Almost an year ago, I embarked on a journey to explore Sitecore Connect to Salesforce CRM connector. Almost instantaneously, in my first week, one of the initial questions I had was , can I map Sitecore Contacts to some other objects in Salesforce, such as Leads, for example? Upon researching, I figured there is no OOTB way to map to something else other than Salesforce Contact. Back then, the client was okay for us to push Sitecore Contacts as Salesforce Contacts and have a special view in Salesforce to ensure Sitecore pushed Contacts are in their own special bubble inside of Salesforce Contacts, so, their end users on Salesforce view does not get cluttered with Sitecore Contacts. So, that door of if we can push Sitecore Contacts as different Salesforce objects was left unopened.
End of last year, same question came our way during discovery with another client and this time around the client’s data architecture was much more complicated and can not abide to simple workarounds, they wanted us to be able to ship form submission data as custom object/s to Salesforce. This though doable in theory was never tried or never really documented as a use case in Sitecore world. So, the only way to prove the theory is to actually, well, to do it.
We convinced the client to allow us to roll with POC and my gut was I could pull this off based on all the learning I did so far on the connector. Check out my experience with Sitecore connect with Salesforce CRM blog series and my VDD session on the same.
I was happy and nervous to take up this challenge couple weeks ago. I know there is actually nothing out there that can help me once I go in that path, so, though it was exciting that I will be the potential first one doing this on record, but, at the same time, I could not stop thinking of all the walls that would come by way. 🙂
In coming blogs, I will share the experience with you all what my strategy was, what problems I solved, milestones, happy moments and couple bugs I excavated while I was at it. Let’s get started, to begin with, on such type of projects, I like to jot down my thoughts and an outline that will help me stay focused, but, also helps to look back on steps if need be. It is always proven to be my best friend, staying organized.
Here are the goals for POC I had on my mind –
- Prove that Sitecore Connect for Salesforce CRM can ship Sitecore Contact Information as a Custom object/s on Salesforce.
- Configure Connector to map Custom Facets on Sitecore Contact and send those Custom Facets as Custom objects to Salesforce. Meaning, no longer Contact to Contact mapping on two systems, it would be completely custom.
- Explore ‘Salesforce CRM Plugin for Tenant Service’ option noted on Download section here and see what it has to offer. There was not much documentation on this one, so, it is a bit of suspense, but, again my sixth sense was hinting me that it might prove to be useful.
I got these goals jotted in my document and in my heart and kept moving through milestones. As I passed through every single milestone, I got more and more excited to reach to the end of POC. I will take you through how I achieved each of these goals and hopefully it will help you achieve something similar in future.