New Old Qualify Lead Experience

Back in the olden days (pre 2015 I think), you used to have the ability to qualify a lead and choose the record that would be created. Microsoft removed the choice and the last few years you either had to live with the default behaviour or replace the functionality with workflows or plugins. I even wrote an unpublished article about how to do this but when it was announced that this functionality was coming back in the 2019 wave 2 features to D365CE.

Let's go through enabling this feature and how it works. Firstly, if you are reading this before October 2019, you need to enable this feature in preview in your sandbox. N.b this cannot be undone. Go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com and click on your environment.

On the right of this screen you should see an option for the 2019 Wave 2 update. You can switch it on here and then it should look like this when it is finished.

Once this is updates have taken place, you can turn on the feature in the Settings area. Settings -> Administration -> System Settings -> Sales. From here you can turn on this setting.

With this setting switched on, it changes the default behaviour when you qualify a lead. Create or go to a lead and choose Qualify on the command bar. You now get this dialog.

This gives you options on which records you would like to create, Account, Contact, Opportunity or a combination. This gives users much more freedom and brings a lot of value back to Leads and the qualify button. It is great that this feature is back in D365 as there are lots of users who request this and I’ve built alternatives to the default functionality multiple times over the last few years.

There are a couple of things to note, however, it’s important to say that this is currently in preview so functionality may change. The default business process flow for Lead, which takes you from Lead through to Opportunity, gets stuck in an active status with no way to finish the BPF if you don’t connect it to an Opportunity. This is mainly an issue if you report off the BPF itself, so it’s important to understand.

The next thing to point out is that you can actually qualify the Lead and generate no records at all! If you choose no to all the options, the lead goes to a qualified status, becomes inactive but doesn’t generate any additional records. There could be advantages to this, you could link Leads to existing Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities, without the need to create the additional records, but still changing the status of the record to Qualified. To me it just seems a little unusual that there is no warning message.

Anyway, I hope this guide has helped explain this new functionality and I look forward to using it.

Ciao for now!