Hello Outbound Funds people!
We are getting our foundation up and running with Outbound Funds after several months of configuration and learning. My next frontier is to connect our application process, currently using Google Forms, with Salesforce.
I've read up on Form Assembly, and it seems like a good solution for most of our use cases. But it's pretty expensive, too. I have a few questions and I thought this group might have good insights.
- Does anyone use "Leads" to collect incoming inquiries so that you can only "convert" the ones you're interested in pursuing? That seems like a logical way to handle initial applications, but I am not seeing any reference of that on this board when I search. If anyone out there does use Leads as an intermediary between inquiries and funding requests, I'd love to hear how you set it up.
- Our application form collects a lot more information than the Funding Request currently holds. I saw the GitHub article recommending an "application" object with a lookup relationship to Funding Request - is that how most people have this set up?
- We have a "contact us" form on our website through Squarespace, and it seems like we could use Zapier to insert that data into Salesforce in lieu of using Form Assembly. Zapier also seems to work with Google Forms. Does anyone use Zapier to integrate their application process with their Outbound funds? If so, does that work out ok?
Thanks so much!
Sheri
@Sheri Gurock We have several clients who use Leads as Inquiries and convert ones that make it through to a full proposal. It seems to work well because of the built in Lead to Opportunity conversion. That said, since you are using Outbound Funds you wouldn't be able to take advantage of that. As Shari points out, there are several different ways to handle this but it really depends on what your organizational needs/wants are.
As for external form tool options, you may also want to check out the Demo Jam that was just done that showcased Form Stack, Form Assembly, and FormTitan.
If it helps, nearly all of our clients utilize an external form tool and none of them use Zapier as the form tool does everything that is needed.
