In a more serious vein, I think the approach I describe here really can help improve your data quality, and the requirements that drive it are in my experience pretty commonplace. It will help you if

1. you want all of your contact records to be associated with a parent account; and
2. a significant chunk of your contact records are converted from lead records.

Here’s my three-step program guaranteed to get you that perfect data you’ve always wanted:

1. Customize the Contact entity, by making the Parent Account lookup field required.
2. Customize the Lead entity, by adding a lookup field allowing users to tie a lead record to an existing account.
3. Make a workflow that runs when a new contact record is created, checks to see if it originated from a lead, and if so, associates it with the appropriate parent account.

“Out of the Box” Dynamics CRM Lead Conversion

I’ll provide detailed instructions in a minute, but first I’ll provide some background on an important and often misunderstood piece of this: the lead conversion process. In out of the box, un-customized Dynamics CRM, leads are essentially standalone records – they aren’t associated with any other records (such as a parent account), and no other records (e.g., opportunities, invoices, cases…) are associated with them. For example, here’s a pretty-much out of the box lead form:

Notice that not the Topic, Last Name and Company fields are required. Many people don’t like the fact that the text field “Company Name” is required, since users are forced to enter a free-form text field for what may already be an existing account. (One of the customizations I describe below will fix this.) After you save a lead record there’s a Convert button you can click, and if you do, you’ll see that you can convert a lead record into one or more of three different record types: Account, Contact, Opportunity:

Most of the information you’ve entered about the lead (basic information on the lead form, a history of your activities) gets carried over to the records you create during the conversion, which is why you’d go to the trouble of converting in the first place. But since there are lots of permutations of the different records you can create with those three checkboxes, here’s a summary:

It’s the last of these that can get confusing. You can see it if you try to convert a lead to an opportunity and notice you can’t click OK unless at least one other field is filled in: you either have to also convert at least one of the other two convertible records (account or contact)…or you have to select an existing account or contact from the “Potential Customer” lookup field. One potential glitch I’ve noticed is that you can actually select an existing customer to attach the converted opportunity record to, and after doing that, click one of the other two options (or both!):

Yikes! It turns out that if you do this, Dynamics CRM ignores the Potential Customer lookup, and performs the steps described in the last row of the table above.

Besides being confusing, I think the main problem with this out of the box lead conversion process is that it requires you to enter a free-form text field for Company Name that has no tie to any existing account records. All too often, one of these two things happens when a sales rep creates an opportunity record by converting a lead:

• Since they’ve provided a company name on the lead form (they didn’t have any choice, after all), they simply use the account checkbox on the Convert Lead dialog (after all, they’ve already supplied the company name)…and if it’s an existing account, they create a duplicate record.
• They forget to select an account record from the Potential Customer lookup and just select the Opportunity and Contact check boxes. Again, the new opportunity record won’t be attached to the correct account, plus in this case you’ll have a standalone contact record created.

Effectively, this lead conversion process encourages users to enter bad data, by requiring that free-form “Company Name” field on the lead form. If you get a significant number of leads that are in fact contact records at existing accounts (say, collecting business cards at a trade show), this can lead to poor data quality and frustrated sales reps.

Three-Step Summer Workout Program to Whip Your Data into Shape

Try something along these lines:

1. Customize the Contact entity. If you really want all contact records attached to a parent account, change the Requirement Level to “Business Required” for the paretcustomerid attribute (Display Name “Parent Customer”). It’s not required out of the box, but it’s easy to make it required. Open the Contact entity for customization, click Attributes, locate the Parent Customer attribute, and make the change shown in the following screen shot, then save and publish the customization.

   

    

2. Customize the Lead entity. This involves just a little bit more customization. Here are the two most important:
   1. Add a custom N:1 relationship from Lead to Account, and add the lookup field created by Dynamics CRM to the lead form. Give it a display name of “Existing Account”, to make it obvious to your users what it’s for.
   2. Change the requirement level of the companyname attribute (display name “Company Name”) to “No Constraint”, and change its display name to “New Account”, to make sure users only use this free-form text field if they don’t think the account exists.

   After you save and publish those changes, you can make your customized Lead form look something like this:

   

3. Finally, create a workflow that runs automatically when a new contact record is created. (The one I show below is written for the Contact entity, has a Scope of Organization, and runs automatically on the “Record is created” trigger.) It will have logic like this:
   1. Check to see if the new contact record is a converted lead record. (The Contact entity has a sweet attribute – “Originating Lead” – that is designed for this purpose!)
      1. If it is a converted lead record, check to see if the “Existing Account” lookup was filled in. If it was, then the workflow should update the new Contact record by filling in its Parent Customer lookup field with the value of “Existing Account” from the lead record.

   Here’s a screen shot of my workflow’s Step Editor, in its unpublished state:

   

    

After you publish this workflow, create and convert a few lead records to see how it works. By requiring contact records to have parent customers, and by allowing your users to associate lead records with parent customers early on in the sales process, you’ll have happier, more productive sales reps, and your data quality will be the talk of the CRM neighborhood.

If you found this helpful, my book on Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0 has detailed explanations of topics like this one plus lots of others, and downloadable versions of the example workflows. Here’s a link to the page on Lulu.com where you can find out more and buy the book. 

Cheers – Richard Knudson, richardk@imginc.com