Success Story
Industry
Enterprise
How One of the World’s Largest Food Companies Automated Enterprise Salesforce Lead Capture
70%
efficiency gain vs. previous lead management processes
150
active forms managed by 12 users across global business units
20→1
category-specific contact forms consolidated into a single universal form
Overview
Cargill is an agricultural and food ingredient powerhouse with over 160,000 employees operating across dozens of countries and industries, and one of the largest privately-held companies in the world. When a food manufacturer has specific needs from Cargill, they eventually find their way to one of the company’s many contact forms.
Across their multiple global business units, Cargill uses FormAssembly to power enterprise Salesforce lead capture — automatically qualifying and routing thousands of annual business inquiries. It’s how a team of three business development representatives manages a volume of inbound interest that would overwhelm most organizations many times their size.
The Challenge
Before FormAssembly, teams within Cargill handled contact forms the way many large organizations still do: with form responses routed to email inboxes, waiting to be responded to, and manually entered into Salesforce — assuming the data didn’t get lost, entered incorrectly, or duplicated along the way.
The volume of data Cargill manages is substantial. One of their business units, Food North America, receives more than 4,000 inquiries every year. Sorting through the responses and routing inquiries to the right people inside a 160,000-person organization requires considerably more than a standard web-to-lead form can handle.
The other challenge was fragmentation. Cargill had accumulated more than 20 separate category-specific contact forms, each maintained independently, and each requiring individual updates whenever something changed in Salesforce. Marketing is expected to demonstrate its value, and those siloed or fragmented forms weren’t telling the full story of how a lead became a customer.
“FormAssembly helps us sift through the noise, quickly qualify leads, and route each inquiry to the right person — in seconds instead of days or weeks.”
The Solution: Automation Takes the Lead
Cargill’s use of FormAssembly has evolved over roughly 15 years, guided by a hybrid governance model: IT centrally manages platform access, permissions, and technical best practices, while individual business teams own the day-to-day form management and the customer data they collect.
As a Marketing Technology manager, Katie Carlson sits at that intersection and ensures the platform is used to its full capability across the organization rather than worked around in silos. Here’s what the team has implemented:
• Lead Qualification at Scale: At the heart of Cargill’s FormAssembly usage is its lead intake operation. Potential customers reaching Cargill’s website encounter carefully designed lead qualification forms that give business development reps the context they need before ever making contact. The inquiry flows directly into Salesforce, where complex routing logic determines who should follow up. With this process automated, just three BDRs in Food North America can manage 4,000+ of these inquiries annually.
• Marketing Attribution and the Full Customer Journey: Beyond lead qualification, FormAssembly helps close a loop that matters deeply to marketing teams: proving where a customer actually came from. Through hidden fields, cookies, and campaign tracking built directly into Cargill’s forms, the team can follow the customer journey from the campaign that drove someone to the website, through the form submission, into Salesforce as a lead, and finally as a closed-won opportunity.
• SAML SSO login: For events requiring verified identity, students log in with their university credentials before check-in is recorded, confirming they are who they say they are.
“As marketers in a huge corporation, you’re always asked what value marketing is bringing to the organization. For us to be able to map back to a specific campaign is really important. With forms being our primary lead capture system, it’s a critical step in that.“
— Katie Carlson, Marketing Technology Manager, Cargill
• Gated Content, Email Lists, and One-Off Campaigns: FormAssembly also powers Cargill’s content marketing infrastructure — things like gated campaign materials, email list sign-ups, and custom forms for specific product promotions or product sampling requests.
• A Creative Extension: The Customer Document Portal: In one of the more inventive uses of FormAssembly, Cargill uses FormAssembly to gate secure access to information hubs for major food manufacturing customers. FormAssembly acts as both the access verification layer and the login interface: The form accepts only Cargill and the customer’s company email addresses, then sends a verification code to confirm access — a flow familiar to companies paying for third-party verification services, built entirely within FormAssembly.
“We used FormAssembly to create a login and verification experience similar to what people encounter every day in mobile apps. It was a creative, nontraditional use of the platform that allowed us to deliver a familiar and intuitive user experience.”
— Katie Carlson, Marketing Technology Manager, Cargill
Spotlight:
From 20 Forms to One — How FormAssembly’s Implementation Team Helped Cargill Unify Its Lead Capture Infrastructure
As Cargill’s use of FormAssembly grew, so did the complexity of managing it. The team had accumulated more than 20 separate category-specific contact forms, one for each major food ingredient category on the website. Each had to be maintained individually, so every time a field changed in Salesforce, the update had to propagate across every single one of them. And none of the forms were sharing data in a way that could trace the full story of a lead’s journey from first click to closed contract.
The answer was a “universal form,” a single, centralized contact form deployed across all category pages of the Cargill website, with all maintenance consolidated in one place. If a field changes in Salesforce, it only needs to be updated once. But building it correctly with the campaign tracking architecture, conditional logic, hidden field setup, and multi-step Salesforce connector complexity that Cargill’s marketing operation required wasn’t a project the team could staff internally at the time.
They turned to FormAssembly’s own implementation team.
“We needed people who were pretty familiar with the platform in order to help us. Using FormAssembly’s internal resources was a huge help — people embedded in the platform can work a lot faster, and we knew we were following platform best practices. They actually got things done faster than we were expecting.“
— Katie Carlson, Marketing Technology Manager, Cargill
The engagement delivered more than a consolidated form. It produced the full attribution architecture alongside it: hidden fields capturing cookie and UTM data at the moment of form submission, campaign source information flowing into Salesforce with each new lead record, and the ability to trace a closed-won deal back to the campaign that first generated the inquiry. For a marketing team expected to prove its impact inside one of the world’s largest private companies, that attribution capability provides true ROI.
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