Salesforce IdeaExchange

5470

Allow for Account SEARCH during Lead Conversion

When converting a lead SFDC only offers a picklist of existing accounts that match the Company field. Because of the simple match algorithm, the target account is not in the picklist. You then have to cancel the conversion, edit the lead field "Company" and start the conversion again.

It would be far more efficient to have the ability to SEARCH for an account during conversion. You can then change the search string in order to find the right account. As addition there should be a checkbox to indicate whether a new account should be created.

Because our company uses web-to-leads, I quite often encounter the situation that I have to adapt the "Company" field in leads before I can do a conversion.

Example:

- We have an account "Salesforce" (supplier).

- Someone from Salesforce visits our web site and fills out "SFDC" as Company name in our web form.

- The lead that is generated now has "SFDC" as Company name.

- When I convert this lead Salesforce matches "SFDC" with our existing accounts, but will not find the account "Salesforce".

- So I have to cancel the conversion, edit the lead, change "SFDC" in "Salesforce", save, and convert again.

- Only now Salesforce, finds the account "Salesforce", and I can convert the lead correctly.

TomaszOczapowski 03/28/07	Great idea!
RikvdW 03/29/07	Thanks!
manu 04/04/07	Agree with this. Good idea.
HippyTim 04/04/07	Let me tell you this is a GREAT idea. so many people get held up on this part. Pointless accounts created all the time. THIS would fix alot of issues.
WrogWrog 04/11/07	Even further, search for a CONTACT as well as an account at the first stage of conversion - my users can often link a lead to an existing account, but matching to a contact seems to be hard for them.
RikvdW 04/12/07	Indeed, this should also allow for a Contact search. Pitty that I can not update the Idea.
becksicle 04/16/07	Fantastic idea! I am responsible for system training and the lead process training always causes huge problems. I have to demonstrate what RikvdW explains in his posting and explain the problems caused by duplicate accounts. This is really daunting for new starters who are not familiar with SFDC or our current customer base. The ability to search for an account / contact would make a huge difference.
RikvdW 04/20/07	If we add the "Contact" search as proposed by WrogWrog, it would be nice to check for duplicate leads on way.
Scott312 05/01/07	I am new to sales force and went to post this idea and found it already posted. I would like to add the following....after allowing a search to find the contact/account instead of relying on crude match criteria: During the conversion process, allow SFDC user to compare contact information to existing contact (similar to the merge contact workflow). Many times the contact may put updated info into the website, but conversion process does not take that into account. This would allow most current contact info to be compared by SFDC user and updated as done in a duplicate merge.
RikvdW 05/02/07	I agree, when a lead conversion leads to a merge with an existing contact, the same process should be followed as merging contacts.
RikvdW 05/11/07	As mentioned in other ideas, whether a user is able to create a new account during conversion (check box field in form) should be configurable by the administrators (via profile).
mtlcanuck 05/15/07	The ability to search for the account and a contact upon conversion is a great one. Why hasn't this been acted on????
RikvdW 05/15/07	Good question :-)
skappler 05/18/07	Please, please, please get this ball rolling! My org is processing 400+ web-to-leads per month with only 4 people and the process is miserable. This is in addition to our full-time responsibilities and we end up spending additional time cleaning the system of the inadvertent duplicates created. I love SF, but this one hang-up causes me so much grief and misery.
RikvdW 05/21/07	While implementing this feature, please also allow administrators to set the default for "Do not create an opportunity". Currently, as a default an opportunity is created. In our case we would prefer to have the default set to "Do NOT create an opportunity"
FrancisLam 05/30/07	Allow Account search during lead conversion is very important and effective. Especially in Asia with local languages, the English name of the Account/Company may be different, depending on the who/where did the translation. By manually search an Account is a good feature to avoid creating redundant Accounts.
IG-Brent 05/30/07	Another "ditto" here - we ramped from ~250 web leads to ~1,000 web leads a month with 5 inisde reps and now our ability to respond to the leads has completely fallen apart. I just met with my marketing team and did a root cause analysis; we determined that a big problem is this very issue. Someone must have figured out a way to solve this problem - maybe a third party product? This seems like such an obvious improvement to the ability to manage leads. Another problem this creates downstream is that when a lead is the result of a campaign, but the rep knows that the lead is a duplicate, he/she will simply mark the lead as "unqualified" because the process of merging to an existing contact is so burdensome. As a result, the campaign association is lost (and any subsequent link between the campaign and an opportunity that arises)
nicky6 06/06/07	Great Suggestion. It would also be great to overwrite the Company Name in the lead record from SFDC to Salesforce once you made the association to the Account
snish 06/06/07	Completely agree that this needs to be addressede. This is a big productivity waster and a major deficiency for closed loop marketing. It's a becoming a huge frustration point for our marketing team (and even sales mgt).
UGSAdmin 06/22/07	This is LONG OVERDUE. GET it in.
BenPirih 07/13/07	We wrote a custom function to replace the default lead conversion process. i.e. a custom button that links to our internal servers, which then uses the api to perform all neccessary logic, i believe this could have been done with scontrol and apex code also.. This avoids duplicates and enforces our custom biz rules / logic.. Why not allow customization for the lead conversion logic?? seems like this is missing, and would be of great value..
MissouriAdmin 07/18/07	This is absolutely critical and SHOULD search ALL accounts not just those that the user can update. With over 900,000 accounts, we need to search them all. If the Account is NOT editable, then do not perform the updates.
cspires 08/13/07	This would be a big help! We have so many duplicate accounts because when reps convert leads if they do not have the exact name that is already in SF, then it creates a new account. Since our leads are generated from a website form, customers enter the company name and when a rep converts the lead, a new account is created if the company name is not exactly how it is in SF. We have accounts like Jenny.com, Jenny, Inc., and Jenny and SF does not a way for admin to go in and run a dup report to correct this problem. We have to manually search through thousands of accounts, contacts, etc.
jshumaker 08/30/07	This is definitely something that would help my agents avoid duplication, however i have a patch, i have made a look up field on the lead record which allows my agents to search for an account and just "copy and paste" the account that matches the account for the given lead. It's a little cumbersome and sure some of them do not follow the idea, but it reduces it a little.
thusker 09/20/07	This is a MUST HAVE . . . I can't believe that SFDC has not already provided this kind of functionality!!!!!!! ANd it has to be a pretty easy one to implement, too. Please, please, please do this soon!!!!!!
quick13 12/03/07	This would be huge for our organization. Lead conversion process is KILLING us and costing my sales reps valuable selling time and something like this would be extremely helpful and save me as the administrator so much cleanup as well!
JustWondering 12/05/07	I LOVE this idea.
ljgriffin Jan 21	great ideas! we market to educators and there are many schools/universities with the same name across various states and counties and the simple picklist does not provide enough information to link the lead to the proper account in its proper location. the view option to the right is nice but when you have a long list of matches it is less user friendly. hope to see an improvement soon..
rpr2 Feb 10	Yes! What RikvdW describes as far as searching, and then re-searching and modifying the lead company name, and then searching again is the process that I go through as an administrator when I convert leads. However, this is not a process that our Sales Managers want our salespeople to spend their time doing since it is so time-consuming. Yet, they don't want duplicate accounts either. Being able to adjust the lead company name during the search and do one search instead of 3 would be wonderful.
carolina.santamaria@idealistas.org Mar 31	We really need this! it would make the process much more efficient.
kailanichole Apr 4	Thanks! Looking forward to this feature:)
jayr2008 Apr 4	I agree, this would be a great time saver
sephraim Apr 6	Yes. It will be a helpful feature.
sephraim Apr 6	Yes. It would be a helpful feature.
ks May 23	We are currently in the process of designing and implementing account lookup on lead convert. The proposed implementation would keep the existing matching algorithm, but then allow for account lookup/create directly on the convert screen. thoughts?
TheBoot Jun 27	I think even if you make it only so that the lookup is still available when no account name match has been found, that will really help. ( I think that is what you are describing.) I ran into this yesterday with a similar scenario as is described in the Idea listing. -Convert a lead with Company SFDC -NO matches in my database, but I know that I have Salesforce.com in there. -On conversion screen, SFDC is not editiable, and I am forced to create a new Account, rather than given the opportunity to search for a potential match. Of course the option is there to cancel and go back and change the company name and re do the conversion process, but what sales rep is really going to do that? In most cases, it will only be admins or mareketing users that will care enough about the data quality to do this extra step. By just making that Company/Account field on the conversion page open,editable,and searchable - even when no match is found, I think that will help alot.
phuts Aug 4	I agree this is a great idea and also agree that the search should look for contact matches first as this will give you an exact hit to the associated accountand eliminate the creation of duplicate contacts because you picke dthe wrong account. It should also be possible to configure the Account match results as currently you only see the Account Name and Account Site fields and it is sometimes hard to pick the correct account
APW Aug 21	Changed status to Coming in Winter 09.
sfgsfghsdfjsdj Sep 5	Need to be able to do the same with contact name, though. Because spelling errors can be really tricky as well.
marilynl Oct 14	Changed status to Delivered.

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