Account Ownership determination during Lead to Opportunity Conversion

[khan_farasat]

Hello,

Can anyone advise on ways to auto-assign the Lead Owner (Sales) to the Account during a Lead to Opportunity conversion scenario?  Open to any ideas here... the objective is not to have end users come back into the Account after they have converted a FREE TEXT (Company and Contact) Lead into an Opportunity (now with an Auto-created Account and Contact).

Thanks

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

C4C has a few standard workflow features to determine parties on a document.

1. Party Determination- this feature is available on all transaction documents such as Ticket, Activity, Quote, Sales Order, Oppty, Lead, and Contract. Go into fine-tuning of the object and open up the Involved Parties tuning exercise.

When you have this Involved Parties maintenance open, click on a party to configure what are the workflows that will determine the party with the "Maintain Determinations"

Choose which workflow framework you want active or not. For the lead the following are the workflows

1. Use Rules for Lead Assignment -> this is the rule engine in Administration -> Sales and Marketing -> Lead Assignment

2. Employee Responsible of Account Team -> if there is an owner in the account team, it will use that party to default the owner on the lead

3. Employee Responsible of Territory Team -> if there is an owner in the territory team, it will use that party to default the owner on the lead

4. Current User-> default the person logged and use that party to default the owner on the lead

Here is the rule engine to define lead routing

2. Workflow field update engine. After all of the party determination workflow frameworks have executed, you can also use the workflow field update engine to overwrite the owner field with a value define by a "field update" action in the workflow engine.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Dear Rei,

i am sorry but i not able to use the field update to change the owner.
When i try to set the workflow rule and select the field update, in the dropdown of fields there are only my custom fields, qualification level and brand interest.

Thank you

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Gabriele,

Did you ever find out where to find the Lead owner field update in workflow rules?

[r3n3 · Accepted solution]

Meanwhile the workcenterview was renamed to "Sales and Campaign Settings". Hope this helps you to find it faster 🙂

[kavyakrishnan]

Dear Farasat,

We do not support auto assignment for party roles of Account. There are some enhancements planned in this area for future releases.

Regards,

Kavya

[khan_farasat]

Hi Kavya,

Can you provide some information as to when this might be planned, tentatively?

Thanks

[former_member210407]

Hello Kavya,

I'm also interesed in the release where those features are planned.

Just like Khan asked, we would like to define the account owner based on the user that create the account.

We have this requirement very often and this very simple rule can not be maintained at account level whereas it can be done at lead/opportunity/quote level.

Best regards,

Benjamin

[Former Member]

As of 1508, defaulting the owner of the account to the logged in user is a standard feature when you don't enable territory management.

Use-cases are the following

1. C4C with no ECC integration without territory management

a. On account create, the owner is defaulted to the logged in user

b. The owner or anyone in the owner's sales organization has read/write authorizations to the account via enterprise search and the "My Team's Accounts" in the Account Work Center

c. The owner or anyone in the owner's sales organization can add/remove people to the account team to add more people to access the account outside the sales organization

d. Use the re-alignment runs work center to bulk re-assign accounts to new owners. This will also bulk reassign the open leads and open opptys assigned to the owner to the new owner

2. C4C with no ECC integration with territory mgmt

a. On account create, the owner is not defaulted, but the territory is determined

b. Anyone in the account's territory has read/write authorizations to the account via enterprise search and the "My Team's Accounts" in the Account Work Center

c. Anyone in the account's territory can add/remove people to the territory team to add more people to access the account outside the sales territory

d. Use the Territory re-alignment runs work center to bulk re-assign accounts to new territories. This will bulk reassign the open transactions to the new territory (planned for 1511)

When you have ERP integration, then you would already have all of the accounts with their ERP sales area data in C4C. Ideally, the rep should pick from a list of already available accounts then create new ones. If you allow the creation of new accounts in C4C in an integrated tenant you have a few more options, but then need to consider master data management of how you deal with duplicates and merging the duplicates, etc.... which is a topic in itself.

[Former Member]

Hi Rei,

As I understand, if I have an ECC integration, the owner will not be determined.

We are working under a scenario with ECC integration and without territory management.

At this time user logged can't be set as the account's owner.

Thanks for your time.

Regards

RA

[Former Member]

If you have ECC integration enabled then you will need to decide if you want maintain the account owner information in ECC or not. The account owner is really a CRM/front office concept and is meant to change and be flexible as people come and go to manage an account and has really no relevance in a backoffice erp process.

That is why we have territory management in C4C to enable very flexible "ownership" scenarios for an account.

If you want to replicate C4C account owner information to ECC, then you would need to map the "employee responsible/owner" involved party for the C4C account with the ECC partner function that defines the owner of an account. C4C would be the leading system to manage the account owner in ECC and not the other way around.

This would be a HCI/PI value mapping exercise and the integration quick guide and HCI/PI setup guides have the details to do this replication scenario.

[Former Member]

Hi Rei,

Thanks for your comments,

We don't want to maintain the account owner to ECC, it is not necessary for the scenario, my problema, is that when I create an individual customer, the owner is not determined automatically as difference with corporative account, that the the owner is the user logged.

Thanks in advance

[Former Member]

I suspect that is not supported by the standard.

Regards

[Former Member]

Hi Rei,

Do you have an idea about this issue?

Thanks for your commments

[Former Member]

Rei,

We have C4C 1511. Not linked to ECC and no territory management.

I was changing the account owner in customer master by mass change.

It is not automatically reassigning the open leads and opportunities as you suggested.

Can you please tell me what can be the problem?

Regards,
W

[Former Member]

What I described for Lead Parties is also true for other Parties such as Opportunity Parties.

As Ankush indicated, when you create a follow-up document (creating a follow-up Oppty from Lead), while it may copy header data and item data from the source to the target, it will also copy the parties over too. However, the Party workflow frameworks will kick in and determine a party value.

[khan_farasat]

Guys,

Thanks for all of the input but I am referring to the new Account that is created as a result of Lead Conversion (scenario when NOT referencing an existing Account).

I am already aware of the mechanisms you all are describing to determine parties for Transactions (Lead or Oppt).  Here I am not referring to determination within the transaction - I am referring to the Account that is created as a by-product of the Lead to Opportunity conversion.

When a user enters Free text information into a Lead in the Company field and a contact in the First Name and Last Name fields, there is no existing Account yet (and hence no Owner for that Account).

When the Lead converts to an Opportunity, the Lead and Opportunity parties are/can be determined using the determination mechanisms you all pointed out, but the Account left with NO owner.

Rather than make users come back into the Account and assign themselves as Owner/Employee Responsible, after the Opportunity conversion, I would like the Account owner to be determined automatically during the conversion of Free text account information to the actual Account in C4C.

Please let me know.

Thanks!!!

[Former Member]

Great point.

Lets take a step back... the reason why you have owners, organizations, territories, and teams is to enforce authorizations of who gets to do what with the data.

So the first thing to define is how you want groups of people to have access to data. It is best practice to use the C4C territory mgmt feature to define territories, assignment of people to territories, and rules to define how a territory is determined for master data.

In most scenarios you will at a minimum setup some basic region based territories and then align the Accounts to those territories. In directly the people who are part of the territory will get authorizations to read or write or no access at all to the Account data. From there, when transactions are created for the account, the territory is automatically copied over from the Account and you also have the same authorizations applied to the transactions.

Then of course you will have more granular authorizations for the transactions themselves which is where sales teams come in where you may want to grant access to other people who may not be part of the territory.

Now for lead mgmt, as you described complements above.

When you allow the creation of marketing leads, again it is best practice to create lead routing rules to determine the Sales Employee party of the Lead "Team". Imagine marketing creates leads. The lead routing rules then route the lead to the regional sales manager who can then assign the lead to one of his/her sales rep (make the sales rep the "owner" of the lead"). Or you could create more sophisticated rules where one rule = one sales rep = "owner" (employee responsible party) of the lead.

Now if you are the sales rep creating the lead, then you can make yourself the owner of the lead and then create a lead routing rule to ignore running the rules if an owner is set.

Next when the rep qualifies the lead, ultimately the rep needs to assign an account or create a new account. This is where territory mgmt kicks in.

If the lead does not have an owner, and the rep associates an account, then the lead owner gets set as the account owner. The territory also gets determined from the account as well so now the Lead has the same territory based authorizations as the Account.

If the lead does have an owner, and the rep associates an account, then the original is kept. Again the Lead territory will be determined from the Account territory.

Then when you create a follow-up opportunity from the lead, then the lead owner is carried over to the opportunity owner.

Again if the lead does not have an owner, and the rep associates an account, then the lead owner gets set as the account owner. The follow-up opportunity from the lead would then carry the lead owner (which is the account owner) as the lead owner.

[AnkushPashine]

Hello Farasat ,

The logic as was mention remains same .Please refer the below explanation.

1.Go to Business Configuration->Open Fine-Tune activity 'Opportunities->Maintain Involved Parties->Select Party Role as 'Owner'->click 'Maintain Determination'.

Let say in determination screen below option are active/checked.

1. Employee Responsible of Account Team
2. Employee Responsible of Territory Team
3. Responsibility :Employee Responsible for sales
4. Current User.

2.Go to Marketing woc->New Lead (without Existing Account). and enter all details i.e. Name/Company/Contact Last Name.

=>Here 'Owner' will defaulted base on determination rule for the LEAD ---Or--- let say you manually maintain here some 'Owner' as ABC

3.Save and open this New Lead.

4.Now click on 'Convert to Opportunity'.

5.In this Opportunity screen since determination base on Account Team/Territory Team/Employee Responsible Sales DOES NOT satisfy ,it will consider 'Current User' as 'Owner' of an Opportunity

(Not Owner as ABC ,which was in the Lead).

***Note: If the determination as 'Current User'(rule 4) was not active/checked in BC-Fine Tune ,then the 'Owner' in the Opportunity would be blank bydefault.

Hope this help .

Best Regards,

Ankush Pashine.

[khan_farasat]

Hi Ankush,

Thanks for taking the time.  It is the ACCOUNT-OWNER I am concerned with - not the Opportunity OR the Lead.

[khan_farasat]

Hi Rei,

Our needs are much simpler - we already have Lead assignment and master and transactional data access figured out (Org Structure).  We would prefer not to activate Territory management simply for the Account :Owner determination during Lead to Oppt conversion - i.e. why maintain a secondary structure for the business to manage...when all other needs are being met...

For now I have surmised that without Territory Management, the answer is that there is no way to determine/assign the Account Owner and the end user will simply have to open the account and assign themselves.

Thanks again for your input.  I am working this item through SAP Support - once I confirm there response, we will post this idea in Idea Place.  i.e. Account owner determination as default behavior (in the absence of Territory Management).

[Former Member]

Hi Khan,

Again it is best practice to separate an "HR hierarchy" which is the org model vs. an "operational hierarchy" which is the territory model. Often how you define your HR hierarchy (which is simple)

is different from how you want them to work (which can be complex).

Having to change an HR org hierarchy because you need to change how you work in the field is major overhead to change management since IT is the only ones who can do this vs. territory management was designed for sales operations/line of business to manage this. It gets more complex in an integrated/hybrid environment where the OnPremise systems are based on simple org management concepts to manage authorizations, again using org management just for simple authorizations in C4C is the way to go. Then you put territory management on top of it to allow the business to change the way they work in C4C without having to change their OnPremise systems for every operational change

In the end the only way you automatically assign accounts to people (owners) is through territory management in C4C. Over the years a lot of investment went into simplifying the management of territories. For example, you can download/upsert the rules that define account assignment in excel.

Enabling the line of business key users to manage territories is an easy concept when compared with org management and would keep the two separated from a key user activity. Let IT manage the org structure process and let the business manage the territories.

The process is actually very simple.

1. Define your territories on how you want to work. Every territory has a territory owner. This territory owner will get defaulted as the document owner when a territory is determined for the document.

2. Add/remove people to the territories and define their roles if you want to share access to documents without having to manually add/remove people to the sales team. You of course can add/remove people on the sales team as an exception process, but as a default process allow territory management to automatically add/remove people and their roles on the territory team.

3. Add/remove rules to define how territories are assigned to accounts. As I shared in pt1, if you usually model a hierarchy of territories so that at the most granular level, only 1 rep is assigned to 1 territory to give you the 1:1 relationship between an account and a person via rules

4. Run territory realignments when you optimize your working model and push those changes back down to the accounts in C4C. Planned for 1511 is also the automatic realignment of the transactions too so if you change the territory on the account the transactions that hang off it also get the update keeping the territory based authorizations in sync (if you also want to activate territory based authorizations instead of org based authorizations).

[AnkushPashine]

Hello Farasat ,

While converting Lead into Opportunity an Owner is not copied from Lead ,but rather it is determine based on the rule which is maintained BC->Fine-Tune activity (i.e. Under Fine-Tune ::Opportunity ->Involved Parties -> Party Role 'Owner' ->Maintain Determination').

'Owner' is an exceptional to copy rule during the conversion.

Hope this answer your question.

Best Regards,

Ankush.