An Introduction to Integrating with Salesforce

This article covers the following:

• Overview of How the Integration Works
• Overview of The Setup
  • Automatic Contact Lookup
• Information Flow Between Salesforce And AdvocateHub

Overview of how the integration works:

• Integration with Salesforce allows information to be shared between Salesforce and the Influitive platform, primarily for the purpose of creating robust advocate profiles based on information from their contact record in Salesforce.
• Influitive Salesforce AppExchange Package that allows you to add custom objects into your Salesforce layout. These custom objects will then be populated with information from the Influitive platform.
• Influitive Salesforce 2.0 for Referrals integration allows you to push referral lead information submitted from the Hub to your Salesforce

These are the functionalities you'll have access to by using our Salesforce-AdvocateHub integration:

Salesforce General Integration

1. Chatter messages

Chatter messages display a short message outlining an activity of advocates (these can then be commented and liked as with other Chatter messages). A new message will be created each time an advocate does a challenge related activity in the hub. This message will appear on the Salesforce Contacts page record and only the Salesforce contacts that are joined members in the Hub.

2. Reference Requests

The Request a Reference feature for the Salesforce integration allows a Salesperson or Salesforce user to request a reference from Hub members for an Opportunity from within Salesforce. Essentially, Influitive provides a button through the AppExchange package that could be added to an Opportunity Layout where Salespeople can facilitate a Reference Request Challenge in Influitive. Sales Reps can customize the requirements for their reference and narrow it down to a reference that meets their specific needs. This button or tab will create a Challenge draft in the Hub, that a Hub admin will need to review, target appropriately, make changes and then publish them for users to participate.

Please note that this is an additional cost to enable this feature for your AdvocateHub-Salesforce Integration.

The following is a screenshot of the Request a Reference form in Salesforce:

Here's how the challenge created will appear in the AdvocateHub, you can customize this challenge further:

Learn more about the Reference Request Feature

3. Automatic Contact Lookup

This feature allows the Influitive Hub to try to find a matching contact record for an Advocate in the AdvocateHub with the Salesforce contact record. This will then bring all the mapped information from Salesforce into the Hub's custom profile fields based on matching email addresses. When this feature is turned on, the Lookup button will be visible on the user’s Hub profile in Influitive. 

4. Automatic Customer Data Import

The integration with Salesforce will enrich your advocate data in your Influitive platform with Salesforce data. This additional data can be used to segment your advocates and better target which advocates should receive certain challenges as well as automatically  to Groups.

Specifically with the Automatic Customer Data Import tool, Influitive can integrate with your Salesforce contact database on a nightly basis (starting every 12AM EST) using the SOQL query criteria of your choosing.

Influitive can import new advocates in order to invite them into the program, in addition to updating existing advocates with information that could be leveraged for targeting purposes. The advocate custom profile data fields could be populated from the Contact and Account object. Learn more about Automatic Customer Data Import here.

In each of the Hub member's custom profile fields:

5. Advocacy Insights

Surface a list of Advocacy Activities completed by an advocate on their contact record in Salesforce. Let's say you are about to  a customer and you know that they are an advocate member of your AdvocateHub. You want to recognize them for what they have done. When an advocate completes a challenge activity, redeemed a reward, made a referral or performed other activities, you can display these activities on the Salesforce Contact Record in a custom object provided by the Influitive Salesforce AppExchange Package called "Influitive Acts of Advocacy".

In Salesforce Classic:

In Salesforce Lightning:

This will give your front line customer teams like Account Managers the visibility they need to properly recognize advocates during their regular meetings or especially contract discussions.

For multiple Hubs, each act of advocacy from each Hub can be differentiated and tagged by the Program name and Hub ID.

Learn more about Advocacy Insights here

6. Viewing Advocacy Information

There are ways to see whether your advocate Hub member exists and is connected to the Salesforce record in your Salesforce instance. This tool is also useful to push / add / nominate your Salesforce contact record to the AdvocateHub as a member if they have not been added to the Hub and are looking to be invited to the Hub.

Nominate contact / Contact Converted Details

Allow Salesforce users to nominate Salesforce contacts to become advocates. This nominate button will appear on the Contacts record page. If the user does not exist in your AdvocateHub, it will show you a button to "Nominate Now".

Once the button is clicked and the user is added to the AdvocateHub, this visualforce page in Salesforce will display the user's Hub information that includes their email address, current points, lifetime points, Level and which Salesforce user they are nominated by. This is useful to catch a glimpse of the contact profile in the Hub from Salesforce.

From the AdvocateHub, you can also view the Salesforce contact record that the Hub profile is connected to by clicking the "view on salesforce" link on the Hub member's profile page.

For multi Hubs, you will be able to select which Hub you would like to nominate / add the Salesforce contact record to through the Hub mapping tool provided by the AppExchange Package.

Learn more about Nominating Contacts In Salesforce

Date Added to AdvocateHub & Date Joined the AdvocateHub

These two fields reside in the Contact record in Salesforce and provided by the AdvocateHub AppExchange package to be added to the Contact layout.

Whenever a record is added to AdvocateHub, or when the Advocate registers to be a participant of AdvocateHub, if there is no Salesforce Contact ID attached in the Hub, Influitive will perform a lookup in Salesforce via email address to retrieve the Contact ID. Subsequently our system will update these two date fields in the contact record. 

Influitive does  not create contacts/accounts in Salesforce, when there are advocates in the AdvocateHub that do not exist in Salesforce.

For multi Hubs, a new Date Joined and Date Added field will be added for each of the Hub in the family so that you are able to determine which Hub the contact was added or had joined.

Salesforce for Referrals

Allow advocates to suggest referrals that are then passed into Salesforce. This Salesforce for Referral integration is in a different integration card in the AdvocateHub and will require a different independent set of setup. 

Your sales team always wants qualified leads. One of the great benefits of the AdvocateHub is that it easily allows you to put your advocates to work to generate referrals for your sales team. When an advocate suggests a prospect in a referral form in the AdvocateHub, a lead is created with the default lead assignment rule in Salesforce. The Influitive platform expedites the process by seamlessly passing these leads to Salesforce and updates the Salesforce lead source to "Influitive" so you get the credit!

Influitive can track the progression of referral leads in the sales cycle, by setting up Salesforce Workflow rules when certain criteria are met (for instance a Lead is converted to an Opportunity) which then update the Influitive in referral to progress to a new milestone in Influitive (for instance, the Influitive Referral is now "Qualified".

For more information on setting up pushing leads to Salesforce, please consult this article - Referrals 2.0: Integrating With Salesforce

Salesforce Dashboards

The Influitive Salesforce AppExchange Package also provides a ready-made Salesforce Dashboard report on acts of advocacy within Salesforce. Check out these Salesforce Dashboards for inspiration.

Overview of how to setup the integration

Here are the overview of the steps needed to set up this integration:

1. Install the latest Influitive Salesforce AppExchange Package version to your Salesforce instance
2. Add components to the Salesforce Page Layouts
3. Turn on and set up the integration tools from the AdvocateHub's Salesforce Integration card

Please see the following complete instructions for the full setup: New Influitive Salesforce AppExchange Package Setup Overview

Influitive and Salesforce Data Flows

The Influitive and Salesforce integration does not support a bi-directional sync of data. Here is the overview of the Influitive Salesforce data flows:

Salesforce > Influitive

• Automatic Customer Data Import tool pushes the information from Contact and Account field values in Salesforce to the Influitive AdvocateHub member's custom profile fields as well as creating a new AdvocateHub contact profile. This tool will only pull in the information that is mapped in the Influitive Salesforce integration in the Account or Contact Object.
  

  

• Automatic Contact Lookup tool will pull in the Contact and Account information from Salesforce to the Hub member's profile. This will include Name, Title, Email, Salesforce Contact ID, Salesforce Account ID, Salesforce Account name and the rest of the information mapped in the Influitive Salesforce Automatic Customer Data Import Integration from the Account or Contact Object.
• Nominate contact visualforcepage button in Salesforce can add new users to Influitive's Invite List, waiting to be invited in order to join the Hub. Fields pulled from Salesforce include:
  • Contact - Name, Email address, Title, Company, Salesforce Contact ID, Salesforce Account ID.
  • Salesforce Contact who nominated the user - Name and Email address
• Reference Request tool will push the Opportunity's Contact record information to the Influitive AdvocateHub as a reference request challenge.
  • Opportunity Contact - Name, Email, Company, Title, Salesforce Contact ID
  • Opportunity Object - Name and ID
  • Salesforce user who submitted the reference request - Name and Salesforce Contact ID.
    
    
• Influitive Salesforce Referral Integration allows Flow rule and outbound messages from Salesforce to talk back to Influitive AdvocateHub to update the Referral lead's milestone status in the Hub.

Influitive > Salesforce

• Date Added to AdvocateHub and Date Joined AdvocateHub field will be populated in Salesforce Contact record once the user:
  • has just been added or created in the Hub as an Advocate type (not nominees)
  • has joined the AdvocateHub
  • has an activity logged on their Hub profile feed
• Influitive will populate the Acts of Advocacy custom object in Salesforce through the Advocacy Insights tool (which can be added into the Contact and Account Object). You can select to exclude the acts of advocacy that you do not want to push to Salesforce. Here are the data that will be pushed to Salesforce:
  • Acts of Advocacy Name, Advocacy Type, Source Type, Source Title, Date Occured, ROI value, AdvocateHub Channel, Points, Content, Program Name, Acts of Advocacy ID.
    

    

• The Acts of Advocacy that relates to references or prospects will be pushed to a component in the Contact layout called References Received via Influitive
  • Here are the data that will be pushed to Salesforce:
    • Acts of Advocacy Name, Advocacy Type, Source Type, Source Title, Date Occured, ROI value, AdvocateHub Channel, Points, Content, Program Name, Acts of Advocacy ID.

  Influitive Salesforce Referral Integration allows referral lead submitted from the AdvocateHub to be pushed over to Salesforce as a Lead record. It will push any Lead Object data that are mapped in the integration.

Data Flow Diagram