Leads are potential customers of a company. In Salesforce, information about leads is stored in Lead records. We can gather leads through various lead sources like Web, Phone enquiry, past happy customers, partner referrals so on and so forth. Leads will become assets to your company once they gets converted into a contact or account to whom you can actually place a deal with. The total number of leads which are converted out of the total leads generated by each lead source is a value worth comparing since it helps throw light to the best lead pathway. This article discusses about lead conversion and how to create Lead Conversion Report and dashboard in Salesforce.
Convert Leads to Opportunities, Accounts, and Contacts
Once you are convinced that the lead is a definite sales possibility, you can convert the lead to a account, contact and opportunity. The criteria for qualifying a lead depends on the company’s unique business process.
When you convert a lead, Salesforce uses the information stored in the lead record to create a business account, a contact, and an opportunity. If you’ve enabled person accounts and the lead record didn’t include a company name, the lead is converted into a person account and an opportunity.
Let’s convert a lead record.
- On the Leads tab, open the lead record to be converted.
- Click Convert.
- In the Account section, create an account from the Company name entered for the lead. If you’re converting a lead who works for an existing account, select the existing account instead.
- In the Contact section, create a contact from the name entered for the lead. If the contact exists, select the existing contact instead.
- In the Opportunity section, enter a name for the new opportunity.
- Click Convert.
Now a contact, account & opportunity are created and populated with the lead’s data.
The lead field “Converted” is changed from false to true. This field is very useful when we create the lead conversion report.
If we don’t need to create an opportunity upon conversion of the lead, check off the box as shown below.
So after converting the lead, only an account and a contact record will be created, but no opportunity record.
After the conversion, the lead record cannot be viewed or edited as a lead but it can be viewed in reports as a lead. The data within standard lead fields are automatically transferred to contact/account and/or opportunity. To transfer data within the custom lead fields, we have to map those fields to a matching field of same datatype in any of the corresponding account/contact/opportunity object.
Create lead conversion report
- Navigate to Reports tab and start report on Leads.
- Set the filters to show all leads of all time.
- In Outline section , group rows according to the Lead Source.
- In Group columns, add ‘Converted’.
- Save and run the report.
- For each lead source, the record count of converted and non-converted leads will be grouped into separate columns.
The report when viewed in the dashboard as Stacked horizontal bar chart will look like this.
To read more about reports and dashboards in salesforce, click Reports and Dashboards (salesforce.com)
Take Five Consulting is a technology company, based in Virginia U.S., that specializes in the Mortgage Banking vertical especially LOS implementation and application development. Take Five Consulting creates and implement mortgage technology and software specifically for Mortgage Industry.
