Customer or Lead? Using Status Values to Differentiate
If you are using AMCalc, you know that one of its most powerful features is the ability to define calculator definitions that can be applied to AMCalc calculators on your public Salesforce Communities sites. This allows your company to showcase its product offerings and collect prospect information that your sales team can follow up on.
Once the prospect comes to your site and runs a calculator, they then fill out a form with their contact information and submit it. At this point, AMCalc saves the contact information as a Salesforce Lead record and saves the full details of the loan that the prospect ran in AMCalc tables.
The Importance of Knowing the Status
You likely also have active loans in process that you are working with existing customers on. These are also stored in AMCalc tables. It is a good practice to differentiate loans that you are actively processing from loans that are associated with leads.
Why is this? Because you are probably not going to convert 100% of your leads to customers. If you are…that is very impressive!
Usually some percentage of lead records that you collect will never progress beyond a lead.
If you are using standard reports that come with the AMCalc package, or have created your own reports, you may not want to have loan totals shown on these reports to exclude loans that are not in process or active. So, how do you differentiate loans associated with customers with loans associated with leads?
There are a couple ways to do this, but one of the easiest is to create one or more Status entries in the AMCalc object that can be assigned to leads.
Here is how you do it. First, go to the Object Manager in Salesforce Setup and add your lead statuses to the AMCalc object:
Log in to Salesforce and in the Setup Quick Find box type Object Manager. Click on it when it appears.
Find the Salesforce object called Amortization Schedule, click on it, and then click Fields & Relationships on the next screen.
3. Scroll down and select the Status field. On the next screen, scroll down to the Values section and click the New button.
4. In the box provided, input your loan statuses for leads. You can input multiple values by hitting the return key after each status that you input. In the example below I have four statuses to indicate the stage that the lead is in. You may want different values for your processes. Click Save when complete.
Make AMCalc Assign the Status when the Lead is Created
The next step is to ensure that when AMCalc loan records are created by a lead, the status of the loan is set to the value that we created. We do this in the calculator definition for each AMCalc calculator that is being used on a Communities site.
To do this, navigate to the AMCalc Calculator Definition Administration tool.
Select the calculator definition to edit from the drop down menu and, when it comes up, scroll down to the Saved Schedule Definition section. Click the Saved Schedule Status drop down, select the status that should be assigned to loan records when they are initially created by a lead, and then click the Save button at the top of the administration tool.
Repeat this process for each calculator definition that you have defined.
You can now use the statuses that you have created in criteria of reports to differentiate between loan schedules associated with leads from loan schedules that are in process or active with customers. In your reports, you can either group loans schedules associated with leads into their own sections of the reports, or use the status to exclude those schedules from the reports.
Be sure that you also have processes in place to change the status of these loan records when you convert a lead to a contact. This can be either done manually, or better yet, automatically via a Process Builder process. Not-so-coincidentally, there is another how-to guide on the 3 Creeks site on how to automate changing the status when leads are converted!
If you do not have AMCalc installed in your Salesforce org yet, be sure to go to the AppExchange to check it out. Click the Watch Demo button to see some of the functionality that AMCalc has to offer.
Let us know if this article was useful or if you have any questions. Thank you for reading!
