This is a follow up to my earlier post about How to Preserve Related Lists and Chatter on Lead Conversion. In this post I talk about the larger picture of how we can use Process Builder to customize and enhance the standard lead conversion process. But before we get into advanced lead conversion, we should take a minute to understand standard lead conversion in Salesforce.

Standard Lead Conversion Process

When you convert lead records, you choose to either create or update an Account and Contact records and (optionally) create a new Opportunity. During conversion, standard lead fields automatically map to the contact, account, and opportunity fields. You also have the option in Setup to map custom lead fields to custom contact, account, and opportunity fields.

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Beyond just simple field mappings, if you use record types in your org then if an Account, Contact, or Opportunity are created then the default record type assigned to the user’s profile is used. But what if you use multiple record types for each of the objects? What if you need different lead record types to map to different account/contact/opportunity record types?

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Prior to introduction of Process Builder, many people like myself and Marie Chandra have asked how to get around this and solutions varied from fancy workflow rules and field updates to apex triggers. In fact, back in 2014 I wrote an apex trigger and custom setting to provide record type mapping control to the administrator.

With the vast amount of diverse customers that Salesforce has and their sales processes, it is no surprise that a big request on the IdeaExchange is to provide more customization options. Thankfully, it looks like product management has listened and some improvements are on the roadmap (safe harbor).

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Until then, what’s an ambitious Salesforce Administrator to do?

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Advanced Lead Conversion with Process Builder

You will be happy to learn that when a Lead is converted that this causes an update to occur on the record and that you can have Process Builder take action! This means we have at our disposal all the capabilities of Process Builder to do things like: update related records, make a Chatter post, launch a Flow, or invoke Apex (e.g. to make web service callout to third-party system). If you’re unfamiliar with Process Builder then I highly recommend you check out Trailhead, the free and fun way to learn Salesforce.

The key fields we care about in Process Builder criteria to identify the conversion event is when the IsConverted field changes from false to true, then we can use the ConvertedAccountId, ConvertedContactId, and ConvertedOpportunityId fields from the lead to do pretty much whatever we want. We can use clicks-not-code to assign specific record types to the converted records based on the lead’s values, or or do fancier field mappings that the standard field mappings doesn’t allow, like mapping custom fields to standard fields. We might even want to send an email alert to certain people or create some initial follow-up tasks that should occur for newly converted accounts, etc.

Here’s screen shot of the lead criteria checking if the record became converted:

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The next screenshot shows an Update Records action updating the related account’s record type:

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Here’s video tutorial for setting up lead conversion. From here, it’s really just up to your imagination and what your company needs to accomplish. Good luck!