Point and Click Salesforce Integration

Today, we’re going to talk about integrating Salesforce using a point and click tool called Workato. Workato makes it quick and easy to integrate Salesforce.com with dozens of other applications without writing a single line of code. In our previous tutorial, we talked about how to build a Google form to capture some basic information to mimic an event registration tool.

Now, there are some really, really great event registration tools out on the app exchange. Search for event registration tools, you’ll see things from companies like Cvent and dozens of others. They’re all great, and they offer a ton of power, but sometimes we need something that’s just really, really easy to get up and going. It doesn’t need to be overly complicated. We may not need to take payments. We may not need to issue tickets. We just need to capture some information off the web and push it into Salesforce.

In our previous tutorial, we covered how to build an event registration form, real basic. Now, it’s time to connect that with our Salesforce org, and we’re going to do that using Workato. You’ll need a Workato account. Go out to Workato.com, and once you’re logged in, we’re going to create a recipe. Let’s come in and get that started. The first thing it’s going to ask us is, “What triggers our recipe?”. Well, we’ve got our Google form that dumps into our Google spreadsheet. What’s going to trigger our recipe is going to be Google Sheets, and it’s going to be a new row added to the spreadsheet. So, when somebody else fills out the form, and we have a new row added that is going to trigger our recipe.

Now that we’ve done it, we need to tell it which spreadsheet, and we’re going to call it Event Registration responses. Notice though, I have already established the connection between Workato and Google Sheets. It’s a very straightforward process, and in a minute we’ll see what that looks like in terms of connecting Workato to Salesforce.com. Here we’ve created our trigger event, new spreadsheet row added to this specific Google sheet, and now we’re going to tell it what action we want to take.

Actions are going to be what result. In this case, we need to do a few things. We’ve created an event registration form where we’re capturing the company name, the first and last name of the attendee, their phone number, their email address, and we also want to capture the fact that they have registered for an event. So, let’s do this. Let’s tell it we want to push this into Salesforce. So, we’ll select Salesforce from our menu, and the first thing that we need to do is create our account. We’ll come in here and give this an account name.

Now, so notice Workato is going to pull in all of our fields that we have accessible on the account, and it would pull in any custom fields as well. So, where do we want to get the account name from? We want to get it from our Google sheet. We will take the company name, and we could come in here and we could set values for these other fields. We could default things or we could continue to map. For now, in this tutorial, I’m just going to pull in the company name, and that’s going to be our first step.

Now that we’ve got that created, we need to add a new action, and you’ll notice we can do conditional actions, all kinds of other things. In this situation, we always want to create an account. We always want to create a contact, and we always want to create an event registration. So, let’s come in and … Our second step is going to be in Salesforce as well. We want to create a contact. Now, thinking about Salesforce, if you’ve ever done any kind of data work in Salesforce, and you’ve needed to relate records to other records for example, a contact is going to be related to an account, you’ll know that when working with the API, we need record ID’s.

Workato does a great job of referencing ID’s that were generated in previous steps so, in step one, part of the output was that we created an account, which created an account ID. We can easily drag and drop our account ID into the account ID field here in Salesforce. Now we want to get the rest of our contact information so, we’ll do a first name and a last name and a phone and an email address. This is great. We’ve got all of that, and now that we’ve created our account and contact, the next thing that we want to do is create our event registration.

So, again, we’ll do a new action, and we always want to do this action for this particular use case. You might have another use case where that might now be applicable. Now, I have already done some work in terms of creating custom event and event registration objects. One of the great things about Workato is that while it supports most standard objects, it also supports custom objects. So, let’s come in here and we want to … oops … We want to create a custom object. Create object. There we go. Here, we’ll tell it our object so, in this case, we want to create an event registration record.

Now, you’ll notice here, we’ve got event, event participant, meal preference, and comments. Well, event is going to be … There’s going to be an event record in Salesforce that our event participant or event registration object relates to. So, here again, we’re going to need an ID from Salesforce. We’ll hop over there in just a minute. Our event participant is going to be our contact so, just like we got the account ID in step one, we’re going to come over here and get our contact ID from step two.

Let’s go over to our Google sheet, and let’s get our meal preferences. So, there we go. Let me flip back over to Salesforce and grab the event ID. We come in here. Let’s go down to our events tab. We will have to go over here. Alright. So, I’m logged into Salesforce now, and as we mentioned in the previous step, we need to have created an event and an event registration object. The way that our event registration object works is we have two master detailed relationships. One that looks up to our event object. Another, this event participant, that is master detailed to our contact object, and here we have our meal preference and comments fields. Well, since this is a master detailed relationship, we always have to have ID’s for these related records, and we got our event participant, our contact from step two in our Workato process, but now we need an event.

So, we will have needed to have created an event record in Salesforce. I come out here, here’s my really big event, and I just need to grab the ID for my event record. We’ll come over here back to Workato. We’ll paste that in. So, what we’re saying here is that for this particular recipe that we’re building, it is specific to this event. If we needed to do this for another event, we could come in here, replicate the recipe and put in the event ID for that new event. So, we’re going to create an event registration record. There’s our event ID. We’re getting our event participant ID from step two, and then we’re mapping meal preference and comments from our Google form.

And we’re already done. Okay. So, we’ve got our connections named here. It’s worth mentioning that Workato does support sandboxes. That in mind, I would tell you always, always test this in a sandbox. I’m working in demo environments here so, it’s not impacting anything really critical. One thing to note though, Workato does support Professional Edition orgs. If you’re familiar with the different license that Salesforce offers, you know that professional orgs cannot get a sandbox. If you do want to use this with Professional Edition, you have the ability to do so, but I would recommend that you get a separate dev org to do some testing.

Let’s say, “Next.” Let’s give this recipe a name. We’re going to call this Really Big Event Registration, and we can give this a more formal description than what we’ve got here, but for now we’ll just go with that. We can put some categories in. We’ll say, “Next.”. And when we’re ready to start, we need to click the start. Now, this is really, really important. If you have ever stubbed your toe building workflow rules like I have, you’ll know how critical it is to activate the workflow in order to get it to work. This is no different so, let’s come in here.

Let’s start it, and let’s hop back out to our registration form, and we’ll call this New Company, and we have Michael Jordan, and we’ll say that M.J. is eating gluten free these days and he is really looking forward to the event and submit. Alright. So, that has been recorded here in our spreadsheet, and if we hop over to Salesforce. Actually, let’s go back to Workato for a minute. Here, it’s pulled in … It’s already looking at our sheet. It’s pulling in some information, and if we come back into Salesforce, we will see that we have captured these additional event registrations.

I hope that helps. If you find yourself needing assistance with Workato, Venn Technology would love to help you out. Reach out to us on the web at VennTechnology.com or on Twitter @Venn_Tech. Thanks for watching.