Most of my blog posts come from customer enquiries, design sessions and projects. This particular post is no exception. Recently, I was introduced to a customer who has seen a 400% increase in web visitors in the past year. They receive requests online through their websites for a variety of things: Join a Mailing List, Create an Account, Request a Contact and Request an Art Proof.
Currently, they have a fairly manual process of receiving and processing the lead. They have a web-service provider that hosts their website; and then captures the leads in an SQL Database. From that point, they have to manually download the leads to a file. From there, the leads are reviewed manually to determine who should be the appropriate sales manager to handle the request. The CEO asked the question, “Can Microsoft Dynamics do any of this for us?” Great question. For the answer, I looked to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.
From the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 dashboard, I went to Sales –> Internet Lead Capture, as illustrated below:
As I had not created a Landing Page before, I selected “Create a new landing page”. The first step is to set up the page appearance, which includes:
Once you have selected these, click the “Next” button on the bottom of the page to move to the next step. The next step involves providing the various page elements, which will provide the web browser with your company’s information:
Further down, you will selection the Title for your form. I chose “Let us help your business grow” as a sample phrase to use on the landing page. Below that, you will select the fields that you want your individual leads to complete before submitting. I chose: Company Name, First Name, Last Name, E-Mail, City, State and Zip. You can also add a company logo. I chose “ENTER” as the button text that users will “click” to submit their information. Lastly, I entered a URL that users would be passed to after they submitted their information via the web form. Click the “Next” button on the bottom of the page to move to the next step.
The Review and Confirm step allows you to take a look at your newly-defined website prior to committing the changes to the CRM database. Here’s a quick picture of the one I created as a sample:
Once you click “FINISH”, you then have the following options:
These steps allow you to go out and view your newly-created web-page. I entered some sample information in mine to check to make sure that it would work. Below is the resulting website, with my sample lead information typed in:
Now I can go back to my Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 environment to review my leads. Again, from the Sales (or Marketing) I selected Internet Lead Capture to review the leads I have collected. Here are the three sample leads from my website:
So there we go! It took 5 times as long to write this blog post as it did to create a fully-functional internet lead capture website! So getting back to the CEO, it is now possible in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to use the URL forms from this process in some of the existing marketing and lead capture processes.
We’ll be exploring how to utilize, route and conditionally respond to these leads in a later Blob Post – so stay tuned in.
Good luck in your implementations!