Workflow – Phone Call Conversion of Lead to Opportunity

In every version of CRM I have had a favorite feature that I tend to obsess slightly over. 🙂 In Version 3.0, it was Client Side Scripting. In 4.0, it is Workflow. The Workflow engine in CRM has so much possibility to help transform businesses and is heads and shoulders over every other CRM application I have used. While some other packages have limited workflow capabilities, the ones in 4.0 have blown away every other application I have used. (If the words “Contact Processes” or “Automated Processes”, you know exactly where I am coming from.)

In a previous blog post, I outlined a quick way to be able to create Phone Call Activities from a notes field in a case.

In this post, we are going to show you how to streamline the lead qualification process.  For this post, we want to streamline the sales rep’s workflow so that they only update an appointment and based upon the outcome of that appointment, the lead is either disqualified or an account, contact and opportunity are created automatically.

Step One: Let’s go ahead and add a field on the Phone Call to Track if we want to promote the lead based upon this appointment.

In my case I created a Bit Field that allows the sales rep to create an opportunity.  So when the phone call is made, the rep simply checks the create opportunity box.

Step Two: Build the Workflows

Our First Workflow will be creating the phone call from the Lead. In our example we called this Create Phone Call. I left the fields blank, but you could get much more granular here if you wanted.

Our Second Workflow is the one that will monitor the Phone Call. It is called Create Opportunity from Lead. I set the Workflow to fire based upon Record Attribute Changes and Selected the Create Opportunity field as the “trigger” field.

We now go through and create new Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities.

Here is the sample Account

Here is the sample Contact. One of the cool things in the Workflow, you can call from one Entity to another created entity.  So I could create the new account and use that account name as my Parent Account.

Now we created the Opportunity from the Lead’s Data.

Now that that is all done, we will be closing out the Lead.

For that we change the record status to closed and qualified.

Now I publish both workflows. So I am going to go from a Lead to an Opportunity, Contact and Account based upon the checking of the box in the phone call Record. Let’s see this in motion. 

First I create a Lead.

It now creates the phone call for me automatically:

You see it now created my opportunity

Here it is from the workflow monitor:

And as you can see the Lead was automatically closed.

So with NO CODE and just a little bit of thinking things out, you can put Microsoft CRM to work in your business. This example was done using Microsoft CRM Online, so this works in both a S+S and a On Premise Solution.

This example was meant for inspiration, not to be used in production. How have you used Workflow in a unique way in your business?

Ben Vollmer