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Contacts and Leads
I'm adding contacts and/or leads successfully via SOAP/PHP. I'm not quite clear on which I should choose - If I don't have any owner id, should I create it as a lead or a contact with no owner? I'm just not quite clear abut the distinction between a lead and an unowned contact and which I should use when.
I noticed some oddities - you cannot create a lead without a company name (even though it's not marked as mandatory in the WSDL), but a contact doesn't have a company field at all.
I noticed some oddities - you cannot create a lead without a company name (even though it's not marked as mandatory in the WSDL), but a contact doesn't have a company field at all.
Generally, a Contact is created because you converted a Lead because it sort of 'graduated' to an Opportunity. To answer the second question, at that time (conversion), the company name will be used to create an Account that the Contact 'belongs' to.
Is there any harm in creating a contact that has no account or ownerid set? For instance, will it effectively be invisible because it won't show on anyone's owned contact list? Does anything special happen to contacts with no owner?
I'm also concerned that it's possible to create duplicate entries - there doesn't seem to be any kind of uniqueness constraint on contacts - I can create multiple entries with identical names and email address for example. Is such checking down to external APIs, i.e. should I check if a contact with these properties exists before trying to create it (and incur a second SOAP transaction hit in the process)?
If I associate them all to a dummy account, how will that affect my reporting? Most of my contacts have opportunities associated with them and I want to track the monetary value of those opportunities in reports. But if all those contacts are grouped to one dummy account, won't I just get a summed up opportunity value total for that one account, rather than the individual numbers per contact?
Hope that's clear - thanks for any help.
Morley.
Can't you just create a "phantom" account for each of those contacts? One that is just there to parent the record?
Maintaining artificial accounts for the sake of supporting individuals seems silly and creates a link between contacts where none exists. We have customers that are likely to have hundreds of thousands of individuals (and so I'm sure does every company using CRM for B2C). Can you consider this a feature request?
Thanks,
Morley.