A lead is a business transaction that describes, stores, updates, and manages the potential business interests of a business partner, and the interactions based on this over a period of time. The goal is to provide the "sales" area with the information gained in the lead, in order that it can be used as a basis for deciding whether to create an opportunity.

The information gathered in the lead is transferred to the "sales" area via the workflow "create opportunity from lead".

In the workflow, you decide whether the opportunity is generated manually or automatically.

If the lead-specific attributes Priority and Lead group fulfill specific criteria, the workflow automatically generates an opportunity. Otherwise, the workflow sends a work item to the sales employee responsible, for manual creation. Once he has checked the data in the lead, the sales employee can either reject this lead or create an opportunity from it.

The workflow is automatically started when the lead is saved.

The sales representative entered in the lead is first taken as the sales employee whose task it is to create the opportunity based on the information in the lead. This person can be determined using partner determination in CRM, depending on the prospect in the lead, and can, for example, be a manager of a sales area. If no sales representative is entered, the workflow takes an organizational unit assigned in the workflow template, and sends the work item to all users assigned to the organizational unit.

• The workflow template uses the user statuses SAAC (accepted by sales) and SARE (rejected by sales) of the status profile CRMLEAD. If you have defined several user statuses, the data flow for task TS10008154 (set status) must be adapted accordingly.
• When the opportunity is created, the workflow template uses the opportunity transaction type OPPT. If you have defined several transaction types for the opportunity, the data flow for task TS10008151 (create opportunity) must be adapted accordingly.
• If the sales employee rejects the lead, the workflow resets the qualification level to value 02 (warm). If you have specified your own qualification levels in Customizing, you need to adapt the data flow for task TS10007918 (change qualification level) accordingly.

The workflow "create opportunity from lead" is started when a lead is saved with qualification level Hot and status Error-free. The system uses the lead-specific attributes Priority and Lead group to check whether an opportunity can be automatically created, or a sales employee first needs to decide. If the sales employee decides that an opportunity can be created, the lead status is set to "accepted by sales", and an opportunity is created in the background. If necessary, this is forwarded to the sales employee to check. If the sales employee rejects the lead, the lead status is set to "rejected by sales", and the initiator is informed by mail.

The workflow is ended if no opportunity is created and

• the lead is deleted or
• the qualification level of the lead is changed to a value other than Hot or
• the status of the lead is changed to a value other than Error-free.

The following information is of technical nature. You need this information if the implementation details are relevant for you, or if you wish to make your own enhancements.

The actual procedure is implemented in the workflow template WS10001011 (CRM_LEAD).

The events AttributeChanged andSetErrorFree are entered for the object category BUS2000108 (lead CRM) as triggering events. The event SetErrorFree is triggered when the system status is reset to Error-free. As the workflow should only be started when the qualification level is set to Hot, this is checked using the start condition of the event. The event AttributeChanged is triggered when one of the lead-specific attributes qualification level (manual / automatic), priority, lead group, background or status is changed. The start condition is used to make sure that the attribute qualification level was actually changed, and the status was changed at the same time.