Considerations for Converting Leads

During lead conversion, triggers fire. Universally required custom fields and validation rules are enforced.

When updating a lead, triggers that cause the lead to convert can cause a warning. The warning indicates that the lead is no longer accessible to the user because it’s been converted to a contact. Refer to the new contact instead.

If the Require Validation for Converted Leads checkbox on the Lead Settings page is deselected, Salesforce ignores lookup filters when converting leads.

Converting leads with many associated events and tasks, or converting leads to accounts or contacts, can result in Apex governor limit errors, especially if there are triggers on the objects. See Apex Governor Limits.

A lead can match an existing contact. If both records are linked to the same campaign, the campaign member status is determined by whichever is further along in the campaign lifecycle. For example, if the lead member status is “sent” and the contact member status is “responded”, the responded value is applied to the contact.

Related campaign information is always associated with the new contact record, regardless of the user's sharing access to the campaign.

When more than one campaign is associated with a lead, the most recently associated campaign is applied to the Primary Campaign Source field for the opportunity, regardless of the user's sharing access to the campaign.

When updating existing accounts or contacts during lead conversion, the values of mapped lead fields don’t overwrite the values of the mapped account and contact fields.

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 fields on the contact and account. Salesforce doesn’t overwrite existing account and contact data with any lead data.

For the composite address field, which is made up of several individual fields, Salesforce only adds information to empty individual fields on the contact and account.

When the State and Country/Territory picklists are enabled, the State/Province and Country fields on the lead only transfer to the existing contact when both the State/Province and Country fields on the contact aren't set.

Be sure to verify the resulting data on the contact and account after lead conversion.

With person accounts enabled, you can convert leads to either person accounts or business accounts. In Lightning Experience, leads that don’t have a value in the Company field are converted to person accounts. Leads that do have a value in the Company field are converted to business accounts. In Salesforce Classic and the Salesforce mobile app, leads without company information can still be converted to an existing business account.

To differentiate leads that convert to person accounts from leads that convert to business accounts, use different lead record types and page layouts. Specifically, remove the Company field from the page layouts for leads that convert to person accounts. Then, make the Company field required on the page layouts for leads that convert to business accounts.

In the Salesforce mobile app, you can't convert a lead to a person account if the person account name already exists.

If the lead has a record type, the default record type of the user converting the lead is assigned to records created during lead conversion.

The default record type of the user converting the lead determines the lead source values available during conversion. If the desired lead source values aren’t available, add the values to the default record type of the user converting the lead.

For accounts, users can set an overall default record type as well as subdefault record types for business accounts and person accounts. When converting leads, the overall default record type is used. Lead conversion doesn’t use subdefault record types.

Whether a converted lead is searchable differs for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience.

Salesforce Classic: After converting a lead, it’s no longer searchable. However, the new account, contact, or opportunity record created from the converted lead is searchable.

Lightning Experience: The converted lead record and the newly created account, contact, or opportunity record are searchable. However, you can’t access the converted lead record from the search results page to view or edit it. As you type the lead name in the search box, you might see search suggestions for leads that you already merged as duplicates. A delay in removing these converted leads from the search index causes this issue.

The system automatically maps standard lead fields to standard account, contact, and opportunity fields.

For custom lead fields, your administrator can specify how they map to custom account, contact, and opportunity fields.

The system assigns the default picklist values for the account, contact, and opportunity when mapping standard lead picklist fields that are blank. If your organization uses record types, blank values are replaced with the default picklist values of the new record owner.

Converting a lead sets the Unread field to false.

The lead's ConvertedDate field contains the date the lead was converted based on the current date in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This field appears in some reports and shows the GMT date not adjusted to the user's local time zone. The value stored in the lead's CreatedDate field includes both the date and time and is converted to the user's time zone.

You can't convert a lead that’s associated with an active approval process or has pending workflow actions.

Converting a lead to a person account doesn’t trigger workflow rules.

When a lead is converted by someone who isn't the lead owner, all workflow tasks associated with the lead that are assigned to that user, except email alerts, are reassigned to the lead owner. Workflow tasks assigned to users other than the lead owner and lead converter aren't changed.

If validation and triggers for lead conversion are enabled, then converting a lead can trigger a workflow action on a lead. For example, if an active workflow rule updates a lead field or transfers the owner of a lead, that rule can trigger when the lead is converted. However, because of the conversion, the lead isn’t visible on the Leads tab. Allow the workflow process to finish before updating lead fields, otherwise save or lead convert fails. A workflow rule can create a task because of a lead conversion. In that case, Salesforce assigns the task to the new contact and relates it to the associated account or opportunity.