WordPress and CRM

Editor's Notes

• #6: CRM was born as contact management. Back in the old days. People argue about whether ACT! or Goldmine was first. Then it became salesforce automation. Then CRM and it then it has continued to evolve.
• #7: Contact management basically tracked contacts and activities associated to them. Things like to dos, meetings, phone calls. You could set upcoming activities that would remind you as they came due. Then a key concept is that you complete your activities. When your to do, meeting or phone call is done, you complete it and add your notes. Then it becomes history associated to the contact. When people are working solo, you can have a log of all your interactions to bring you back to date. When there are multiple people involved, it lets everyone know the current status and past history of the company’s interaction with the contact. In contact management, the concept of custom fields also came about. As you worked with yoru leads or customers, you wanted to be able to store specific data that had to do with the business you were running. If you were a financial planner, you wanted to keep information about the client’s assets and other financial planning details. If you are a veterinarian, you’d want to keep track of things about your client’s pets. And so on.
• #8: This is a standard ACT! layout from ACT! 6. In the old days ACT! was contact centric. You tracked people, not companies. You had a variety of information that could be tracked in the detail area and you could add custom fields and custom tabs. You can also track and see information such as outstanding activities and history, opportunities.
• #9: As we moved into Sales Force Automation, some of the concepts changed. Instead of mainly just dealing with prospects or clients, we often dealt with multiple people in a company. That brought the company or account entity into play. Contacts were associated to the company they worked for. That way you could keep track of the various people you dealt with at your customer, prospect, vendor or whatever types of companies that you worked with. The opportunity entity also came into play here. As interactions in larger companies became more complex and more numerous, we needed a way to keep track of a sales opportunity. Sometimes you did multiple deals with a given company over the life of your relationship. Because of that, you needed to be able to track multiple opportunities. In addition to that, for more complex sales cycles, we wanted to systematize that sales process and provide a way to make it consistent. Opportunities had stages. And sometimes you’d even embed a lot of the activity into a sales process so people could check boxes and automate steps, all the while incrementing the stages and probability of an opportunity. All of these opportunities, in addition to contacts, activities and history, rolled up to the account.
• #10: This is a old SalesLogix screen. You can see that in SFA, there was a way to track information against an account or company. And related to the company, there were multiple contacts and opportunities.
• #11: And then as CRM came about, it started to support other areas of the business. Originally it was mainly sales focused but then it extend to service and support. Additional functionalities to track tickets and defects and such were added to the platforms. Leads were added. Other features like forecasting and dashboards came about. Then the needs of accessing this information across bigger and bigger organizations grew. Where you might have had a single install on one computer back in the contact management days, now you needed people to have it all over the company. People all needed access to the central database. In the old days, this usually involved servers and client installs.
• #12: This is a more recent SalesLogix screen. You can see there are toolbars for functionality beyond sales (Marketing, Service, Support). And dashboards, reporting and mash ups became more robust.
• #13: And then today, much of this has moved into the cloud. Now most CRM systems are cloud based and all people need is a browser and an internet connection. Other things also became really important like: mobile access, social media integration enhanced dashboards and analytics and now we’re seeing marketing automation.
• #14: This is a Salesforce screen. Now with the more recent CRM implementations, platforms have moved into the cloud. There is social media integration, mobile access and more.
• #15: Mobile access has grown more and more important. People need access to their data everywhere now and use many different varieties of devices.
• #17: db = value acquire new customers ^ $ from customers (cross sell/upsell) better satisfaction/retention develop customer advocacy opportunity management forecasting analysis of customers/leads sales turnover
• #19: Before people move to a CRM solution, most folks just live in Outlook or email. After a certain point, it just fails to do the job. There is no visibility into past activity, no 360 degree view of the prospect/client, no social integration, no sharing of information. Once this pain becomes acute, a move to CRM makes sense.
• #20: Which platform depends on YOUR needs. Online / bricks & mortar? What is your sales cycle like – long & educational or quick & transactional? Security concerns. Customization needs. Budget? Standard functionality needed? Purchase vs. or pay by subscription? Web vs. install?
• #21: There are tons of CRM systems that integrate with WordPress. There are a variety of integrations. And these platforms vary in functionality and price from free simple platforms to very complex systems.
• #23: One of the main form plugins that many folks in the WordPress ecosystem use is Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms has robust integrations with a large number of CRM platforms. You can often find these as separate plugins which are typically pretty simple to configure.
• #24: Screenshot demo
• #25: First you need to set your configuration info.
• #26: Then you need to map data between Gravity Forms and your CRM system.
• #28: In addition to mapping information over, often you can indicate certain things about a given Gravity Form that can be used to trigger specific workflow once a contact gets into the CRM system.
• #29: Screenshot demo
• #30: First you need to set your configuration info.
• #31: Then you need to can map your entities.
• #32: Then you need to map data between your form and your CRM system.
• #35: Another commonly used form plugin is Ninja Forms. Ninja Forms has integrations with a number of CRM platforms. Some of these are separate plugins which but it looks like they are increasingly relying on Zapier to provide their integration services.
• #36: Another commonly used form plugin is Formidable Pro. Formidable Pro is primarily relying on Zapier to provide their integration services. There do exist a couple of direct integration plugins.
• #37: Contact Form 7 is another of the main form plugins that folks use. As it is free, there are a lot of implementations and integrations with it. You can often find some of these as separate plugins. There is one particular plugin, Contact Form 7 Integrations, that supports a large variety of CRM platforms.
• #38: In addition to integration plugins, WordPress can also host web form code from the platforms themselves, rather than communicate via an API.
• #39: Screenshot demo
• #40: First you need to set your configuration info.
• #41: Then you need to map data between your form and Salesforce.
• #42: There also exist some form submission options that can be configured.
• #44: Zapier is a tool that is built to support integrations between a very large number of platforms. At present, Zapier already has connectors to 44 CRM apps. It connects to a huge number of different platforms.
• #45: In Zapier, you just configure the end points between the two platforms. And then you can map fields.
• #46: There is also a plugin that has pretty generic integration capabilities. If you know specifics about the systems you are trying to integrate, you can use them to manually configure your integration.
• #47: There also exist a number of plugins that install actual CRM functionality into your WordPress instance. You are not using a separate CRM platform. You are just extending WordPress capabilities & then using only that.
• #48: WP-CRM is a commonly used plugin that can provide a good level of customer relationship management functionality.
• #49: New person add screen. You can add custom fields to track data other than the typical user information.
• #50: Search screen to segment & trigger actions against contacts.
• #51: Keeps track of notes and interactions.
• #52: WordPress Leads is another CRM plugin that can provide a extended contact/user tracking capabilities. It has a good amount of functionality around tracking contact behavior on site.
• #53: New person add screen. You can add custom fields to track data other than the typical user information.
• #54: Search screen to segment & act on people by
• #55: Search screen to segment & act on people by
• #56: Email template functionality.
• #58: New person add screen. You can add custom fields to track data other than the typical user information.
• #59: Search screen to segment & act on people by
• #60: Contact screen with extended functionality.
• #61: Contact screen with extended functionality.
• #62: Variety of actions you can trigger against a contact.
• #63: Search screen to segment & trigger actions against contacts.
• #64: Email functionality.
• #65: This is a subscription model. It offers very robust functionality. Some of the functionality is hosted on their servers.
• #66: Dashboard/reporting.
• #67: New person add screen. You can add custom fields to track data other than the typical user information.
• #68: New person add screen. You can add custom fields to track data other than the typical user information.