Controlling the Lead Qualification process in CRM 2013

CRM 2013 (Orion) removed the Convert Lead dialog box from the Lead Qualification process. While migrating to the Orion instance, this is becoming a roadblock for us as the product doesn’t give the option of controlling which entity records to create upon Lead qualification.

Orion directly creates all the three entity records – Account, Contact and Opportunity as a part of lead qualification process, thus removing the flexibility from the user of selecting the entity records that needs be created. The product however checks for possible duplicates for Account and Contact records but the process isn’t favored by many and the risk of creating duplicate records or associating lead and opportunity to incorrect Account/Contact cannot be neglected.

I mentioned it as a roadblock for us because we have several business rules on lead qualification process wherein we don’t create Opportunity and Account record for a couple of qualification reasons.

In order to implement the same business rules in CRM 2013 Orion, I was researching a way to restrict the create of Opportunity/Account record for specific lead qualification status reason.

Here’s a simple way to do it –

Write a PreValidation plugin on the QualifyLead message for the Lead entity. Based on a certain condition, change the plugin context as follows

// Requirement – if the lead qualification reason is 100000021, do not create account and opportunity records
if (((OptionSetValue)(context.InputParameters["Status"])).Value == 100000021) // status is the lead qualification reason selected by the user
{
     context.InputParameters["CreateOpportunity"] = false; // set to true by default
      context.InputParameters["CreateAccount"] = false; // set to true by default
}

The InputParameters collection in the plugin context contains the key-value pairs for Account (CreateAccount), Contact (CreateContact) and Opportunity (CreateOpportunity). As shown in the above code, we can change these values to false under specific condition and hence restrict/control the unnecessary record creation.