Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Can you have multiple contacts associated with a lead?

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Posted on by Jay Pilkington

I can't seem to figure out how to have multiple contacts associated with one Lead. Does CRM Online allow this?

Thanks,

Jay

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jlattimer 24,562 on at

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You can't really. You can add more custom fields (first names, last name, etc...) to the lead entity to track multiple people but you won't be able to use the built in functionality to turn a Lead into a Contact with any fields other than the default ones. You might also look at the "Connections" functionality, which allows multiple unrelated records to be associated with one another.

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Jay Pilkington 80 on at

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Thanks again. And once again, I'm finding this pretty weird. Virtually every Lead is going to have multiple decision makers (Contacts) that I will want to track emails and conversations/documentation. And Dynamics CRM doesn't do this "out of the box" eh?

Thanks

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jlattimer 24,562 on at

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I think Dynamics CRM is more designed to use the "Opportunity" record type for the scenario you are describing as opposed to the "Lead" record type. An Opportunity record can be associated with an Account or Contact record out of the box. Dynamics CRM really uses the "Lead" record type to for contact data that is really un-qualified, you bought a list or got someone's card at a trade show. You would enter the data in and then follow up with a call or email to see if they really might be interested in doing business. If the possibility exists you might do some business, you convert the Lead to a Contact/Account record. From there if you when you believe there is a more specific deal you want to track against, you would create an Opportunity linked to the Contact. One great thing is that virtually all record types allow you to track emails, phone calls, etc... against them for reference.

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Community Member on at

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I have a customer that tracks multiple contacts against a lead in Dynamics CRM 4.0. We upgraded them to 2011 some time ago, and this is how it works.

Create a custom N:N relationship between leads and contacts. Relate multiple contacts to the lead. When promoting a lead to an account/contact/oppty, you have the out of the box first/last name creating the contact via out of the box mapping process. We wrote a plugin in 4.0 to associate those contacts to the newly created account/opportunity, but this is actually easy to do using client side scripting making odata calls to create associations from each contact to the account/opportunity.

With CRM 2011 it's very convenient to perform such customizations and just because it's not out of the box doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider some light customizations to make CRM work the way you do.

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Kyle M Garrett 315 on at

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Michael.

Might you be able to post/email said plug-in? I'm dipping my toe into plugins for CRM and would love to adapt what you've described for a slightly different scenario.

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OlaAnd on at

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Hi, presumably you'd need CRM on premises (not CRM Online) to do client side scripting?

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