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Lead Forms for CRM 2011 Rock

Post Author: Joe D365 |

How nice would it be if when a lead submitted a form on your website the information just appeared in Dynamics CRM? And even better, wouldn't it be great if this was an out of the box feature?

Well, in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 it is. CRM online users get access to something called "Internet Lead Capture," a cool feature that allows a Microsoft Dynamics CRM user with no programming or development experience to create a web-based, personalized lead capture landing page that is tied directly to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

For example, a basic landing page you might want to create is a "Contact Us" form where you ask your prospects basic contact information and a question or two about their business needs.

Then, as long as you're using an Internet Lead Capture landing page, when your prospect hits, "submit" the lead information flows into the "Internet Leads" area of Dynamics CRM where the lead is then assigned to a salesperson and followed up with.

And, of course, when the salesperson opens up the lead record for the first time, the corresponding CRM fields from the form are already populated.

Another plus, is that within Internet Lead Capture there are metrics that measure information like leads per month and landing page performance.

To get started creating your landing page, select the Internet Lead Capture icon in the Sales area of Dynamics CRM 2011 and select "Create a new landing page."

  • Decide if you'll have Microsoft host your page or if you want to use the tool to create a piece of HTML code that can be embedded in your company's website.

  • Come up with a unique name for the URL, the page layout and the page theme.

  • Customize the elements of the page, including giving it a page title and a description for your business, product, or service.

  • Choose the fields from your CRM that you'd like to show up on the form. One of the best parts is you can use customized fields to create the forms. Say for example you have a field in your CRM called, "Is JoeCRM awesome?" You can just add that to the form on your webpage as a piece of information you'd like to capture. Then when a lead selects" yes" (of course J ) it populates the corresponding field in the lead capture record.

  • Further personalize the page by adding a company logo using the "browse" button and uploading your image. Then decide what you want your "submit button" to say and select a URL where your lead will be taken after they hit submit.

And…you're done! As soon as you select "finish" you'll have a live landing page out on the internet (which even helps improve your organization's web presence).

Now it's up to you to decide what to do with the leads. Assigning the leads to yourself or divvying them up among other users will create actual lead records in CRM (at this point the leads are in a kind of "lead limbo" until you make the next move and assign them). You also have the option to simply delete them from Dynamics CRM.

Full disclosure; once you dig into this you'll realize it's just the tip of the iceberg. After you start putting your custom CRM lead fields on personalized internet landing pages that in turn automatically populate your Microsoft Dynamics CRM system, you'll start to wonder what else is possible.

Whether it's creating alerts to notify users when a new lead capture record is created, designing a landing page for registration to events, creating surveys for your customers that add the results directly to their CRM record or creating a custom portal for your clients that they can use to update their own CRM records… the sky is the limit.

If you need a little inspiration let us know, because CRM is all we do. You can find your Microsoft CRM Experts here

Happy CRM'ing

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

5 comments on “Lead Forms for CRM 2011 Rock”

  1. Hi
    Seems this is a feature that was in the US V4 online version and is available to upgrade users of that service but new & international users wont get it till "Spring 2011"
    But it will be good to get.
    Charlie

  2. Spring 2011 is a bit ambiguous, any specific date and is this Nothern Hemisphere spring?
    Until then, does anyone know of the best way to do this manually?

  3. I am an O365 client and see the MS Dynamic CRM is an option, but I must have the ability to embed a form that takes a user to a landing page and populates the CRM. I believe this is how everything works.

    My issue is there any way to embed the form, populate the CRM but us MY OWN landing pages? For example, WordPress (WP) can easily create landing pages and the MS Dynamic CRM has a self-imposed limit of 10 active landing pages. I would like to do my own landing pages to avoid that limit, which I find odd since website authority is greatly judged by number of relevant pages (blog posts and landing pages accomplish this very well).

    My goal with myself and any client is to build their sales funnel with many different downloads or webinars tied to a landing page which ties to a lead nurturing campaign. The 10 landing pages limit is not acceptable.

    Can there be more than 10 forms linked to MS Dynamic CRM and allow my website program to dictate which internal landing page to send them? I called Sales and they were not sure, so I am searching online before I call my MS Partner with an issue I should be able to solve. Thanks!

    1. PowerObjects has a Dynamics CRM add-on that does exactly what you want. PowerWebForm lets you build your web form within CRM, post that form to your own landing page, and pulls the form information into CRM. There’s no limit on the number of forms you create, and you can set duplicate detection for each form individually. You can also tie each form to a campaign so that when a form is filled out, a campaign response is created. PowerWebForm will be out at the beginning of next week, but I have attached the user guide if you would like to see how it works. You can try PowerWebForm free for 30 days and, if you decide to subscribe after the trial is up, the subscription price is $1/CRM user/month.

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