Build a Flow \- Buyer

Build a Flow \- Buyer

Flows are the heart of LeadConduit, housing your fields, sources, and the steps used to collect, enhance, filter, and deliver your leads. Let’s look at how to build a simple flow that collects leads from a webpage and delivers them to our fake MockCRM.

Background

You are the owner of Robert’s Robots, a new manufacturer of state-of-the-art robots. In order to generate sales leads for your robots, you are going to add a simple HTML form to your website where consumers can request more information.

Step 1: Create Your Flow
Let’s start with a fresh LeadConduit flow. You will need to log into your ActiveProspect account and navigate to the LeadConduit dashboard. Click the Flows menu option and then click Create New Flow. This will launch the Flow Editor. Your flow will be given a default name based on today's date, you should click on the text and rename it by typing “Robert’s Robots.” Make sure to click the Save button when you are done.

Step 2: Pick your fields
LeadConduit will automatically add a selection of the most used fields: First Name, Last Name, Phone 1, Email, Address 1, Address 2, City, State, Postal Code, and TrustedForm Cert URL.

In addition to the above fields, we want to add a text field for comments. To do that, first, click the Add/Edit fields button. Fields that have already been added to your flow will have a green checkbox next to them and will appear at the top of the list. Fields that are in any of your flows will have a green circle. se the Search Fields box to search fields, and locate the Comments field. You can also Scroll down the page to find fields. Once you have located the Comments field, click the empty checkbox to the left of the field name, then click Update Fields. Lastly, click Save to save the work you have done.

Step 3: Setup a Source
Sources represent uniquely identifiable entities that supply leads to your flow. These can be websites/webforms, lead vendors or even Facebook Lead Ads. Let’s add a new custom source to your flow. Click + Add Source. Click create a new custom source, and then select LeadConduit Standard integration (you can learn more about source integration options, visit our Sources page). Then click the green Next button. Enter Robert’s Robots Website as the Custom Source Name and select Website - Leads obtained via your website or webform from the Select a Source Classification drop-down, then click Finish. Lastly, click Save at the upper-right of the screen.

In order to make sure that you are able to contact your client, you only want to accept leads that include an email address. Click + Add under Acceptance Criteria in the Robert’s Robots Website row:
![][image1]
This brings you to the rules editor. Rules are used throughout LeadConduit. Click Add Rule. In the field that says Flow Field, start typing email, and you should get a drop-down, click Email. Change the is equal to (the operator) drop down to is not blank. Leads that do not include an email address will now be rejected before entering your flow. Ensure that the email field is filled out is one way to validate email data, but emails should also be formatted as username@domain (such as support@activeprospect.com). Let’s include a rule to require the email be properly formatted. Click the + icon to add a new row. Again, enter Email in the empty Flow field textbox, and change is equal to to format is valid. Click OK. Lastly, click Save.

This has set source-specific acceptance criteria.** If you want your acceptance criteria to apply to all sources, click the + Add button in the Configure Flow Settings row.

Step 4: Add your Steps
Steps are where the magic happens. Once a Source has successfully posted a lead into your flow using the fields you've selected, that lead begins it's journey through your steps. There are three types of Steps for processing a lead in LeadConduit: Enhancements, Recipients, and Filters.

For the tutorial, we will be adding a single recipient and filter.

Start by clicking on the Steps tab. You should see three options, Add Enhancement, Add Recipient, and Add Filter. Let’s get started by clicking Add Recipient. The Add a Recipient window includes a drop-down that lets you select from other LeadConduit accounts, your existing custom recipients, or any of a number of built-in recipients, like SalesForce, Hubspot or MailChimp. You can see a complete listing on our integrations page. In this case, we are delivering to our fake MockCRM, so click create a new custom recipient. This will bring you to the Select Integration screen, you can use the Select dropdown to scroll through the various built-in integrations, but we want to use Form POST. Locate Form POST from the dropdown and click it. On the next screen, enter MockCRM as the Recipient Name and select No, this recipient represents one of my own systems. LeadConduit may also recommend an existing Recipient with similar names.

Click Next to be taken back to the flow editor.

Step 5: Configure your step
You should now see a MockCRM step in your flow editor. Click Edit Field Mappings to be brought to the Outbound Mapping editor. By default, the Outbound Mapping editor will include any required fields needed to function, in this case, it includes only the URL. Normally URL and a list of fields would be provided to you by your CRM provider as part of their submission (or posting) instructions. In this case, I have generated some very simple posting instructions below.

Submission URL: http://www.mocky.io/v2/5c1016c53100002c0924f01e
Fields:

Successful Response:
{“status”:”accepted”,”reason”:null}

Failure Response:
{“status”:”rejected”,”reason”:”failure reason”}

Let’s start by copying the Submission URL into the flow field or raw value textbox in the URL map row:
![][image2]

This is the only required field for the Form POST recipient integration to work, however, if you submitted a lead right now, none of the data in your fields would be sent to MockCRM. Let’s fix that.

Start by clicking + in the URL row. In the flow field or raw value enter First Name, if you’ve done it right, it should turn blue-green. Once you click in the recipient field textbox, you should get a drop-down, select Form Field. Reviewing the submission instructions above, you will see that the field name is not First Name (or properly, first_name), but is fname. By entering fname in the textbox, you are letting LeadConduit know how to send the data to MockCRM:
![][image3]
Complete the mappings for all of the fields.

Lastly, you might notice that MockCRM requires a static (hardcoded) client_id. LeadConduit allows you to hardcode values by simply typing the value (178, in this case) into the flow field or raw value map:
![][image4]

Finally, you will need to indicate to LeadConduit what a successful outcome for MockCRM is. This is given in the submission instructions under Successful Response. This is call response parsing. If you do not setup response parsing for a recipient, LeadConduit will assume all responses are successful.

To setup response parsing for MockCRM, click the + button in the Outbound Mappings, and in the recipient field, locate Outcome Search Path in the dropdown. In the flow field or raw value, enter status. This will tell LeadConduit to look in the status field in the response. Click the + icon again, and in the recipient field textbox, select Outcome Search Term and place success in the flow field or raw value textbox. Finally, select Reason Path forms the dropdown in the recipient field. Enter reason in the flow fields or raw value textbox.
![][image5]
For more detailed information why and how we selected these fields, see Response Parsing.

Click OK and then click Save.

Step 5: Configure a filter
Filters allow you to stop the flow. Once a filter triggers, no additional steps will be completed. A comment use of filters is to reject leads after they pass the configured acceptance criteria and enter your lead flow. A flow with no filters will always respond with a success to your source.

To get started, click Add Filter. This will add the filter to your step. You may (optionally) provide a name/description for the filter. In this case, we would use MockCRM failures to quickly identify the filter when looking at the flow.

Next, using the rules editor, select MockCRM Outcome from the flow fields dropdown. This tells the filter which field to use. LeadConduit supports complex, nested rules, to find out more visit LeadConduit Rules. For our purpose, we only are worried about the MockCRM outcome. Change the operator dropdown to is not equal to and in the Select Outcome dropdown, choose success. This rule says that if the MockCRM Outcome is not equal to Success, the lead should fail. You can either setup a static failure reason, such as Failed rules, this is done in the reason textbox. You can also use the MockCRM Reason that was populated from MockCRM. To use that, remove Failed rules from the textbox and then start typing MockCRM Reason in the textbox, and you should get a scrollbox that pops up so you can select the MockCRM Reason field.

Click Save.

You know have a simple flow that will ensure that leads have a properly formatting email and will deliver to a MockCRM.