Process
Design your website forms around your CRM
For most B2B businesses, the website is where CRM records begin. Someone fills in a form, and a lead appears in Salesforce. Yet the website and the CRM are often planned by different people, at different times, with different goals. The design team wants fewer fields. The sales team wants more information. The result is often a form that suits neither.
Designing the two together avoids that. Here is what to settle before the forms are designed.
Start from the record, not the form
Before anyone designs a form, decide what record it should create in your CRM and what happens next. A sales enquiry, a support request and a newsletter sign-up are different things. They need different fields, go to different people and need different follow-up. One “Contact us” form that does all three pushes the sorting job onto your team.
For each form, write down:
- the record it creates, such as a lead, a contact or a case
- who receives it, and how quickly they are expected to respond
- which fields sales needs at this stage, and which can wait
- the campaign and source details to carry through, so marketing can report on it
Ask for less, and ask at the right time
Every field you add is another reason for someone to give up. The answer isn’t to collect nothing. It is to ask for each piece of information when the visitor has a reason to give it. A first enquiry might need only a name, an email address, a company and a message. Detail about budget or requirements can come in the first conversation, or in a later form once there is a relationship.
Make the form behave like your CRM
A form can accept data your CRM will reject or mangle. Small mismatches cause most of the trouble:
| On the form | In the CRM | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Free-text “Country” | A picklist of countries | Records fail to sync, or reports split “UK” from “United Kingdom” |
| One “Name” field | Separate first and last names | Personalised emails greet people by their full name |
| “Service interest” options | A different list of values | Leads go to the wrong team, or to nobody |
| A consent tick box | No field to store it | You can’t show when or how someone opted in |
Fix these during design, not after launch. Now, it costs a conversation. Later, it costs a data clean-up.
Test it the way a visitor would
Before launch, submit every form yourself, using realistic and awkward data: a long company name, an international phone number, an optional field left blank. Then open the record in the CRM. Is every field where it should be? Did it reach the right person? Was the campaign source captured? Testing the website and the CRM separately won’t catch a problem that only appears when one hands over to the other.
Consent belongs in the design. An opt-in box should be unticked by default, link to your privacy policy, and be stored against the record with the date it was given. Ask your legal adviser to approve the wording.
When a form isn’t enough
Some journeys are too long for a single form. A registration that needs documents, approval and follow-up questions works better as a self-service portal, where people can sign in, see where their application has got to and find answers for themselves. On Salesforce, that portal is built on Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud).
How Coupang rebuilt seller registration
Coupang runs an end-to-end e-commerce and logistics network in Korea. Overseas sellers used to register by emailing documents and Word forms. The self-service registration process was limited and not integrated, and sellers struggled to find answers for themselves, which added to churn.
We designed a registration layer for the marketplace website, drawing on our UX/UI design work, and a custom community with profiles, application and document submission, support requests and learning content. Behind it, automated lead routing and lead, account, contact and opportunity management ran on Sales Cloud. New monthly seller sign-ups rose by 31%, and the time it takes a global seller to sign up fell by 53%.
Read the Coupang case study to see how the website, portal and CRM fitted together.
Design and CRM in one team
Our design team works alongside the consultants who set up your CRM, so forms, journeys and records are designed together rather than reconciled afterwards.
See our website, UX/UI and design services.
Next step
If you are planning a new website, or your forms feed a CRM nobody trusts, talk to us before the design is signed off.
