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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!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 8:59 am and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.