I am a newcomer to suiteCRM and am seeking advice on the best practices for tracking the various actions performed by leads. For example, someone downloads a brochure from my web site, or they add a comment to a blog posting. I would like to have a complete record of all such actions. But it is not clear to me how to set up suiteCRM to record this information and which types of records need to be created.
Any advice on the subject would be greatly appreciated.
You are going to have to make changes on your website for Suite to be able to get any information. There are a couple of features of SuiteCRM you could take advantage of when you do this.
SuiteCRM provides the ability for a form on your website to post to it and for that information to be saved. First you need to create a campaign in the CRM then make the action of the form on your website the URL of your CRM then /index.php?entryPoint=WebToLeadCapture and include campaign_id and redirect_url as hidden fields in the form. Redirect url is where the form will redirect the user to after the information has been saved on Suite.
Suite also has a REST API and SOAP API so you can add code to your website to post information to the CRM using these API’s.
You can find documentation on these APIs at
http:///service/v4_1/rest.php
http:///service/v4_1/soap.php?wsdl
Hope that helps you get started
Thanks very much for that. That gist of my question was more along the lines of understanding how to model the information in suiteCRM. So, suppose I have 10 postings and there are 5 comments to each posting, each from a different person. I want to record the identify of the person making the comment (as a lead) and be able to link that lead to a record of the post. The purpose is to be able to see who is commenting on which posts and then take appropriate marketing actions for those leads.
I would have thought that a single post would be modeled as a product. My company creates three things: published knowledge (via posts and others); training courses; and consulting work. There are the things I try to sell, albeit the price of the posts is 0 and is freely available. You refer to campaigns, but a post is not, to my understanding, a campaign. It might, however, be a tool I use in the context of a campaign. But what I still do not see is how in suiteCRM I would record the fact that a given lead has left a comment to a given post (or product).
SuiteCRM Is very customisable so it really is up to you how you decide to model information and with your knowledge of your own business I’d imagine you’ll have the best idea what works for you.
You could use the existing Products module and add any extra fields you need using Studio. You could also create a brand new module for Posts using module builder.
Both can be found on the admin menu and are user friendly (no coding required).
You can also add new custom relationships between modules using Studio.