Do More With Your Consulting Business WordPress Site

We’re super excited that that ConsultPress by Proteus Themes officially supports Caldera Forms. ConsultPress is a theme designed for professional consultants that are looking to create an online presence. We have added Proteus Themes to our recommended themes list beacuse their themes look great, work well with Caldera Forms and we have a good relationship with the company.

Caldera Forms works seamlessly with ConsultPress to offer beautiful, sleek and actionable forms for all your consulting needs. In celebration of this partnership, we want to show you how you can combine the powers of ConsultPress and Caldera Forms to create a lead generation form and a form to accept payments for consulting services on your WordPress site.

Capture Leads for Your Consulting Business

Creating The Lead Capture Form

Creating forms with Caldera Forms is easy thanks for the drag and drop form editor. If you’re new to Caldera Forms, I would recommend looking at our getting started guides.

We’re going to create a contact form for a consultation business where clients and potential clients will be able to book a consultation date and tell you what service they need assistance with. This is great if you need to direct queries to a certain person in your consulting firm.

1. Login to your WordPress and navigate to the Caldera Forms admin page.
2. Click on the New Form button and select the Blank Form template. Name your form and click the Create Form button.
3. Once in the form editor we will create the relevant fields for clients to book a consultation date. The fields we use will be the following –
   1. Full Name – Single Line Text Field.
   2. Email Address – Email Field.
   3. I Need Help With – Dropdown Field – Populate this with the services you offer.
   4. Consultation Date – Date Picker Field.
4. Once the layout has been created, go to the Email tab. If you are uncertain about how to set the email settings you may read our guide to email settings.
5. Save your form by clicking the Save Form button at the top of the screen.

Adding The Lead Form To A Page

Once the form has been setup to your liking, you are able to add it to a post or page. In this case, we will be adding it to a page called Work With Me.

1. Inside your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Pages.
2. If the page already exists, simply edit the page you would like to add your Caldera Form to. If it doesn’t exist create a new page.
3. Since ConsultPress makes use of a built in page builder from SiteOrigin, simply select the container you would like to add the Caldera Form to.
4. Select Add Widget and then choose a text widget.
5. Inside your widget, paste your Caldera Form shortcode.
6. Save your page.

Once completed your page should look similar to –

You are able to download the lead generation form example here.

Accepting Payments For Consulting Services

Accepting payments for your consulting services is simple with Caldera Forms. Caldera Forms supports multiple payment gateways which means you can handle transactions from your website with any major payment processor. To accept payments in this example, I will be making use of the Caldera Forms Stripe add-on.

Creating the Payment Form

1. 

   Since we’ve created a lead generation form previously, we will now extend on it so it can accept payments.

2. Navigate to Caldera Forms and Edit the form we recently created. We are going to add in the additional fields –
   1. Price for the service – A hidden field for each price. This will match with the I need help with drop down select field. This field will store the numerical value for hourly rate of the relative service.
   2. Hours – A number field which will allow users to select the number of hours they wish to pay for.
   3. Total Price – a calculation field which will show the total price for the service. In this use-case it will be a set price per selected service multiplied by the hours.
3. Inside the Total Price calculation field, we will use multiple Operator Groups. The mathematical logic is as follows: selected service x price for selected service . If you are interested to know more about using calculation fields in Caldera Forms, check out this helpful guide.
4. We will need to use conditional logic to show the hidden fields according to the user’s selection. This way the calculation field will only use certain hidden fields in the calculation – the price of the service selected.
5. With our total price being calculated correctly, it is time to implement the Stripe processor to  accepting payments for consulting services. To add the Stripe processor click on the Processors tab and then the Add Processor button. In the popup window for choosing your processors, select the Stripe processor. If you have never worked with the Stripe processor before, take a look at this for getting started.
6. The Stripe processor simply needs a Secret Key, Publishable Key and an amount in the settings in order to work. Find out where to find your API keys for Stripe.
7. Save your form by clicking the Save Form button at the top of the screen.

You can use the Preview Form button at the top of the page to test out your form.

Download the complete form demo here.

Adding The Payment Form To A Page

Just like with the lead generation form, you need to put this form on a page. Create a new page called Accept Payments. You can use the page builder like before. Alternatively, use the default WordPress page editor, and use the Caldera Forms button to add your form.

Caldera Forms + ConsultPress For The Win

ConsultPress, like a themes from Proteus Themes looks great. Combined with Caldera Forms, you can not just advertise your consulting service, but capture leads and get paid. You can use these simple steps that you’ve learned in this article to transform your consulting business site.