Q&A: Can I Populate Information from a Lead to a converted Opportunity

Question: When I convert a Lead record into an Opportunity, I’ve noticed that CRM associates the Opportunity with the Lead with the ‘Regarding’ field, so I can access the information about the Account or Contact (customer) by clicking the link. But what if I want quicker access to information about the customer? Is there some kind of way I can populate information from the Lead record directly onto the Opportunity record?

Answer: You can definitely do this, but as usual, there are at least a couple of options. First, start by creating an automatic workflow on the Create trigger for the Opportunity entity. Make the first action a Check Condition, and note that for the Opportunity entity, there’s a very handy related entity called ‘Originating Lead’ — this is exactly what you want for the scenario you described, since it will let you check to see whether the Opportunity just created was created by using the Convert action from a Lead record, or ‘from scratch’ (with no originating Lead record).

So what I would do is create that conditional logic, and only if the Originating Lead record’s Topic contains data (Topic is required for Lead, so this will always work), then fill in the fields on Opportunity from their values on the Lead record, which will be accessible from the workflow.

One caveat: I’d advise against creating custom attributes in the Opportunity entity to hold these values, since they already exist elsewhere in your CRM (on the Contact or Account records), and it could be confusing to users since they won’t be in synch if changes are made in one place or the other. What I would do is use the Opportunity record’s ‘Description’ field, and put some text in there describing what information you’re showing them, and then include the fields from the Lead record using Dynamic Values in the workflow UI.