Leads represent potential customers that can be qualified or disqualified based on criteria set by your organization. After you work with a lead record and determine whether or not the lead fits your lead qualification criteria, you convert the lead. When you convert the lead, you specify whether or not the lead is qualified or disqualified.

When you qualify the lead, you create one or more of the following record types: account, contact, or opportunity.

Your business process should dictate which of the records to create. For example, if your organization sells to businesses, you will probably want to create an account and a contact. If your organization sells to individual consumers, you might not want to create an account. Likewise, you might not always create an opportunity when you qualify a lead. You might determine that a lead fits your qualification criteria but that an immediate sales opportunity does not exist.

In addition to creating new accounts and contacts, you can convert a lead to a new opportunity that will be linked to an existing customer record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You might want to do this if a matching account or contact already exists in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM database.

When you qualify a lead, you can mark a check box to open the newly created records, which will open the new account, contact, or opportunity records created during the convert lead process so that you can work with them right away, saving you a few clicks.

In this exercise, you will convert a lead as qualified and create a new account, contact, and opportunity.

Note

USE the Mike Snyder lead record you created in the previous exercise.

BE SURE TO use the Internet Explorer Web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web site, if necessary, before beginning this exercise.