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Advanced: Passing custom values into Salesforce CRM
Advanced: Passing custom values into Salesforce CRM
Updated over 2 years ago

Note: This solution requires a premium Appointlet and Zapier account. The Salesforce subscription tier required will depend on your usage. You can create an Appointlet Salesforce Zapier integration without following these steps. This guide is for people who specifically want to pass custom data into Salesforce.

What we mean by "passing custom values" to Salesforce

Any time a person books with your Appointlet organization, you have the option of using Zapier to pass that data securely to a third party application like Salesforce. The problem is that CRMs don't always have a "receiver" for you to plug your booking data into. For example, if you are collecting leads in a sales funnel, you might want to pass through information about the leads that your CRM does not accept by default. You need to first create the custom properties on the lead objects in salesforce -- only then will the data type will appear as an option in the Zapier "create lead" action.

Let's say that you ran a series of advertisements on Google Adwords and want to know how they performed in terms of customer conversion outcomes. You set up Appointlet for sales demos and are passing the booking data into Salesforce with Zapier. You won't need to generate custom fields for basic data like Name, Email, and Company, but custom data properties are required to track something like your ads' Google Click IDs.

Setting up your Lead Objects in Salesforce

This article will show use Google Click IDs as an example, but you can use this method for any data type. The same Salesforce schema editor is available for objects other than leads, but in the interest of brevity, we'll stick to this use case.

Step 1: In Salesforce, click on the settings gear and click "setup" as shown below:

Step 2: In the upper left corner, you will land on Home by default. Click on the Object Manager tab shown here:

Step 3: Within the Object Manager, scroll down to Lead and click on it:

Step 4: Click on Fields & Relationships in the left navigation bar. Then click the New button to generate your new custom field:

Step 5: It's generally a good idea to set up a basic text field for custom data. If you need to support longer fields (255+ characters), use the text area data type. We'll be creating a Google Click ID field, so the regular text field is fine.

Step 6: We label the field based on how we're using it and have the option to specify a maximum character length. I'm using "gclid", which is short hand for Google Click ID. Once this is filled out, you can click next on the remaining screens and then hit save.

Step 7: Now that you've saved, you should see the gclid field on your Fields & Relationships dashboard:

Setting up the Zapier Salesforce Integration

Your Lead's custom field is created, so now you can navigate to the Appointlet / Salesforce integration in Zapier and propagate that field. In the screenshot below you can see that the "create lead" action has a "customize lead" section. This is the step where you will pass the custom field in from Appointlet to Salesforce.

If you're looking for your custom property, we found that it appeared at the bottom the Customize Lead list:

Once you complete this Zapier action and turn it on, you'll be ready to start passing custom fields into Salesforce.

Bonus: Filtering the properties in your Salesforce Reports

If you're passing in custom data then you probably want the ability to run reports on it as well. To do that, you will need to take a few extra steps in Salesforce.

Step 1: Click on the "Reports" section and then select "New Report":

Step 2: Select Leads from the left navigation menu and click on Leads in the main area. Then hit the Continue button:

Step 3: Use the left navigation menu on this New Leads Report to organize the data. First you'll want to click on outline and in the Columns field, type in the field name. When we type our field "gclid" and select it, that property appears in the report. You can use this same section to remove unwanted columns:

Step 4: You can click on your custom data column title and drag it over to the left for ease of visibility. Now in the left nav area, click on the Filters tab and type in your custom data label again. Set it copy one of the "gclid" values from the spreadsheet.

As you can see, the filter will show you only the records that have that value assigned to your custom property. Now you're ready to run a report. Just click "Save and Run" to generate that report.

When you're finished, the report will show up in your dashboard so you can access it and continue to run reports periodically, as needed:

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