What happens when I convert leads?

If the lead was also a campaign member, Salesforce associates the campaign member record with the new contact. The converted lead becomes a read-only record. If existing accounts and contacts share the names specified on the leads, you can choose to update the existing accounts and contacts. Salesforce adds information from the lead into empty contact fields; Salesforce doesn’t overwrite existing account and contact data.

When you convert a lead to a new or existing contact, Salesforce adds the contactCreatedByLead or contactUpdatedByLead system field to the contact. You can see these fields in the History related list for the contact. The value of these fields is null; their presence on a contact indicates that the contact was created or updated from a lead.

Salesforce attaches all activities from the converted lead to the resulting account, contact, and opportunity, except activities initiated from a Sales Engagement cadence. If you delete one of these activities from any of the resulting records, Salesforce also removes it from the other records. To restore an activity to all resulting records, remove it from the recycle bin. You can assign the owners of these new records, and schedule follow-up tasks. When you assign new owners, only the open activities are assigned to the new owner. If you have custom lead fields, that information can be inserted into custom account, contact, or opportunity fields. Your admin can also set up your custom lead fields to populate custom account, contact, and opportunity fields automatically. You can’t view converted leads, unless your admin has assigned you the View and Edit Converted Leads permission. However, converted leads do appear in lead reports. Salesforce updates the Last Modified Date and Last Modified By system fields on converted leads when picklist values included on converted leads are changed.

After it’s converted, a lead record is no longer searchable, unless your admin assigned you the View and Edit Converted Leads permission. The new account, contact, or opportunity record created from the converted lead is searchable.