Salesforce Integration

In this article, you will learn how to connect Salesforce to Forwrd and how to use it as a source when creating a scoring model.

Introduction to this integration

Adding Salesforce to Forwrd makes it easy to analyze and score your leads and customers by matching historical data (i.e., engagement, firmographics, demographics) against a business objective, to ultimately predict who will convert and why.

Here are some examples of use cases:

• Predict which leads will become MQLs
• Predict which MQLs will become Opportunities
• Predict which Opportunities will become Paying customer
• Predict which Customers will Expand
• Predict which Customers will Churn

In addition to Salesforce, you are encouraged to add more data sources, in order to develop a holistic, unbiased scoring model that takes into account ALL relevant user touch points.

What you need to get started:

• A Forwrd.ai account
• A Salesforce account - (See section # 6 for more details on the account requirements and Salesforce settings)

Setting up the integration

1. Add Salesforce as a source in Forwrd

To connect Salesforce to Forwrd, navigate to the 'sources' layer.

Click 'New Source' and select Salesforce.

Give your source a name that anyone accessing Forwrd can easily recognize.

From there, log in to Salesforce like you normally would.

Once done, Salesforce will show up as a source in your 'Sources' panel in Forwrd.

Click the 'three dots' icon to see more functions you can perform with this source. For example, you can share this source with another team member who uses Forwrd, and you can also test the connection to this source.

2. Define a decision base (micro data warehouse).

Next, you will need to define a ‘decision base’, which is a micro data warehouse that Forwrd can analyze to generate predictions.

A decision base can combine data from multiple sources. For instance, you can combine data from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Mixpanel. The types of source you would combine would depend on your use case.

Click 'Create New', name your decision base, select the data sources and the respective objects you'd like to join together.

Once the decision base is created, you can see its size, its date range, when it was last synced – and you can even set it to sync, to ensure your data is always fresh and up-to-date.

After you're done creating your decision base, you can apply filters to hone in on specific segments, user groups, and so on.

3. Define a metric (business objective).

Next, you should define your Metric, which stands for the business objective and business logic that will guide your prediction.

Click 'Create New' and name your metric. Next, add the decision base you have just created (in step 2) and define an expression to teach Forwrd what a successful conversion looks like.

Next, you will teach Forwrd what an ‘open’ record looks like, so it will make predictions on these open leads.

Lastly, to generate the most accurate predictions, you need to tell Forwrd how to recognize ‘lost’ leads that didn’t convert into opportunities.

4. Run an analysis.

At this point, we can run an analysis. Go to the 'Projects' tab, create a new project and within it, create a new analysis that includes your ‘Decision base’ and ‘Metric’.

Once done, click 'Create'. This will run your analysis.

At this point, you can review your analysis – As you can see on the left side of the screen, Forwrd identified a number of factors that impact your business objective, and, by how much.

You can drill down to any of the factors that Forwrd detected to gain a deeper understanding into what drives conversions and what does more damage than good.

5. Build a scoring model.

Now you can go ahead and build a model that will help you predict whether your open leads will convert or not. To do that, we’ll click ‘build model’.

Forwrd will display the result and classify your leads into 4 buckets, based on their likelihood to convert.

You can hover over each of the records and see a clear explanation of WHY Forwrd decided to give the lead its score.

6. Push the results into Salesforce CRM.

First let's define the Forwrd required fields in Salesforce itself, for that we first need to define the permissions required for the Salesforce user defined in step #1.

The user used for the integration in step # 1 should have read and write permissions to all the new fields that are going to be defined in this step. (It is recommended that other users should only have read permissions to these fields and not write permissions).

Now let's define the new fields in Salesforce required by Forwrd:

Forwrd score field:

And now, once we have this built, we can go ahead and activate this data and create an automation that pushes it into the tools your team uses daily – in our case Salesforce CRM.

Go to the 'Automations' tab and create a new automation by clicking the 'plus' button.

You’ll see a new line created for this automation, press on ‘Set’ button on the box that says: ‘DEFINE UPDATE SOURCE’:

In the drop menu that opens select your Salesforce source name defined in step # 1  (‘Choose Update Source’): 

In the ‘Object’ field choose the table you would like to write to (for example ‘Leads’) and in the ‘Record ID’ field choose the record key you would like to use (for example ‘Salesforce Lead Id’).

Now you can choose per the tabs: ‘SCORE’, ‘EXPLAIN’ and ‘TREND’ at the bottom the relevant fields you created (e.g. ‘Forwrd Score’, ‘Forwrd Explain’, ‘Forwrd Trend’). 

At this point you can choose to add another field by pressing the plus button, you can choose per the tabs: ‘SCORE’, ‘EXPLAIN’ and ‘TREND’ and add a condition of either once or always. for example: you can choose to create a field for Forwrd’s first score by clicking on score + once, this way you can view the progression of your score record.  

Once you are done click on the Done button at the bottom. 

Now, choose the frequency of the updates.

Click on the sync box, you are now able to choose at what intervals you would like your fields to update. choose the time (in UTC) it should be running every day (it can also run weekly, monthly) but If you choose daily you can pick the hour you wish to receive the update, you can add multiple times each day by pressing the plus button.

Decide how far back you want to score the leads.

This is defined at the first box in the line, once you click it you’ll see a menu that allows you to define the criteria. for instance, leads created in the last 14 days. It is important to choose here the correct time metric that is related to the prediction metric created for this analysis.

Last but not least, enable the analysis-Slide the On/Off button on the right corner to the ‘ON’ position.

FYI- A common automation would be to score Salesforce open leads and push them back into Salesforce CRM once a day.

Thanks for taking time to review these instructions.

If you need further help setting things up, or if you’d like to see a personalized, in-depth demo of Forwrd –book a demo with us, we'd love to help!