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sf_davesf_dave 

Convert Lead v.s. Deleteing the Lead and creating an Account / Opportunity / Contact

Hi Everyone,

I'm integrating our existing web portal with Salesforce and we have a "lead capture form" that creates leads in Salesforce from our website with out any problems.

I'm wondering if I even need to then mess with the convertLead API call when I can just manually delete the lead and create our custom hierarchy by hand (Account, Opportunity, Contact).

Do you gain any intrinsic data cohesion by converting a lead to an account or is the API doing exactly what I'm proposing for you?

Thanks,
-Dave

 

Jeff TalbotJeff Talbot

Consider that in addition to the creation of an Account, Contact, and Opportunity, performing a Lead Conversion within Salesforce also:

  • Takes any Activity records and Campaign Member records that were related to the Lead and updates the relationship to the Contact
  • Automatically checks for existing matching Accounts and Contacts to help prevent creating duplicates
sf_davesf_dave
Thanks Invisible,

And darn :-/

My annoyance is that the lead, which is a combination of an Account and a Contact, doesn't capture the full information of either of those records, so if I convert the Lead to an Account / Contact I then have to get the ID from Salesforce, update my local db, pull the full Account, Opportunity and Contact from our web portal and re-upsert them.

That just seems like a lot of hand shaking:
Convert Lead->Update Local Records->Pull Full Local Records->Upsert Full Local Records

When I could just:
Delete Lead->Pull Full Local Records->Upsert Full Local Records

Thanks for your reply
-Dave


Message Edited by sf_dave on 01-31-2008 07:26 AM