A few weeks back the Eloqua Artisan blog spotlighted posting up links within your CRM system to connect your CRM and LinkedIn, it’s a very helpful post that walks through how to better enable your Sales team with seamless integration between your CRM and LinkedIn.  Prior to reading this post I had done some similar linking within our salesforce.com instance and were inspired to share.
A few of the items we’ve linked into our Lead records:

• Hoovers Profile
• Map It!
• Google It!

So now for the how-to:

1. I (as our salesforce.com admin) opened up the set-up page, under “App Setup” and from the “Customize” menu selected “Leads” and then “Buttons and Links.”
2. Select “New” button, once the New Button or Link interface opens up, you’ll want to put information in all of the boxes that have a red line alongside them (those are mandatory).  Using our “Hoovers Profile” button as an example, you’ll want to fill in the Label and Name with the appropriate information.
3. Under Behavior you’ll want to make an appropriate selection, I have it set up to display in a new window and since this is replicating a search string, the Content Source is URL.
4. In the larger box with formulas and fields, I dropped in the following:  http://search.hoovers.com/cgi-bin/hol_search?which=company&query_string={!Lead.Company}
5. After you’ve entered your formula/search string, select ‘Save.’
6. Now you’ve got a button, you need to add it to your Lead Record.  Select the “Page Layout” menu under “App Set Up,” “Customize,”, “Leads,” “Page Layouts.”  Decide which of your page layouts you’d like to edit and choose ‘Edit.’
7. Once the interface for editing the lead layout appears, you’ll want to select ‘Custom Links’ (noted in blue below) in the gray box and find the link you created (it’s name will appear).   From there you can drag it and drop it within the links portion of the Lead record.
8. Hit “Save” and you’re done.

Here are the strings I use for the buttons we’ve added:

• For a Google Search:
  http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS275&q={!Lead.Company}
• For a Map:
  http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?cn={!Lead.Country}&csz={!Lead.City}+{!Lead.State}+{!Lead.PostalCode}+&addr={!Lead.Street}
• For a Hoovers Company Profile:
  http://search.hoovers.com/cgi-bin/hol_search?which=company&query_string={!Lead.Company}

This has been a great help to our sales reps to give them a little more info about their prospects and has been a huge time saver.