Developing a Salesforce Web to Lead form in Flash

At Greg Banig Design & Marketing we work with leading website technologies as well as leading marketing technologies.

One of our firm’s core competencies is in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program design and build. We typically lean toward Salesforce.com as our CRM solution as we are one of San Diego’s leading CRM and Salesforce.com consulting firms.

Developing a Salesforce Web to Lead form in Flash
One of the key strengths of Salesforce.com is the system’s ability to capture and process Leads using the company’s Web-to-Lead functionality.

The Salesforce Web-To-Lead functionality creates a simple HTML form that can be added to a company’s website. This form will automatically pass Leads from a company’s website to their Salesforce user account.

Implementing a Salesforce lead capture form in Flash differs slightly from the HTML code that Salesforce provides.

Here’s an overview of the process for developing a web to lead form for Salesforce using Flash. (This example and the attached files all use Flash CS3 to create a Salesforce web to lead form…if you are on a different version of Flash the process will vary slightly but the steps will be similar).

All of the referenced files for creating a Salesforce Web to Lead form in Flash are linked here. Click here to download a zip file of a Sample Salesforce Web to Lead Flash Form.

Step 1:
Setup your Flash file (Flashform.fla in the attached example) as your Flash form that captures all of your user inputs. In our example you’ll see that we used Flash CS3 form components to gather user inputs and then associated the form components to Flash variables.

We used an onRelease functionality along with a getURL command to pass these variables to a PHP page.

Step 2:
Setup your PHP file (Flashform.php in our example) to receive the form variables.

We kept this really simple. We edited the Salesforce.com Web to Lead code so that all the form inputs were hidden fields. Then we assigned the value of each hidden field to the variable that was passed from the Flash form.

Finally, we added some JavaScript code after the form code to automatically submit the form.

That’s the process in a nutshell for creating a Salesforce web to lead form in Flash.

You can download our sample files here.

Keep in mind that are sample does not use any form validation. This could easily be accomplished with some minor edits and we’ll probably explain this in a future posting.

If you have any questions or comments please contact us.

Greg Banig Design & Marketing is a leading San Diego CRM consulting firm that specializes in Salesforce.com.

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Article by Greg Banig Design & Marketing, http://www.gregbanigdesign.com.