Converting Leads in Salesforce with Person Accounts Enabled

If you have person accounts enabled in your Salesforce org, there are a few differences about lead conversion that you should be aware of.  In this post, I will walk you through a couple things that make lead conversion a little different for organizations with person accounts enabled.  I will also give you a couple easy steps to follow to ensure that AMCalc loan schedules flow through the lead conversion process smoothly.

Getting Person Accounts Enabled

Person accounts can be used for companies that sell directly to individuals instead of companies.   When enabled, account records in your Salesforce org can hold information for both companies and individuals.  If you need to enable person accounts in your Salesforce org, there are a few configuration changes that you will need to make to your Salesforce org first.  Once those are made, you will need to submit a case to Salesforce Support and they will enable person accounts in your org. 

You should, however, be aware of all of the ramifications of enabling person accounts before you do it because, once enabled, you will not be able to disable it. To learn more about person accounts, check out this Salesforce Help documentation.

Once person accounts are enabled, there are a few things that are different about lead collection and conversation.

The Importance of the Lead Company Field

First, you may already be aware that when you convert a lead in a Salesforce org where person accounts is not enabled, the lead conversion process can create up to three standard object records;  a Contact, an Account, and an Opportunity.  This is all assuming that Salesforce did not determine that the lead information is already in the system as a Contact or Account.

For the contact, the record is created from the first and last name of the lead, along with lead’s address, phone number, email address, and any other personal information that is on the lead record.  The account that is created from the lead record is usually pretty minimal and many times will only include the company name that is on the lead record.  Creating an opportunity during lead conversion is optional to the user and there is no difference on how it is created between orgs that do or do not have person accounts enabled, so I am going to ignore opportunity creation in our discussion.

When person accounts are enabled in an org, the number and type of records created when a lead is converted may or may not be different then what was described above.   This all depends on one field on the lead record, the Lead Company.

In orgs with person accounts enabled, if the lead’s company field is filled in, the conversion process will function in the way described above by creating an account, contact, and an opportunity.  If the lead’s company field is not filled in, Salesforce assumes that the lead is an individual not associated with a company and will create a person account record when the lead is converted.

Determining How a Lead Conversion will Work

So, when you are converting a lead how do you know which way the conversion will work? The answer to this question is that it will be clear when the lead conversion dialog comes up after the Convert Lead button is pressed.

Below is a conversion dialog that is displayed for an org with person accounts enabled when the lead record being converted has information in the Company name field. Notice that there are three sections being displayed, one for each record that is going to be created: Account, Contact, and Opportunity. Also notice that the record type for the account record is called “Business Account”. For this org, this is the name of the record type for a standard account record (the record type name for your org may be called something different).

Convert dialog shown when a lead’s record has a value in the Company field

Now compare the above to the conversion dialog below. This is what you will see when your org has person accounts enabled and the convert button is clicked on a lead record that has no value in the Company name field. Notice that there is only a section for Account and Opportunity. Also notice that the record type for the account is called “Person Account” (again, the record type name in your org may be different). There is no contact record that will be created in this case. The first name, last name, and other information from the lead record will be used to create a new person account record when you perform the conversion and you would go to the Account tab to view this record after the conversion is complete.

Convert dialog shown when a lead’s record DOES NOT have a value in the Company field

Now let’s see how to set up AMCalc so that leads that are captured from your communities site (which was renamed to Digital Experiences with the release of Spring 21) are moved to a person account record when you perform a conversion.

First, by default, Salesforce requires a value in the company field of a lead in order to save a record, so let’s change that.  Go to Object Manager in the Setup menu, find the Lead object in the object lists, click on it, and then click on the Page Layouts menu item. 

Edit each page layout that you are using by removing the required flag for the Company field.  Click on the Company field in the page layout and then click the wrench icon that appears.  In the pop up box, de-select the Required check box and then click the save button to save the page layout changes.

Now, go to the Builder for your communities site.  We need to make sure a couple AMCalc communities calculators attributes are set correctly.  When in the builder, go to each page that has an AMCalc component on it and click on the component to open up the attributes panel. 

First, let’s ensure that any leads using the calculator do not get prompted to input a company name when they submit their contact information.  Find the AMCalc component attribute called “Lead Company Label” and put “none” in for the value.  This will tell AMCalc to not display the Company field on the form that the lead fills out to submit their contact information.

Now scroll down to the bottom of the list to the “Convert Schedule To” attribute. Make sure that the value of this field is “Account”. Remember from the AMCalc administration guide, you must have a lookup relationship already set up between AMCalc and account for the dropdown box to show account as a selection. See the Configuring an AMCalc Calculator for a Communities Site section of the AMCalc Administration Guide for more information on this.

Once you have made these changes, be sure to preview them and, if everything is working correctly, re-publish your site.

After these changes are made, when leads are created by AMCalc communities calculators, they will still have a value in the company name field of the lead record (because Company is required by default by Salesforce, AMCalc will copy the lead’s last name to the Company field).  But, because we removed the required flag from the company field on the lead page layout, the field can be manually blanked out by your users. 

So, to convert a lead to a person account record, users will need to edit the lead record first by removing any values in the Company field.  Once the edit is saved, clicking the Convert button will bring up the second convert lead dialog box shown above.  When the conversion is performed, AMCalc will move the loan payment schedule created by the lead to the person account record. Then both the person account created by the conversion and the AMCalc loan schedule can be accessed by going to the Salesforce account tab.

One last thing to be aware of is that Salesforce does not let you convert a standard account record to a person account record or vice versa (it actually can be done, but it involves exporting records and then re-importing them…maybe a topic for a later how-to article).  Because of this your users should be cautious when performing lead conversions and take note of the dialog box that comes up when performing them.

Be sure to check out AMCalc on the Salesforce AppExchange. Click the Watch Demo button to see it in action!

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