Lead convert creating duplicate contact, Account and Opportunity

Hi Ajit,

Following ways can prevent duplication of objects:

1. Create and populate unique identifiers on the lead object.

Before you plan to convert a lead, you need to plan for fields on the lead which would help you to identify the duplicate contact. You can start with first name, last name, email id or date of birth if you store them as one of the key fields but this would cause some records to be not matching because of the name fields which is always entered wrongly or changed in your ERP or back end system.

So in this case, if the lead gets created first because the lead registered on your website and then at some point, your back end system creates a contact record, you can create the unique identifier on the lead like customer id as an example which can be used to match leads with contacts..

2. Verify and allow minimal fields to be populated before lead conversion.

Once the lead is entered in salesforce and at the point where the user is about to convert the lead , creating an intermediate visual force page would help to check for minimal fields to be entered on the lead so that the converted lead would have relevant data. Fields like phone number or email id, description fields are examples of these lead fields. The visual force solution would make sure that all these minimal fields are filled and required and once the data is filled in, the conversion solution can be triggered to convert the lead to account and contact.

3. Plan for overwriting contact fields or not to overwrite contact fields.

If you have already enabled integration with your back end system, there is a possibility that the customer record (contact) has been created already prior to conversion happening. So in that scenario, you can create the lead conversion solution to check for existing contact record and only update the lead fields on the contact. Here are simple things which you need to be aware of.

1. You should avoid overwritting contact records from the lead and your lead conversion solution should handle it.

2. The default lead conversion solution will overwrite the contact with lead information on standard fields and so a trigger which should copy the old contact information and re update the contact should be considered.

3. Also plan for which fields you want the conversion solution to update and which not to update.

4. Batch mode automatic lead conversion.

This might be a great solution where once the lead is updated with the minimal lead conversion solution, a batch process can be created which would read each lead and automatically convert the lead to account and contact. The batch solution would also create error reports on conversion failures and leads which are not converted as well.

We have a solution which can automatically convert a lead , prevent duplicate contacts from getting created by looking for unique identifiers and also create opportunities on courses which can help in ROI reports on campaigns.

Thanks