Supercharge Your BatchBook.com Web Forms

Don’t miss our new post on BatchBook and Web Forms: Read about how you can integrate Formstack web forms with your BatchBook account with the help of our new service, WebFormGlue.

The BatchBook Web Form is a useful tool for small business owners using the BatchBook CRM to manage contacts and sales efforts. BatchBook’s Web Form generator makes it easy for a web novice to create a contact form for his or her website.

Data submitted via the form goes straight into the site owner’s BatchBook account, meaning there’s no data entry required to get a new contact’s data into the CRM system.

Unfortunately, the standard BatchBook form has a few drawbacks:

• Your site’s users will either have to navigate away from your site in order to fill out the form, or you’ll have to put the form in an IFrame (yuck)
• You have, at best, limited control over:
  • Your form’s styling
  • Types of controls used on your form
  • Default values for controls
  • Form validation
• The BatchBook forms do not validate as XHTML 1.0 strict
• You won’t have the ability to post your BatchBook form via AJAX

Each of these points is a deal-breaker for us, so I set off to see if I could find any solutions that didn’t entail digging into the BatchBook API. With a bit of searching and effort I came up with a solution that allows us to address all of the drawbacks listed above, and do some really useful additional things, as well.

The Solution

It all started with this post on BatchBook’s corporate blog entitled “How-To: Give BatchBook Web Forms your own look and feel.” The gist: You can put your BatchBook form’s HTML directly on your site and control its styling by editing the CSS.

Do you need a customized web form that’s tightly integrated with a third party application like BatchBook? Contact us today!

That’s a great start, and it knocked out most of the drawbacks I mentioned above. Even better, it opened the door to almost unlimited customization options. If you’ve got the required HTML/XHTML, CSS, javascript and server-side scripting chops, you can make your form do just about whatever you want!

To see an example of a highly customized form that inserts collected data directly into xioup’s BatchBook account, click the “Contact Us” tab you see floating on the left side of this page. Go ahead, fill it out!

Features of the Request a Quote form:

• All data entered into the form goes straight into xioup’s BatchBook account
• We have complete control over
  • The form’s styling
  • The types of controls used on the form (including hidden controls)
  • Default values for controls, as well as the ability to set the values of any control via javascript or PHP
  • Form validation
    • Thanks to the jQuery Validation Plugin
• The form validates XHTML 1.0 strict
  • I threw away the BatchBook HTML and started from scratch, being careful to make sure I kept the correct names for all form controls
• The form is posted via AJAX
  • Thanks to the jquery Form Plugin and the use of a Web Proxy
• The form collects Google Analytics data with each submission and saves it in the new contact’s record
  • Thanks to an informative article over at Analytics Talk
• The form collects geolocation data (country, region, city, latitude, longitude)
  • Thanks to the Google AJAX API
• The form collects the URL from which it was submitted, the date and time it was submitted (GMT), and the user agent string of the browser that submitted the form.

BatchBook is a nifty SaaS CRM tool that we’ve been using to manage our contacts for a while at xioup. Expect to see more posts about it as we become familiar with it.

Related posts:

1. WebFormGlue offers Formstack to BatchBook Integration
2. Mail-Merge In the Cloud with BatchBook, WebFormGlue and Drawloop

Tagged as: AJAX, BatchBook, Cloud Computing, CRM, geolocation, Google Analytics, jquery, jquery Form Plugin, SaaS