Salesforce CRM Integration Guide

Overview

By connecting Salesforce, you can combine intelligent community insights with customer data to expand your pipeline, accelerate deals, and grow your business.

In addition to bringing business context like Lead status and lifecycle stage into your Room, our integration with Salesforce also allows you to sync data from Common Room to your CRM. This means that your sellers can easily see which Leads are already engaged in your community, their impact, and whether or not they are community-qualified Leads.

Preparation

You’ll need to have a few things in place to fully configure the Salesforce integration with Common Room.

1. Make sure that a Salesforce admin has access to Common Room. If you aren’t an admin, you can invite your Salesforce admin to join your Common Room (see how in the guide below). This will grant them owner permissions in Common Room and allow them to complete the Salesforce integration.
2. We recommend creating a separate integration account in Salesforce that isn’t tied to a specific employee for this integration. While not required, this can make it easier for you to manage the integration from Salesforce. This account should be configured with a Salesforce Integration license and will need the following permissions:
   • Object Permissions: Read/Write/ViewAll permissions to Lead, Contact,
     Account, Opportunity, Campaign
   • System Permissions: Access Activities
     

     If you need to change the user associated with your Salesforce integration at any point, please email us and our Support team will help you with that change.

3. Likewise, it may be easier to test this integration using a sandbox environment in Salesforce. In order to connect to a sandbox instance, please authenticate using the following URL (making sure to add your community id):
   https://app.commonroom.io/community/<replace-with-community-id>/settings/setup/salesforce?sandbox=true.
   If you have any questions about using a sandbox environment, please contact us for help.

Once you have everything above ready, follow the guide below to connect Salesforce to Common Room.

Connect Salesforce to Common Room.

1. Open Settings and select Salesforce from the list of sources.
2. Confirm that you’re a Salesforce admin. If you aren’t an admin, click the link to invite an admin to your Common Room to continue setting up the integration.
3. Authenticate the connection to Salesforce.

Setup Inbound Data from Salesforce to Common Room

In this step, you’ll configure how your Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities will map to Contacts and Organizations in Common Room. Additionally, you can configure how Contacts in Common Room are created from your Salesforce Leads and Contacts. You’ll be redirected here after completing the initial connection, but you can always come back to this step by opening Settings → Sources → Salesforce.

Setup Update Settings

1. Click Set up under Inbound data setup > Update settings from the Salesforce settings page in Common Room.
2. Define which Salesforce fields to map to Common Room. Start by choosing a Salesforce field and then select the associated field in Common Room.
3. Continue mapping fields for Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities.
4. Test and validate the sync with Salesforce.

Setup creates settings

Once you have defined your inbound update settings, it's important to understand that by default, only Common Room contacts that have a matching lead or contact (by email) in Salesforce will be updated with the Salesforce data. If you would like to create net new contacts in Common Room from your Salesforce leads and contacts, use the Create settings to set this up.

Important: You will be setting up a filter criteria based on Salesforce fields. These fields must be mapped in the previous Update step in order to be available in the filter.

Important: If you do not specify any filter criteria and save your create settings, ALL of your Salesforce leads and/or contacts will be created in Common Room. If you have more than 200k contacts, please contact us before proceeding.

1. Click Set up under Inbound data setup > Create settings from the Salesforce settings page in Common Room.
2. Enable the desired toggle for Create contacts from Salesforce leads and/or Create contacts from Salesforce contacts.
3. Specify the creation filters based on the Salesforce fields.
4. Confirm that the estimated number of contacts is the expected value with your Salesforce admin.
5. Press Save changes to proceed with creating contacts in Common Room

Setup Outbound data from Common Room to Salesforce

Once you’ve setup the inbound data from Salesforce to Common Room, follow along below to configure how Common Room will update existing Leads, Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce. Additionally, you can configure Common Room will create new Leads or Contacts in Salesforce.

Setup Update Settings

1. Navigate to the Outbound data setup section of the Salesforce settings page in Common Room.
2. Click Set up to get started.
3. Define which fields to map to Salesforce. We’ll recommend some fields to start, but you can map any Common Room field to Salesforce, or even create a new static field if needed.

Validate Data Updates

Once you’ve finished setting up your field mappings and are ready to test, find a Contact you know exists in your Salesforce instance and open their Contact profile. Press the Send to Salesforce button to sync the mapped fields for this Contact to Salesforce, then view that Contact in Salesforce to confirm that all fields are updated as expected.

Enable Auto Updates

If everything looks good and you’re ready to set up your daily outbound sync, return back to the Outbound update settings page.

Enabling auto-update for leads and contacts will update all leads and contacts in Salesforce that have a matching primary email.

Enabling auto-update for accounts will update all accounts in Salesforce that have a matching root domain (e.g. http://www.commonroom.io and http://www.commonroom.io/home would both be considered a match).

Setup creates settings

1. Navigate to the Outbound data setup section of the Salesforce settings page in Common Room.
2. Click Edit creation setup.
3. Set Creation settings to control what happens when a Contact is discovered in Common Room that doesn’t yet exist in your Salesforce. You can choose either to create Leads or create Contacts.
4. Map fields to Salesforce. Similar to the update steps above, Common Room will recommend some fields, but you can add any Common Room field or create your own static fields.
5. Define criteria for when a new Lead or Contact should be created. You can use all of the filter options available elsewhere in Common Room. (For example, if you only wanted contacts with the titles Software Engineer, Software Developer, and Staff Software Engineer to be created as contacts in Common Room, you could set select the "job title" filter and select these options). Make sure to preview how many Contacts will be created by setting up the corresponding filter in the Contact explorer.
6. Validate data creation to make sure the associated Leads/Contacts that will be created appear as you'd expect. To do this, once you’ve finished setting up your field mappings and are ready to test, open the Contacts page and find a Contact that doesn’t yet exist in Salesforce. Note that this Contact will need to have a primary email in order to be synced to Salesforce. Press the Send to Salesforce button to sync this Contact to Salesforce and confirm that the corresponding Lead or Contact is created as expected.If everything looks good and you’re interested in automatically creating Leads or Contacts in your Salesforce, return back to the Outbound create settings page to configure your auto-create settings.
7. Enable auto updates under "Sync Settings" if everything looks good and you’re ready to set up your automatic sync.

Manually Creating a Lead/Contact in Salesforce

After you review a contact tagged as a community qualified Lead in Common Room, you can manually push the contact to Salesforce via the "Send to Salesforce" button on the Contact profile, Contact explorer, and Contact lists in segments to create a new Lead or Contact (depending on how you've set up your Salesforce integration) for your sales and marketing teams to review. When you create a new Contact in Salesforce via Common Room, Common Room populates the First Name, Last Name, and Email Salesforce Contact fields by default.

Technical Details

The Salesforce CRM integration with Common Room is available on our Enterprise plan.

Inbound Sync Details (Salesforce to Common Room)

Contacts and organizations

When the integration is first configured, Common Room will sync field data for all Salesforce Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities that have a corresponding match in your room. Salesforce Leads and Contacts are associated based on the Common Room Contact's email address. Salesforce Accounts and Opportunities are associated with Common Room by using an Organization’s domain and name.

Campaign and campaign membership

Importing campaign and campaign membership details into Common Room enables you to filter by any of these campaign level field when setting up your segments, creating scores, or simply exploring your contacts. Please contact us if you would like to get this set up in your room.

Once you have this set up, you will find the campaign filters available under the Source Specific filters.

The campaign membership details will also be available on a contact profile's page.

Import history

When the integration is first configured, Common Room will sync the configured fields for all matching Salesforce Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities in your room.

Ongoing sync

Once the integration is configured, Common Room will import new fields from Salesforce every few hours. Common Room will sync data back to Salesforce on a daily basis.

Outbound Sync Details (Common Room to Salesforce)

Contact field sync to Salesforce

For any community Contacts already synced between Salesforce and Common Room, Common Room can automatically update their Salesforce contact fields to include relevant context.

We generally recommend creating new Salesforce fields for any context being sent back to Salesforce from Common Room to prevent overriding of existing data.

To track which contacts are created by Common Room in your Salesforce instance, we recommend adding a static field to your “Outbound Create” mapping. We would generally recommend naming it “Lead Source” (for leads) or “Contact Source” (for contacts) and setting it to the static value Common Room.

The following fields are available to sync into Salesforce for contacts:

Company field sync to Salesforce

For any organizations synced between Salesforce and Common Room, Common Room can automatically update their Salesforce account fields to include relevant context.

We generally recommend creating new Salesforce fields for any context being sent back to Salesforce from Common Room to prevent overriding of existing data.

The following fields are available to sync into Salesforce for organizations:

Sending contacts from Common Room to a Salesforce campaign

You can send a Common Room contact to a Salesforce campaign in one of three ways:

1. Pressing the "Send to Salesforce campaign" button from a Contact's profile
2. Selecting multiple Contacts from the Contact explorer and pressing the "Send to Salesforce campaign" action button
3. By creating a workflow from scratch and adding the "Send to Salesforce campaign" action as the last step of the workflow

Depending on how your Salesforce outbound settings are configured, the resulting behavior in Salesforce will differ as follows:

• If you don't have any outbound settings configured, we will do a best-effort assignment of the associated Lead/Contact to the campaign without any additional updates. No Leads/Contacts will be created in Salesforce.
• If there is only an update setting configured, we will also update fields for matched Leads/Contacts but will never create.
• If there is only a create setting configured, we will only create new Contacts but not update fields for any of the matched Leads/Contacts.
• If both update and create settings are configured, sending to a campaign will assign to a campaign, update matched Leads/Contacts and also create new Leads/Contacts if we don't have a match.

FAQs

How does Common Room associate pipeline/ARR to a person?

Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is mapped to a Contact based on the corresponding Organization they’re associated with.

Can I surface community-qualified Leads and Lead/Contact creation in Salesforce from Common Room?

It's common to have community Contacts who are potential Leads and ready to engage with a Contact of your sales team, but who aren't yet created as a Lead or Contact in your Salesforce. Common Room can help you automatically identify community-qualified Leads based on criteria specific to your business (e.g. Industry = Financial Services AND Annual revenue > $1M AND > 2 Slack posts in the last month AND mentioned “pricing”). You may work with the Common Room team to define your automated community qualification criteria.

Is it possible to sync Activity outbound from Common Room to Salesforce?

No, it's only possible to sync Activity inbound from Salesforce to Common Room.

Is it possible to integrate both Salesforce and HubSpot with Common Room?

If you use Salesforce as your CRM and HubSpot as your MAP (Marketing Automation Platform), you may want to integrate both with Common Room to get a holistic view of your Contacts and Organizations. This is possible today, but it’s important to keep a few important things in mind.

1. Syncing data into Common Room: The main consideration when syncing data in from both Salesforce and HubSpot is that it may be difficult to differentiate which custom field is mapped to which tool. A simple recommendation here is to prefix custom field names based on the tool, for example, SF Lead Status and HS Lead Status
2. Syncing data out to Salesforce / HubSpot: When syncing data out of Common Room, the most important consideration is any existing sync between Salesforce and HubSpot. Most customers we’ve worked with either have a bi-directional sync with a subset of qualified Leads from Salesforce to HubSpot or sync all Leads between Salesforce and HubSpot. If you’re interested in syncing data out from Common Room in either of these scenarios, we recommend that you pick one tool to target in order to avoid any conflicts during the sync.

How can I map Lead and Account scores in Common Room to Salesforce?

Lead and account scores are stored as custom fields so they can be mapped out to SFDC. To set this up, please reach out to your CSM for further assistance.

The Salesforce integration user will be API only - will this cause any issues when authorizing the connection?

API only is fine as long as the integration user has permissions to view/edit leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and campaigns.

Can we use a Salesforce Integration license, or does the integration user need a full Salesforce license?

A Salesforce Integration license should be fine.