Converted Lead data isn’t lost forever…it’s just hard to find

Last Updated on Thursday, 15 June 2006 07:32 Written by Steve Thursday, 15 June 2006 08:59

I got a distress email from a user of my Rapid Lead Converter the other day:

In my excitement I converted a lead into a new contact, and a second later realized that I converted a lead…which is using a number of new custom lead fields for which I had not yet created an equivalent contact custom field. For example, they had a lead custom field “spanish level” that I had not yet created in as a custom contact field. Since I converted the lead into a contact, that field’s info is now lost?

Good news is the data isn’t lost. But you can’t get to the Lead record in Salesforce.com. You can’t find it with a search, and if you go to the Id directly, it tells you that it’s been converted to a Contact. But the data’s not gone.

The trick is to view the Lead data through one of the many tools for exploring the Salesforce.com schema. There is one written by the Salesforce.com folks in .Net, and you can install this HTML as an S-Control for viewing the schema inside Salesforce.

Install one of these tools, then create a manual query of the Lead table and find the lead record you’re looking for. Grab the data from the fields you care about. It’s manual, but it will potentially save your butt sometime.

Update: Scott pointed out in the comments that I’m making things way harder then they are. Salesforce has a report set for just this issue. It’s called Leads with converted lead information. Thanks Scott!

Salesforce.com Foundation wants to turn you up

Last Updated on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 04:45 Written by Steve Wednesday, 14 June 2006 04:45

I got an email today announcing the second round of Turn It Up grants from the Salesforce.com foundation.

These exciting new grants will provide three nonprofit organizations with the financial resources they need to amplify their use of the salesforce.com application and improve the efficacy of their organizations. Additionally, these organizations will share their developments with the larger nonprofit community.

Three grants of up to $10,000 USD each will be awarded to three nonprofits with an existing license donation from the Salesforce Foundation

Some things I’d love to see done with a Turn It Up Grant:

• Building support for multi-payment pledges
• Build a way to display Campaigns on a website as an event calendar
• Dig into some activism processes–how to model brining constituents to action in Salesforce.com

Come up with a good idea and apply!

Visualizing social networks in Salesforce

Last Updated on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 03:16 Written by Steve Wednesday, 14 June 2006 03:16

I started playing with Prefuse a couple weeks ago. It’s an open source java toolkit for visualizing data. Really cool stuff–man there are some smart people out there… f you look at the examples on the site, you’ll see that this toolkit can do an amazing number of different types of visualizations, including social networks, and geography-based stuff.

In Salesforce.com I have a custom object that records relationships between two people. We’re using it to build social network info about our constitutents. The data is good, but navigating it is hard–enter Prefuse. Here’s a simple social network visualized by Prefuse using data directly from Salesforce–it runs off a trivial XML file schema.

In real life it’s a java app or applet that is dragable, auto-centers, and is searchable. My test is just a proof of concept, but I got it working in just a couple hours–surprisingly low entry barrier. The next things I see on the wish list:

• Automate the gathering of data (PHP or some other toolkit to generate XML file)
• Crawl all the relationship types (Contact-to-Account, Account-to-Account, Contact-to-Contact, Contact-to-Other Account, Contact-to-Household)
• Display relationship metadata on the links (“employment”, “spouse”, “board member”, etc.)
• Turn it into a web app so it can be updated from in Salesforce (using a java applet I guess…I wish I were a java programmer)
• Provide links back to sf.com web interface, or display a summary of sf.com info in a sidebar
• Figure out what prefuse visual display options we have and improve the look and usability
• Set it up to be usable with a minimal amount of setup for any Salesforce.com instance

I don’t expect to have tons of time to play with this, but if you’re interested in it, drop me a line.