Create a Request for Quotation Landing Page using a form with Deal Properties
I'm a new use of HubSpot and what we need to accomplish is simple and it never occured to me that HubSpot wouldn't be able to support it. If I had known this was going to be such a problem, I would have been a deal killer.
We need to create Request for Quotation landing pages so that our customers can enter in certain information and get back a quotation from our sales team.
In order to do this, we need to collect from the customer via a form the following info:
Contact Properties (first, last, company name, email, etc.)
Once the form is complete and submitted then we want to:
a) create the new contact if it does not exist
b) create a new deal for the contact from the RFQ
c) Alert the quotation team of a new RFQ by assign the sales team a task with a pointer to the information collected.
c) send a PDF of the completed form as an email to the customer and assosiate the same email to the contact (for a history of requests) and send a copy of the same email to a google group.
c) Pass the information over to QuickBooks Online to create a new contact if its not already in the system (we can do this anywhere in the process and it appears we can do this with a Zap). We create our quotes in Quickbools Online (we can't use HubSpot as it does calculate all the necessary taxes, etc.)
What I have just found out when trying to build my first form and landing page is that HubSpot only allows you to use CONTACT properties from a form!!!?? How is this possible?? I was blown alway at this limitation, this seems like an incredible flaw (and now that I spent a couple of hours researching this it would seem others feel the same way about not being able to collect deal and company properties from a form!)
Has anyone figured out a simple work around for this limitation?
Create a Request for Quotation Landing Page using a form with Deal Properties
a) create the new contact if it does not exist
b) create a new deal for the contact from the RFQ
c) Alert the quotation team of a new RFQ by assign the sales team a task with a pointer to the information collected.
c) send a PDF of the completed form as an email to the customer and assosiate the same email to the contact (for a history of requests) and send a copy of the same email to a google group.
c) Pass the information over to QuickBooks Online to create a new contact if its not already in the system (we can do this anywhere in the process and it appears we can do this with a Zap). We create our quotes in Quickbools Online (we can't use HubSpot as it does calculate all the necessary taxes, etc.)
Hey there Gary- I can see you're pretty frustrated on this one, so I'm gonna offer as much as I can as regards the HubSpot side of things- As for the Quickbooks integration, that's not entirely my area of expertise.
I'm also gonna offer the second caveat that though I'm a HubSpotter, I don't have a line to the development team, nor am I involved in the development of the platform re: getting new features added/fixed- for that, you'll want to make yourself heard on the Ideas Forum.
So you're right: Forms can only be linked to the Contact Record, as all form submissions are by default tied to an email address, which means we can't add Deal properties in there.
There are a couple possible issues with including Deal properties, but that's just me: For example, if we could, how would we know which Deal to update if a Contact had multiple Deals? I can see how it may be useful, but there are some complicating factors I can make out that would make it hard to implement- But that's just me spitballing.
That said, if I were to build it your process on the HubSpot side would look something like this:
We build the Form, with Contact Properties for those sections we don't already have by Default. (You can create these properties from within the Forms tool) This form will create the Contact and record the form submission.
We create a Workflow with the Enrolment trigger "Contact has filled out Form Name".
That Workflow will then have the action "Create Deal", where we can insert the collected form data automatically into the Deal.
Alert the sales team: This would be done with a Notification action assigned to the team, and/or a Task assigned to the team.
The PDF is a bit more tricky: HubSpot doesn't support the in-app generation of PDFs like this, but you can send an email to the contact, and to an internal email containing the form information formatted however you like with the Send Email action.
As for the Quickbooks integration- I believe it does interact with Workflows in some way, but you'd need to check the documentation yourself to see if that functionality is there. I hope these pointers at least get you moving in the right direction.
Create a Request for Quotation Landing Page using a form with Deal Properties
Hi Aleeson,
Thanks for your feedback, however the issues you mention are easily overcome using existing data already part of Hubspot (and pretty much its done in all the other CRM systems I've used in the past.)
So to let's go through your comments:
So you're right: Forms can only be linked to the Contact Record, as all form submissions are by default tied to an email address, which means we can't add Deal properties in there.
So the key in Contacts is email address, that makes sense.
The key in Company is likely the Company Name
The key in Deals is Deal ID
Since the Key must be unique that is how you would identify what record your editting or updating.
A new deal would basically trigger the system to auto generate a new unique Deal ID for the new deal. (This is basically what happens today in HubSpot.
There are a couple possible issues with including Deal properties, but that's just me:
For example, if we could, how would we know which Deal to update if a Contact had multiple Deals?
This is easy you would want to provide a drop down of the existing Deal IDs for a particular customer and you would prepopulate some of the data so the customer knows what deal it is that they are editing in the form (salesforce, pipeline, activecampagin all support this). BTW the Deal ID is a standard property in HubSpot and its unique for each deal.
HOWEVER, its not even that complicated in the instance I laid out, I'm asking for a new deal to be created for each submission of the RFQ, I'm not even asking for the customer ability to edit it after submission, just submit the form and create a new Deal, so you have no need to know the Deal ID for this example, but editing would be accomplished by using the Deal ID.
As for the process, you nailed it in terms of inside HubSpot, except you didn't mention how exactly you are going to collect and populate the Deal with the customer provided information.
Do you have any thoughts on this? I seem to remember that you can copy values from a contact to deal when creating a new deal. Is this true?
Maybe the workaround is to create new fields in the contact record, that duplicate what we need in a deal, and then copy the values of the contact record into the new deal record and the reset the contact fields to empty strings.
Create a Request for Quotation Landing Page using a form with Deal Properties
@GaryTesta Were you able to resolve this deal registration request? If so, would you be so kind as to message me to engage in how you accomplished this?
Create a Request for Quotation Landing Page using a form with Deal Properties
I'm not gonna debate how it may or may not be possible on the HubSpot end to implement Deal-based forms- That's really not my area of expertise, nor do I know whether it actually would be possible to implement it. Sorry if that's a little unsatisfying, I just don't have the info on that front!
So as to how the info gets from Contact record -> Deal Record, you can set Contact Property Tokens to fill out Deal Properties in the "Create Deal" action (if you add the Create Deal action to your workflow you can see that deal properties can be filled out on creation by the Workflow, with basic copy text, or with Contact Properties), and the Form collects contact property info. You're also correct- You could use the Copy Property Info action to copy any future data from contact->Deal.
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