saas

My last post briefly mentioned my struggle to integrate Salesforce and Redbooth with Zapier. Here’s a more detailed account of how Zapier handles Salesforce opportunities.

I thought I’d struck gold with Zapier. Within minutes I was able to connect Redbooth and Salesforce, Zapier was a pleasure to use, data was transferring, my tests checked out, it all seemed too good to be true…so I decided to implement it into the working day. All of a sudden, account managers’ sales weren’t posting to Redbooth–even though test after test of my own worked fine! For a while, I was really left scratching my head, then that sinking feeling started to settle in. I began to do a little digging in Zapier’s help desk, and came across this:

Zapier message

NEVER? Damn.

Zapier loops its tasks every five minutes, so within five minutes of an account manager creating an opportunity, Zapier had zapped it–never to be zapped again. Although account managers won’t create and sell an opportunity in five minutes’ time (wouldn’t that be amazing?), that’s exactly what I was doing with my tests. So the connection worked IF and ONLY IF an opportunity was marked ‘sold’ within five minutes of creation. I don’t think I would have made it very far if I’d gone to our sales team and told them they had five minutes to close all future sales.

It’s a shame that Zapier only zaps Saleforce opportunities based on creation, and not on stage change (or in my case, an opportunity being marked ‘sold’). This was a deal breaker for me, with the death knell coming on Twitter.

Tweet with Zapier

Well, that was that, no point dwelling on it. I was off to look for the next connector, which turned out to be more difficult than I bargained for. In the end, I found a service called We Wired Web, where I managed to get the connection working exactly as I needed. This is all because We Wired Web can actually be triggered to run on Salesforce opportunity changes. 😀