A Form that Creates a Deal

[Christy007]

It it possible to have a form that creates a deal in a designated pipeline when submitted?

[MatthewShepherd · Accepted solution]

Hi @Christy007 

Yes, if you have access to HubSpot workflows you can create a contact-based workflow that is triggered when your form is submitted. The workflow will then 'create a record' of type deal and then you can populate the deal record with information from the contact's record/form submission and add the deal to the sales pipeline and stage of your choice.

[streets_ahead]

Hi @MatthewShepherd ,

What would be your suggestion to use a form to update a deal?

For example, for a deal to progress to a next stage, we require a lot of smaller details and pictures, and various items. I would like to use HubSpot forms to capture these details if possible.

Is there a way a form submission can 'lookup' a deal to put this information here?

I would consider doing this to a contact then copying propoerties to the deal however, there will likely be issues when there is multiple deals under one contact. 

Let me know your thoughts and advice!

Cheers

Mr Loony aka streets_ahead

[MatthewShepherd]

Hi @streets_ahead 

This is possible but will require a bit of coding knowledge and Operations Hub Pro or the use of a service such as Zapier to work with the HubSpot API. 

As you mention, the issue here is knowing which deal to associate form values with. You could copy form values to all associated deals, but if you need to update a specific deal we need a way to identify that deal. A potential solution is to store the Deal ID in a hidden field in the form (create a new Deal ID contact record number property), but you will need to prepopulate that Deal ID before your lead fills in the form. A potential solution here is to send your lead a unique link to your form/landing page and include a URL parameter that matches your Deal ID property name as a parameter along with your Deal ID value. For example, for our Deal ID property, the internal name is deal_id, so my URL might look like this:

https://mysite.com/update-deal-page?deal_id=8748231608

Now we have our target Deal ID stored in our contact record along with the rest of the submitted form values we need a way to look up that deal and copy those contact properties to deal record properties. If you have access to Operations Hub Pro and Custom Coded actions and are comfortable with coding you could use custom code to look up the Deal via API and copy the values across (the programmable automation library might help provide a starting point for this code). If that isn't an option, you could use a workflow with a webhook to send form data to Zapier (requires a paid account) as I mention here. You would then set up a zap in Zapier to trigger when the workflow sends your form data via webhook and use the Deal ID value to identify the deal in HubSpot to update with the values passed along in the webhook payload. 

Not straightforward, but hopefully this gives you a good start on a solution.

[mikebrown]

Hi Matthew,

I have succesfully created a worflow to create a deal from a form.  As we work more from deals than contacts.  My issue is that the form submission details are kept in the contact feed, but do not come up in the Deal feed.  Is there any way that we can get that accross?

Mike

[MatthewShepherd]

Hi Mike,

There isn't an out of the box option at the moment to pull the form submission activity from the contact record into the timeline activity in the deal record. If that's something you would like to see you could post this suggestion over in the ideas forum, which our product team monitors regularly.

When creating a deal via workflow you can set the workflow to associate the deal with any associated contact, company, ticket, or quotes and also pull in timeline activity from those associated records to the deal record, but that activity is limited to notes, emails, calls, tasks, and meetings.

A few potential workarounds:

1.  When creating your deal copy your form contact property values to matching custom properties in the deal record and then make sure those properties are shown in your deal records sidebar.
   
   
2. Using Zapier (a bit more complex):  Create a workflow to trigger a webhook action on form submission that is then picked up by Zapier, which then copies your form submission details to a note engagement on the contact record. The last step of the workflow action then creates your deal making sure to select 'Add timeline activity from the enrolled contact to the deal record from x last days' under the Associate Deal with section (in the deal creation workflow action).
   
   See screenshots of example workflow and Zapier zap below.
   
   
   
   

[TKim]

Matt thanks for sharing! This has opened us up to a whole new world of possiblities. 

Any solutions on how to @ a specific user in the engagement? 

In my use case, I am trying to @ user other than the contact owner to ensure all the responsibile user have visibility. Thanks in advance. 

[MatthewShepherd]

Hi @TKim 
In my tests @mentions don't work if we send them in the note body via Zapier. what you could do is add a send internal notification action as a final step in your webhook action workflow, choose what other users or teams should be notified and populate the form data into the body of the email using personalisation tokens.

[Audian]

If you don't want to create additional Deal objects (and copy from Contact objects) and don't want to use Zapier, is to populate an open field like Deal Description. You can also do the same thing in a Task description, Email notification, etc. 

It's not fancy, but it gets the job done sometimes, and then users can copy that info as needed.

It goes something like this:

[JSoave]

Matt, we have certain contacts/leads that are deal related (and others that are not) so I created a workflow to create a "deal" if deal criteria are added when creating the contact (I made it optional for our team so if it isn't added, no deal/lead created).  One of the criteria is the state in which the deal is located.  I used a radio select uploaded from Hubspot as the way to capture that information.  The issue is that when I use the workflow, it wont allow me to use/auto fill the "contact token" for that item since it is from a dropdown.  In other words, there is no contact token for something that is input as a dropdown Is there a workaround?

Thank you

Jay  

[MatthewShepherd]

Hi @JSoave 

Is the issue that you can't check for your State values (in a radio select property) in your workflow or that you can't populate your State property information into the deal record / email notifications?

Below is a sample workflow where a form is submitted and I then use an if/then branch to check the values of a radio select property called '[Test] Deal State' to take different actions based on the contact's state. From there I create a deal that uses the '[Test] Deal State' contact token in the deal name (you could also copy the state property to a custom deal property if required) and then send an internal notification that uses the value of the  '[Test] Deal State' property.

[AlexSloth]

Hello Matthew 

I am trying to do what you're stating in your reply, but i can't seem to  populate the deal record with information from the contact's form submission. Could you please elaborate on how to do this? 

[MatthewShepherd]

Hi @AlexSloth

The steps I'm outlining above are how you create a new deal from a form submission. Are you trying to do that or update an existing deal?

To create a deal record, for the action step of your workflow, you need to select create record, then choose deal from the dropdown, and then set the deal properties, and where you see Contact Token you can populate the deal record with fields from the contact record, including form fields. If you don't see fields to send your data to in your deal record you can create custom properties: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/manage-your-properties#create-custom%20properties

If you are trying to populate an existing deal record with form values (which are stored as contact properties), for the action step of your workflow, you need to select Copy Property Value, for choose your contact/form field, and for target property type choose deal, and then deal field you want to copy to. Note this will update all deal records associated with the contact.

[AlexSloth]

Thank you Matthew, what im trying to do is to create a new deal from a (or more) specific form submission of a user. What is challenging me, is locating the entries from the form, within the contact token. Overall i see alot of different user data, but i cannot locate the information derived from the form submission, could you specify where this data would be located? 

[MatthewShepherd]

Hi @AlexSloth 

If you are trying to find the contact properties associated with the fields in your form you can go to Marketing->Lead Capture->Forms and find your lead form. Then edit your form and click on each field you see in the preview on the right of the screen. As you select each form field you will see the field editing pane appear on the left, which gives you the contact property name. These are the property names to search for under contact properties when creating your workflow to create a deal as described above.

If you are finding those contact properties no longer contain the data from the form submission in question (e.g. you are trying to create a workflow to create deals from older form submissions), it could be that other users, forms, or integrations have overwritten the data since the form was last submitted. You can still view the historical data of such properties but workflows can't retrieve that historical data. If that is an issue you likely need to create new unique contact properties just for use in your form to avoid them being overwritten by other forms etc. (although multiple submissions of the same form will still overwrite previous entries.) Though for new form submissions a workflow will trigger pretty soon after your form is submitted so should capture the data submitted on the form and create a deal with the correct information.

If you are trying to create deals from old form submissions you could export your form submission data

and then import the data as deals.

Let me know if the above helps or not.

[Christy007]

You are wonderful. Thank you, that worked a charm.

[MatthewShepherd]

Great. You are welcome!