How to qualify a lead to a contact, account and/or opportunity using CRM 2011 process (workflow or dialog) ?

The CRM 2011 process designer has limited amount of functionality that it supports (create / update / set status), but if you wanted to add a workflow step to qualify a lead you would have to register your own plugin that implements the logic.

Fortunately, there is a solution that already implements this for you. I have extended the CRM 2011 Workflow Utilities to include a step to qualify leads. All you need to do is to download the managed solution from Codeplex and install it in your CRM organization (only supported in On Premise for now). Once you install the solution, you can go to your process designer and you will notice a “QualifyLead” step is now available:

When you insert the Qualify Lead step to your process you have to click the “Set Properties” button to configure how you want to qualify your lead. You have the following parameters:

• Lead (the lead that you want to qualify).
• Status of the lead after qualifying it (by default it will set the status to “Qualified”).
• Create Contact (whether you wand to generate a contact for the qualified lead or not).
• Create Account (whether you wand to generate an account for the qualified lead or not).
• Create Opportunity (whether you wand to generate an opportunity for the qualified lead or not). If you specify “True” then you must also specify the opportunity customer and currency.
• Opportunity Currency (use only if creating an opportunity).
• Parent Account of Opportunity (use only if creating an opportunity).
• Parent Contact of Opportunity (use only if creating an opportunity and no parent account is specified).

This is an example of how the step might be configured:

 

The cool thing is that the custom step will output the entities that were generated by the qualification process so you can edit the generated entities in later steps of your process. For example, if I am qualifying a lead to an opportunity and then I need to edit the opportunity that was created I can just insert an update step after:

I hope you find this useful!