Business
Context
There is a very common business scenario
where you need to associate your Leads (which are onboarded from multiple
sources) /converted Leads to an existing Opportunity. This is a very simple yet
a business critical topic.
Salesforce already providing a
great capability for Lead Management supporting Lead conversion. In recent
upgrade, it has introduced way more user (both Business as well IT) friendly
Lead conversion wizard in Lightning along with new method in LeadConvert class.
Let’s talk about the possible ways to address this business case, considering this
stunning feature.
Solution
with new Lightning Lead Conversion feature
As mentioned above, Salesforce
now provides a brilliant Lead Conversion Wizard. This allows not only to associate
existing Account, it also allows to associate to existing Contacts and
Opportunity. On top of it - the beauty is: ‘Enforced Data Governance’ – option
for existing Opportunity only available if existing Account is selected, and it
will only show selected Account’s Opportunities. Moreover, it leverages standard
matching rule for Contact match and Account match while showing matched existing
Account, Contact options.
So, for this business scenario, using lightning Lead Conversion
wizard is highly recommended since this gives provision to on board Leads and
then convert them to existing Opportunity (apart from associating it with existing
Account & creating new Contacts or associating with existing Contacts)
Solution with Upgraded
LeadConvert Class – useful in Classic
Technically when a Lead is converted, Lead’s ‘IsConvert’ field
is set to true, also few other fields are populated e.g. ConvertedAccountId,
ConvertedContactId, ConvertedOpportuintyId, above wizard automatically populate
those fields as user selects existing Account, Contact, Opportunity. However
this wizard is not available in Classic.
Currently Salesforce provides ‘setOpportunityId()’ method in
‘LeadConvert’ Class, which facilitates to set the Opportunity id for the
converting Lead. That means, if programmatically Lead is required to be
converted, in that case also it can be associated to existing Opportunity. This
is very useful in Classic theme as mentioned above Classic does not support this
enhanced Lead Conversion Wizard today.
Earlier
version of the solution when Lightning Lead Conversion feature or setOpportunityId()
was not available
Honestly there was not any such “clean
solution” to address this business ask earlier when there was not enhanced Lead
conversion wizard or ‘setOpportunityId()’ available. One of the alternate solution
options was to have Opportunity lookup configured at Lead level, and then when Lead’s
Opportunity is populated by user, a process automation (process
builder/flow/trigger) to take place ensuring either Contact creation or identifying
matched Contact and then adding it to existing Opportunity’s Opportunity team
or do any other actions as per business acceptance.
Considerations
to align with this feature
So, with this new feature in
place, the existing solution along with its relevant data requires
re-evaluation to leverage best of the offerings of the platform. Though
completely depends on how you have designed your current solution, there will
be Lead data which may undergo some manipulation, but we should remember that
for any already converted Lead, you can’t update ConvertedOpportunityId (this might
not a valid scenario for your solution).
