Lead Conversion

[roblaus]

I was hoping for 5.1 but in vain...

Create an activity for a lead. Convert the lead and you will get up to 4 identical activities. Worse; Sugar leaves the activity for the lead (which is, once converted, of limited interest I believe), creates one for the account and one for the contact where both the field "contact" as well as the flex relate field show the same contact entry.

Wouldn't it be enough to create the activity for the contact? With the account as "related"? Or at least show a warning like: there are open activities - what shall I do?

Next thing - the conversion screen cannot be changed without programming skills. Any reason for that?

And: Do we agree that a web address today is the most important piece of information? Ok, but why there is no field for it in the lead? So that it cannot be converted? In order to do so I have to create a custom field in leads, trash the existing one in accounts and create a custom field there with the same name as the one in leads. And then I have two fields on the conversion screen.

[swestin]

I have the same frustration with the duplication of the items when converting a lead. Would someone please respond if there is any setting that can be changed to stop this. It is very annoying.

[ruchida]

23282

This was filed as a feature request, but is this a bug?

[roblaus]

From a strictly technical standpoint probably not but in real life and from a db theory standpoint definitely. If I schedule a call with you (assuming you are a lead) but in the meantime somebody else sets you up as a contact/company/opportunity then there is no reason why this call should show up 4 times on my call list. I still want to talk to you and to you only. Once.
Correct would be to create just the relationships to all other involved objects and (also something that pops up here quite frequently) mark the lead for deletion.

[clint]

Well, it is working as designed. Whether you agree with the design is the real discussion. We've talked with many people about this behavior and half prefer it to function the way it does now and half don't want it to work this way.

So we are planning to address this in the Summer 2009 release and give users the option of copying forward the activities when converting a lead or leaving the activities with the lead.

[swestin]

I'd prefer to have the option to copy it to the account and delete the original from the lead. The best would be to find a way to relate it to the newly created account and contact, rather than copy it, though I understand that this is not a viable option from a developers standpoint, or so I've been told.

[andopes]

I second Clint.

We always must have in mind the metadata driven development.
The code always need be smart enough to do anything according to metadata specification.

Regards

[malcolmh]

Hi,

Having the same record there several times just doesn't make sens in any scenario. Copy all closed records to the Contact/Account, and MOVE all open records to the Contact.

This is the only use case that males sense imo

[roblaus]

It's a design flaw that can't be fixed easily without implementing a structural change as it happened with emails.

Imagine the following example multiplied by 10 users...

[jyim]

Just to clarify, here are the options that we are considering for Lead Conversion:

Copy All - This is the current functionality.

Move All This will move all records from the lead to the linked contact upon lead conversion. There will no longer be any records in the Activities and History subpanels linked to the lead

Move Activities - This will only move records from the Activities subpanel, and leave the records in the History subpanel with the lead (emails, notes, completed tasks, completed calls and held meetings).

Relate All - This will relate all records in the Lead's Activities and History subpanels to the newly created records.

Between the "Move All" and "Relate All", which makes more sense for your use cases?