One of the most important aspects of a Salesforce Administrator’s job is finding ways to make working in the system as easy a possible. The extra clicks or seconds of decision making that end-users go through in a system that is not optimized add up quickly over the course of days and months. I recently found a fairly obscure work-around for a common annoyance with lead conversion that may prove useful to you.
The default behavior on lead conversion is to create an opportunity, however, in some organizations the inside sales team passes contacts to a sales rep before opportunity creation. Therefore, whenever they are converting a lead they have to select the “do not create opportunity” checkbox. To fix this you can create a custom lead convert button which uses a url to populate the checkbox – effectively changing the default behavior.
This is a fairly well known workaround and there are plenty of other blog posts that describe this tweak. In fact you can even pull fields from the lead record to help pre-populate the convert page, for example similar to how the opportunity name starts as “companyname- ” you could populate the task section with a title that includes the lead name and the date one week from today.
However, with our particular use case and with many of our clients we also want to change the default value of the “converted status” so that if the lead status was considered a converted status we use that as the default and if it was not considered converted we populate a default value. Unfortunately unlike the other fields, the converted status uses a numbering scheme that can’t be directly taken from the lead page using merge fields.
If you look at the page source you’ll notice that the values for the options are defined as numbers, but displaced as statuses. I believe these numbers correspond to the order in which a status was added to the lead status pick list and then marked as converted, however I can’t find any documentation on this anywhere. In order to pre-populate the fields correctly we need to translate the value on the lead to the numeric values for the status on the lead convert page.
You can do this by embedding a case statement in the URL. The final value of the case statement will be a default value if the status doesn’t match one of your configured values.
/lead/leadconvert.jsp?retURL={!Lead.Id}&id={!Lead.Id}&cstatus={!CASE(Lead.Status,
“Working”, “4”,
“Qualified”, “8”,
“5”)}
The default would be value 5, in this case that in our case that mapped to “Converted – Data Hygiene” but can also be set to “–None–” to keep the existing behavior if a match isn’t found.
