Product Review: “Web 2 CRM” for Internet Lead Capture

Editor’s Note: I wrote the first version of this article in July 2009. One of the things you’ll notice is a mention of functionality included in Dynamics CRM Online similar to what Web2CRM offers. I had hoped that the CRM Online November 2009 Service Update would address some of the limitations of its “lead capture” tool…but alas, I was disappointed! Anyway, I added a summary and a comparison of the two products at the end of this article.

Background: Internet Marketing and Lead Capture

One of the most important functions required to integrate Internet marketing into your overall CRM marketing efforts is “Internet lead capture”: the ability to drive traffic to a web page with a form on it, have a visitor fill in the form, and pop the submitted information directly into your CRM database. Up until recently, if you wanted this kind of functionaliy in Dynamics CRM you had to write server-based .NET code. The code itself isn’t terrible and plenty of people figured out how to do it, but it’s a hassle, and it’s beyond the technical reach of a lot of the sales and marketing people who need the functionality.

Recently some easier approaches have begun to emerge. I’ve written a couple of articles about one of them — the Internet Marketing functionality available now in Dynamics CRM Online — and I’ll include links to those at the end of this article. The obvious problem with this is that it’s only available for CRM Online, the “cloud” version of Dynamics CRM that Microsoft hosts from this site: http://crm.dynamics.com/ I’m a big booster of CRM Online: it’s solid, reasonably priced, and brain-dead simple to get up and running. But…most organizations are still using the on-premise edition, and the integrated Internet Marketing functions aren’t available in the on-premise edition. (Yet)

What does Web 2 CRM do?

A couple of days ago I got this flyer in the mail:

It was apparently an effective pitch: the first chance I got I navigated to www.CRMInnovation.com/web2crm to see what I could find out about this product. It’s described there as a code-free way of creating lead-capture pages that will pop data right into my CRM, so I followed the link to http://web2crm.crminnovation.com/ where I signed up for my free 7-day trial. Seven days isn’t much time so I had to get busy! Here’s how it works:

How does it work?

First you create an account and credentials for yourself, much as you would for any other service, but the big difference here is that you point to your Dynamics CRM organization as part of the process. The Web 2 CRM product is hosted by CRM Innovation, so when you ultimately create the lead capture form it needs to point to your CRM organization, and it needs admin credentials so that the Web 2 CRM code can communicate via web services with your CRM database (I assume that’s how they do it — I haven’t delved under the covers quite yet).

Figure 1: Logging in with user account and CRM organization

 In the “Configure Logins” tab I’d already pointed my account to my on-premise CRM, supplied by admin credentials and so forth. After I sign in, you can see it starts to get interesting:

Figure 2: Select the Entity to Add a Record for

 Notice that I’m asked to select an entity from a pull-down list. All of the entities in the CRM organization I’m pointing to will show up here, including custom ones. The one I select will be the entity the submitted forms will create records for!

So while I could create a Contact or Lead record, I started my experimenting with this application by creating a custom entity, Internet Lead. You can see it in the next screen shot:

Figure 3: Even Works with Custom Entities

Next, you select the entity and click the Create Form button. You will something like Figure 4, which is really the heart of the Web 2 CRM “development” experience. It shows you the existing form for the CRM entity you selected, and you can drag and drop Dynamics CRM form fields onto the middle area, which is the development version of the web capture form you’re building! After about 5 minutes with this tool I got pretty comfortable with it. Figure 4 shows a form in progress, with some of the fields selected from the CRM form and exposed on the Web 2 CRM form. You use the “Form Header” text box to give it a title. There are a few different styles and looks you can get with the various options in the Form Settings and Published Page Settings areas, but I’ll stick to the basics for now.

Create a Default Hosted Form, or Copy a Code Snippet into a Custom Page you Host 

Once you get to this point, just save the form (Save Form…), and give it a name. Then you can Publish it, and sure enough, it actually creates a form (with about as cryptic a URL as you’d expect), and your Internet Lead capture form is done! Here’s what one looks like — notice that the “enable captcha” checkbox is selected above, and you see the little math pop quiz that spam bots aren’t so good at as it displays on the form:

 

Now of course comes the harder part of driving traffic to this form and getting people to fill it in, but the good news, if they do, sure enough you get a brand new record in your designated CRM entity! It really works quite well, and as advertised, no code required.

If you look back at the screenshot of the design environment, notice there’s a “Carry Code” button. If you click that, you get a pop-up window with some script code you can copy to the clipboard, and then paste into the HTML of one of your pages. This is how you can get past the plain vanilla appearance of the default form you see in the previous figure. I was pleasantly surprised how well even this last part worked. It took me about 5 minutes to create a page within my WordPress blog, and I copied and pasted the code using that  Carry Code button, and even though it’s not fancy, you can see the difference between this form and Figure 6:

Summary, Comparison to Dynamics CRM Online Built-in Lead Capture

I like this tool and I recommend it. It costs $495 and there’s a 7-day free trial as I mentioned. If your organization needs this functionality, it would almost certainly cost you more than $495 worth of of development’ time to implement the functionality.

In Dynamics CRM Online (the cloud version of Dynamics CRM), there is an “out of the box” version of a similar kind of functionality. It’s always been somewhat limited compared to the Web2CRM implementation, but I had hopes that some of the limitations would be addressed in the November 2009 Service Update. In general they were not, so unless the $495 is a deal-killer I still recommend the Web2CRM product.

Here are the main criteria I use to compare Web2CRM with the built-in Microsoft “Lead Capture Form” functionality:

• Web2CRM lets you push web form data into any CRM entity; the Microsoft tool only pushes into the Lead entity. This is a significant limitation of the Microsoft approach. In practice, what it means is you have to over-burden the Lead entity with all kinds of fields it shouldn’t have. For example, with Web2CRM I can create a custom entity called “Survey Results” and use it to capture survey information submitted from a web form. With the Microsoft tool I’d have to add more attributes to the Lead entity. Once you start to realize all the potential places you can use this “web 2 crm” functionality…well, your Lead entity gets pretty messy!
• Web2CRM pushes data directly into the entity in question; the Microsoft tool uses a placeholder entity and requires you to manually import records into Leads. As I showed above, Web2CRM implements a captcha scheme to filter out form-spam, but once the form is filled in the data go directly into Dynamics CRM. The Microsoft approach forces a user to manually import data from the “Internet Lead” placeholder. Since the Internet Lead entity isn’t really an entity (e.g., no workflows can be written against it)  the Microsoft approach means you really can’t have an auto-responder workflow.
• The out of the box forms produced by the Microsoft tool are cooler looking than the ones produced by Web2CRM.

In my opinion, this last point is the only real advantage of the Microsoft approach over Web2CRM. For me, it’s not enough to offset the disadvantages, so for most of the web forms I create (and for all of the ones requiring complex forms and custom entities) I use Web2CRM.