Understanding how lead conversion takes place

When you call Brenda, she seems very interested, which is a good sign! You decide to convert the lead.

When a lead is converted, something very important happens. The lead disappears from the system (on the frontend, it is still available for reporting) and it turns into three records. It becomes an account, an opportunity, and a contact. All the information about the company goes to the account, the information about the person goes to the contact, and the information about the actual sale goes to the opportunity. This is an important step in the sales process since this is the point where you stop working with a lead and instead start working with an opportunity.

Let's look at how to convert a lead: 

1. To convert a lead, navigate to the lead record you created and click on Converted (see label 1 in the following screenshot), then click on Select Converted Status (see label 2 in the following screenshot). (Optionally, you can click on the arrow next to the Submit for Approval button and use the Convert button (see label 3 in the following screenshot):)

2. After performing the previous step, a pop-up page will appear on your screen:

This is the page where you can update the Account name (see label 1 in the preceding screenshot), the Contact name (see label 2 in the preceding screenshot), and the Opportunity name (see label 3 in the preceding screenshot). Notice how everything on the left is used to create new records. If Salesforce detects possible duplicates, they show up on the right, where you can attach the lead to an existing account, contact, or opportunity (see label 4 in the preceding screenshot).

3. After filling in the fields shown in the preceding screenshot, click on Convert. Once you click on Convert, you will see links to the newly created account, contact, and opportunity, as follows:

You have now converted your first lead!

In this section, we learned how to convert a lead. Converting a lead is the happy path goal of the sales process. The more leads you convert into opportunities, the more chance it will lead to sales. More about the Account, Contact, and Opportunity objects is covered in greater detail in later chapters of this book. Next, let's see how web-to-lead helps with lead capturing.