CRM data quality is crucial
We often believe that having set up a CRM such as Salesforce or Hubspot is the end of the journey. Unfortunately, many startups (or even scaleups) under estimate the complexity of entering qualitative information into their Salesforce / Hubspot CRM.
How do you currently make sure that you provide clean and neat information which will eventually fall into your unique source of Customer truth?
This is where No Code stands out of the crowd in order to offer powerful options to efficiently capture data from either Prospects, Customers or even our internal users at any time of their liefecycle.
Use case : Prospects qualification
Let’s focus on this specific use case, which is probably where you need rock solid automation in order to deal with significantly high volumes without degrading process performances.
Say that you need to qualify hundreds of new prospects a day. The output of this flow consists in deciding whether a given prospect is eligible for being passed on to your Sales team. You don’t want to mess around as each Prospect is quite expensive.
Option #1 : you want to create a form within your CRM to capture information then trigger relevant actions such as booking a meeting slot, sending email and filling key profiling fields.
Option #2: you want to think out of the box and design a great engagement to maximize Prospect’s experience during their first interaction with your company. Without any constraint.
You understand that going after Option #2 is where we want to lead you as you will unleash infinite capabilities.
Design your own flow with No Code
We are going to walk you through a live example of a top notch Acquisition flow which is dealing with thousands of inbound requests a month.
It all starts with a powerful form that will not only capture information but also serve as a smart guide to help your Lead Development Representatives team to properly drive their conversation and maximize conversion.
Let’s start with Typeform, the tool that we recommended in a previous post. And let’s look at hidden fields that we have to take into account at the very begining of the flow design.
Why using hidden fields in Typeform
Because we want to make sure that each qualification form falls into the right location within our CRM.
To make it possible, we create a link into our CRM targeting our Typeform, and embedding a few variables that we can use during the engagement flow, but also later on when it’s time to record all this information into our CRM.
In our live example, we have created a field formula into Salesforce to generate a URL that an LDR clicks each time they want to start a new conversation. This is how it looks.
We do use a lot of hidden fields to not only enrich the form but also to make sure that when we process the form into Integromat, we can manipulate all data that we need to trigger any possible action. No constraint…
Logic Jump to create a solid engagement flow
The power that lies behind Typeform’s Logic Jump capability is quite unprecedented for such price point. Thanks to this feature, you can not only create conditional jumps from on question to another, using either static data (such as numbers, string or dates), but also design your flow according to both actual values of previous questions and hidden fields.
As you can see below, the question #1 label refers to the phone number that we passed on to Typeform using a dedicated hidden field.
But what’s interesting here is that we look at the value of a specific hidden field (sfcurrentuserid) once a user has been answering question #1 to decide to either keep asking questions or close the form.
When you look at the right end side of the above picture, you see a map reflecting all conditional jumps of your scenario. This section is quite helpful to debug your flow and make sure that your design effectively makes sense.
Within this “Intro & Fast Screening” section, you see a blend of both hidden fields and logic jumps that allows us to steer our LDR team super efficiently by displaying customer information (“Hello my name is….”, “I would like to talk to…”) and skipping questions when not applicable. As we want this qualification phase as quick as possible.
In addition, you understand that we’ve been organizing our form into Question Groups (the red label as shown below) for 2 reasons. Firstly, it makes your Typeform much easier to maintain as you can move all child questions at once, saving a lot of time. Secondly, it helps us drastically replicate the engagement logic into Integromat and ensure that we do not lose any information in translation.
Qualifying prospects is a good idea. But it becomes truly valuable when you’re able to turn this process into tangible actions and move closer towards effective conversion.
This is why the demo scheduling section is so important at that stage as it will impact your company but also will bring your Prospect to the next level of brand engagement. As such, Typeform will help you capture dates, times, emails and mobile phones in a normalized way. Thus, your Integromat flow will rely on a solid set of variables to trigger value-added actions.
In the last screenshot below, we take the time to review all key information in order to ask for final validation from our LDRs.. This is typically the kind of check which is hardly achievable within a conventional CRM. Especially when mixing data coming from both Customers and Salesforce in our example.
In that respect, Typeform brings a level of flexibility which is going to help us design a powerful Integromat scenario.
From Typeform to Integromat
Now that we benefit from a substantial amount of qualitative and normalized data, it’s time to turn them into actionable business tasks. This is when Integromat steps in.
As illustrated in the picture below, our Integromat scenario is not so much a linear approach. The reason behind this decision is that we wanted to mimic our Typeform structure to ease maintenance.
You’re more than aware that designing advanced business processes is a complex exercise that implies careful adjustments to preserve the viability of operational flows.
To illustrate this approach, we have zoomed into the scenario to show you how each branch relates to a specific exit of our Acquisition Typeform.
In particular, we use routers to document the flow and split it to make the overall scenario more readable. As you see below, the first 4 branches are sequenced in the exact same order as within our Typeform, starting with a “No answer” processing, followed by a “Fake Request” output, then a “Not available” situation and a final “Need to re-schedule” situation.
Cleaning Customer information
First and foremost, we want to make sure that critical data such as first name, last name, email address and mobile phone are 100% accurate within our CRM.
In our Acquisition Typeform, we always check each sensitive information with our Customer. Should the data passed form our CRM on to Typeform is not correct, we capture the correct value into a specific question. The image below illustrates it properly.
Then, within Integromat, we take this information into consideration in order to either clean the genuine data using a startcase formula, or replace the CRM value with the one captured during the qualification call.
Hidden fields to detect Lead Time Zone
Another great option we can benefit from hidden fields passed from Typeform to Integromat is also the ability to derive actionable data.
In this example, we are capable of computing the exact time zone a lead shall be related to in order to carefully plan meetings without any risk of timing mismatch. Have you ever experienced such disaster when planning 1 hour late or 2 hours too early? This is what you want to avoid fore sure…
To make this feature possible, we relied on Integromat Data Store feature which allows ones to easily create a quick data base to be accessible from any scenario. In this context, we just created 3 different entries for France, Spain and Italy to which we compare our Country hidden field in order to retrieve the right time zone.
Enhanced CRM enrichment
Thanks to Integromat, we are now in a position to update our CRM with approved information. But we can go on set beyond by changing on the fly the nature of captured data so that it fits our Salesforce requirements.
In the below example, we made a customer-oriented drop-down list into Typeform to ask whether the lead was the right decision maker. Options offer to the responder were either YES, NO or MAYBE.
However, in Salesforce, the field created to store this information is a boolean, waiting for a YES / NO value. The power of Integromat makes this change super easy with the combination of a few text formulas such as if(), contains() and upper().
Due to the fact that our Acquisition form captures 50+ key pieces of information, it would have been a nightmare to ask an LDR to manually enter directly all this data into either Salesforce or Hubspot CRM.
How would you expect a really high level of data integrity without designing a seamless automated flow able to collect, transform and store massive set of information easily?
This is typically what the combination of Typeform, Integromat and Salesforce allows us to achieve.
Scheduling meetings
Here we go: it’s time to book a demo for the most qualified Leads that have just been screened by our team of LDRs.
First, we need to compile all information coming from the discussion between our Prospect and the LDR so that our Salesrep is fully knowledgeable about his/her new target. We use the String module in Integromat to generate a nice summary that we’ll call in further modules.
Then we take the time to clean the date/time meeting otherwise we might be running into troubles. This step is crucial as passing a date/time between 2 applications can lead to data loss relative to time zones. What if you book to late or too early? You’re just throwing money out!
First of all, we isolate Hours and Minutes coming from Typeform. When numbers captured are lesser than 10, we add an extra 0. For instance, if the hour entered by the Lead is 9, we turn it into 09. Same with minutes.
Then we generate a final date/time based upon Salesforce taxonomy (that also applies to many other platforms). To make a long story short, we use a norm called YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.SSSZ format which guarantees that your date/time is never altered when passing from an application to another.
To achieve this, we use the Integromat formatDate() formula into which which inject the time zone that we’ve previously detected.
At that stage, we’re left with formally saving the right slots into both Prospect and Salesrep’s calendars.
In addition, we want to keep all teams on fire by notifying all Acquisition and Sales teammates in real time each time a new Prospect has been qualified and passed on to the Sales department.
Discord is the perfect tools to capture all these events and share business notifications to the largest possible set of people.
As you see in the image below, our preparation steps make it simple to create final action items and send out effective invitation to all parties, in a very professional way.
Wrap-up
In this article, we’ve learnt how to create advanced Typeforms to reflect and support top notch Customers / Prospects’ engagement flows.
We’ve also been working with hidden fields that unleash the capability of passing information back and forth between different applications such as Salesforce or Hubspot CRM, Typeform and Integromat.
We spent some time on preparing an Integromat scenario capable of digesting our Acquisition flow in a way that would make it simple to maintain in the long run.
In particular, we paid attention to the best approach to clean inbound data sets, improve Customer Experience with our time zone detection example, but also enrich our CRM with normalized and/or adjusted information.
Lastly, we highlighted the way we were booking meetings by sticking to international date/time formatting and and triggering Customer-oriented actions such as Salesforce calendar booking or Google Calendar invitation.