Should we use the Account Entity to store all leads, to avoid storing redundant Account-level data?

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Hi, I am initializing a new Dynamics CRM Online implementation, and am interested in the community's opinions on this topic.

The issue is: does it make sense to import a lot of detail companies data (covering both leads and signed clients) from the legacy system into the Account entity rather than the Lead entity, and then populate just a few data fields for all the leads into the Lead entity, with a foreign key N:1 link in the Lead to the given Account entity?

The idea is to eliminate the necessity for many redundant fields from the Leads entity that would have to be copied over to the Opportunity entity when a lead becomes an opportunity. Similarly, the same problem would exist when an opportunity becomes a signed account.

What are your thoughts about how to set the new system up regarding this issue?

Thanks In Advance.

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Hosk on at

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I don't quite understand the question

If it's a lead in legacy system, bring it in as a lead. Lead's in CRM are opportunities which have not been qualified (e.g. you don't have account/contact data for them)

The process in CRM is a lead gets qualified and promoted to an opportunity, at this stage the details from the lead will be used to create an account and/or contact record. So opportunities have lookup fields to accounts/contacts they don't duplicate the data.

if it's an opportunity or better then bring them in as account/contact because these can be used to get more business

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Thanks Ben for responding. I do understand the normal Dynamics CRM promotions from Lead -> Opportunity -> Account.

I have quite a few new custom fields such as YearFounded and LatestReportingYear and TotalStoresCount and a number of lead source fields among others that must be added to the Lead, and I was hoping that I would not have to duplicate all that data in both Opportunity and Account entities.

In a number of other customized CRM systems I worked on the past there is one Company table with status indicators to indicate if the any closed sales were logged (i.e. the promotion from lead to account simply involved changing a flag in the one table, not creating an entirely new record in a different table). This architecture ensures no redundancy of company data.

My question above was about a thought I have about possibly using the Account entity (or possibly the Lead entity instead) in this way. If I am on the wrong track with this, I very much want to understand how this process works in more detail.

Do you think that implementing this idea of mine is feasible, or is it just a bad idea, and just live with the data redundancy? An ill effect of maintaining redundant fields for example is that an address change for Account xyz would have to be manually entered redundantly in the Lead record for xyz as well.

If duplicating these fields is necessary (and I hope that it is not), I am not aware of how to update the promotion process to bring those new fields along.

Thanks again :-)

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Aileen Gusni 44,524 on at

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Hi Boomer,

Good answer by Ben.

Additional suggestion from me..

Lead is just a Cold List, you cannot do anything from the Lead such as Creating Case, Quotation, Order etc...It is not a real Potential Customer in CRM until it was promoted to become Account or Contact.

Fields like:

"YearFounded and LatestReportingYear and TotalStoresCount "

I think better you just put this in the Account or Contact, not in the Lead, because if Salesperson keys in the Lead, better don't challenge them to key in a lot of information, they would be stressful and require much time and effort to key in a lot of info for those list that are not sure really interested or not. The simpler you make in the lead, the more efficient you get.

But, if you think those 3 fields are very very mandatory and required in your Business Process to be filled in first for consideration, then you can put it in the Lead.

You can use Mapping to bring along those fields from Lead to Account/Contact/Opportunity:

www.pardot.com/.../mapping-your-mscrm-lead-fields-to-contact-fields

The key is the source and destination attribute type are should be same data type.

Hope this helps!

Thanks.

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I agree with Aileen, it sounds like that level of detail would usually only be captured after you have qualified a Lead and turned it into an Account, so add these fields to the Account entity.

If some of this data forms part of your qualification process, then of course you need those specific fields on Lead.

Note: you don't have to use Leads at all if you don't need to. You might use them some of the time, never, or only for newly acquired suspects.

Accounts are perfectly valid as prospects as well as customers. Leads might help you separate "suspects" that you have not even qualified as a prospect yet (that you will actively pursue for sales).

I would definitely not suggest you should always add a Lead every time you have an Account. I find that generally once you have an Account, adding a Lead seems like a backwards step, and I would usually just add an Opportunity at that point - an Opportunity might still be very tentative and unqualified, but should be quantifiable even if only an estimate (roughly how much of what do they want and when do they want it).

I know some people prefer to enter vague Opportunities as leads for an existing Account or Contact, then qualify them to become Opportunities, but this need to be carefully considered. You can all too easily end up with additional unwanted Contacts, for example if user don't join things up correctly.

For me, the primary reason to link Leads to an existing Account and/or Contact is when you have acquired a lead (maybe from a trade show, campaign response, or bought-in data) before realising that it is from an existing [potential] customer. You link it to prevent creating a duplicate when it is qualified.

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Hi Aileen, Ben and Adam.

Thank you for all your thoughtful comments.

One factor that may not have come through in my prior comments is that the client has a legacy database populated with about 100k client account records, and many fields of data for these accounts. Of course, most of them are truly leads and not signed business or even confirmed opportunities. Many will have to be dropped, and my client is aware that it will be a large, time-consuming manual task to prune this down to eliminate companies that are out of business, merged into some other business, or are not at all interested in our consulting services.

One more factor that is important is that the client wants to save as much data as is possible about each lead, even if that information is very old. They have a few cases where old leads from way back have bounced back to become hot again, and they don't want to lose any such information. I have asked them to prune the number of fields to be brought forward into CRM, and we have dropped quite a few, but there are still a lot of fields coming over anyway.

Based on my understanding of CRM and your comments, I have decided duplicate all the custom fields in the account entity to the lead entity, so it will be kind of "heavy", but that is what my client feels works best for their business.

Aileen, you deserve special thanks for the link to the Pardot article which is a great explanation of exactly what I need to do to bring those custom fields forward as the leads get promoted.

Thanks Again! :-)

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Hi Ben and everyone,

One more newbie question - I am a little unclear on the promotion process when a lead gets qualified.

Based on my understanding now, when a lead is promoted to an opportunity, the opportunity, account and contact entries are all created at that point in time. Significantly, the Account record is created even without any closed sales at that time.

Then at a later time, when an Opportunity get promoted to signed business when it closes, what happens to the opportunity and account entities?

Please confirm if my understanding is correct, and an answer to the above question would be greatly appreciated.

Again, thanks in advance :-)

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Community Member on at

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You are right about the points regarding the lead qualification, however CRM does not create new Account and Contact record if you are linking the Lead with an existing Account and Contact before qualification. These options are nothing but fields 'Parent Account for Lead' and 'Parent Contact for Lead' in the Lead entity.

By signed business, you mean you are winning an Order out of the opportunity, right?

If your very first quote from the opportunity is converted to an order, the Opportunity will be closed with status = won, you will also have the option to keep the opportunity open at this stage. However you can also anytime reopen the closed opportunity to add more quotes and orders. Whether an opportunity becomes a signed business or not doesn't make any effect on the related Account record.

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Again, bear in mind that an "Account" could be a prospect or a customer (or a supplier, vendor...). It just represents an organisation - a company, charity, public sector or government department, school/college/university or whatever other types of body you can think of.

So when you qualify a Lead it becomes an Account, and usually you would use the "Relationship Type" field to specify what type of Account, and make the default setting for this "Prospect" so this is what it uses when you first create these records (also make sure to specify this during your initial data import to distinguish between customers and prospects).

You could easily create a Workflow that would update the Account relationship to "Customer" when an Opportunity is closed as "Won". I find I often do this in various projects.

Note that an Account can have several Contacts under it, whereas a Lead represents a single organisation and one person, rolled into a single record. This can be a huge advantage of using Accounts and Contacts over Leads, and a reason to want to qualify Leads as soon as possible so you can start tracking information against multiple Contacts you are trying to engage with as part of your marketing and sales processes.

Consider this for your data import too - you might be better off to bring in one Account and several related Contacts rather than several Leads that show no relationship between them at all.

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