It's embarrassing. We've been using web forms to push Sitecore analytics to Salesforce leads with S4S since 2013 but not for a second thought about not using web forms. Then along came a customer who said, "We need to see web analytics in Salesforce but we don't use Sitecore forms!". What! Who does that? 

The use case was a sales rep needing to view, in Salesforce, the website behavior after an email recipient clicked on a link in an email. Before revealing the solution, a quick note on why you need Sitecore analytics in Salesforce. Simply put, it provides the sales team with more intelligence about their prospects and customers. More information leads to higher conversion rates i.e. more sales.

First, you need a unique identifier in each Salesforce lead or contact record. We do this at create time using a formula field or a trigger. Avoid using the Salesforce object id as that introduces a security risk. Now that you have a unique id you need to map that field to your Marketing Automation Solution (MAS). Of course, your MAS needs to have the Salesforce mapping capability, as does Salesforce Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Oracle Eloqua, and Adobe Marketo, to name a few.

The MAS is all about sending automated emails and usually, the email should have links to drive traffic to your website (hopefully built with Sitecore). When composing the email link in your MAS you need to ensure your unique identifier is a parameter of the URL. That way, when a visitor arrives at the site, Sitecore code can strip off the identifier and use S4S, or your integration code, to find the Salesforce lead or contact record that the identifier belongs to.

Workflow when creating leads from Salesforce

At this point, there are many paths you can go on because you now have a primary key (the unique identifier) in all three systems, Sitecore, Salesforce and your MAS. Taking the easy path with S4S, simply update the matching Salesforce record with the Sitecore Contact Id (or the Alias Id for Sitecore 9 and over), and the next time the S4S Analytics Scheduler runs, the Sitecore analytics are pushed to the Salesforce record. Job done! Your sales team are now armed with a raft of data that will help them prepare for the sales call.

If you are keen to go to the next level and start personalizing your MAS emails based on what the visitor has been doing on the Sitecore website, that can be achieved by mapping the S4S Analytics fields in your Salesforce lead or contact records to the MAS. Your emails can then have content tailored to the products they reviewed, or goals they have reached, on the website.

FuseIT is expert at integrating Sitecore CMS websites with Salesforce CRM using S4S. To learn more about how to add value to your business in this way please contact us for more information.