Integration of Salesforce into Drupal

Salesforce is a renowned customer relationship management (CRM) product that is available in the market. This system was initially developed to create a system for businesses to track sales leads and opportunities. Over the years, its use and implementation has extended. Nonprofit organizations use it to track their donors. Venture capitalists make use of it for tracking potential investments while other businesses leverage it for management and vertical market applications. Thus it was just a matter of time before web application developers wanted to use it along with their CMS solutions. When combined with Drupal, it forms a powerful entity creating a perfect bridge between the content management system and the CRM.

Salesforce can be integrated into Drupal using the Salesforce Suit. This suite of modules allows you to integrate Salesforce by synchronizing different Drupal entities such as users, nodes, files with its own objects such as contacts, organizations, opportunities. Here you will be able to easily exchange data between Drupal and Salesforce. This data exchange and changes can be affected in real time or asynchronously in batches during a cron run. This suit offers you a broad range of functionality that allows you to put together the pieces required for a given project. Let us now take a look at some of the scenarios in which Salesfoce can be integrated into Drupal.

This is one of the simplest and most used forms of integrating Salesforce into Drupal. In this type of integration you will make use of the Drupal Webform module to collect data from site visitors and create one or more Salesforce records. The reason we make use of the Webform module is the fact that it serves as an excellent replacement for the Salesforce Web to Lead form. That is merely a cut and paste snippet of HTML making it inflexible for web application development needs. The Webform module also collects data for Case, Contact, or Opportunity records along with custom objects that may be used in Salesforce.

When we are talking of integrating Salesforce in Drupal user synchronization becomes one of our basic needs. This process is a bit more complex compared to integrating a Webform. In this synchronization a Drupal user creates a Lead or Contact record in Salesforce or updates an existing one. A new user registration creates a custom user or profile fields these are automatically included in the new records. One thing that you need to keep in mind in this type of integration is that you should never store Drupal passwords in Salesforce. That’s because it might create security issues. However, you can easily store your Drupal username in the Salesforce record. This is helpful when your staff uses Salesforce to respond to customer calls.

During the process of email integration, a user synchronization is created that allows users to subscribe to mailing lists on the Drupal site. These mailing lists can easily be managed as Campaigns in Salesforce. The advantage here is that the marketing emails can either be sent by Salesforce or using add-on apps such as VerticalResponse or any other app of your choice. However there is a catch here. In order to begin with such a campaign, you will need to have the user record in Salesforce as Leads or Contacts as this directly adds them as Campaign Members.

Same is the case with managing donations and ecommerce integration where users are synchronized. Here you will need to create multiple objects in Salesforce to track orders and financial transactions. Here you will need to create objects such as Account, Contact and Opportunity. Here the Account will represent the organization making the purchase while Opportunity represents the purchase itself. Plus it includes a Close Date i.e. date of purchase.

Apart from these popular types of integration that we have mentioned above, there are a lot of other types of integrations that can happen between Salesforce and Drupal. Such integrations include integration of an event registration system with Salesforce or a contract management in Salesforce where you will make use of Salesforce to manage access control for nodes. Apart from these, there are many other wonderful things that can be worked out with the integration of Drupal and Salesforce.

Salesforce and Drupal form an awesome combination and there are many advantages that you can leverage. For instance, Salesforce provides you with an API that can supply dependency information about its own data for ingestion by Drupal. The Salesforce API also allows programmers to move Drupal data to Salesforce via SOAP. Drupal’s social publishing features combined with the ability of Salesforce helps to turn opportunities into leads and leads into sales. That is one of the most potent ways of growing your business.