and learn how to use. You don’t need to know the complete in’s and outs but learning how to collect leads will definitely help you out in the future.

 

See you space cowboy…