Can Riva Create Accounts and Leads when Converting an Email?

Article ID: 729

Last updated: 18 Dec, 2017

Question from a Client

I just tried to create a new opportunity from an email. The contact did not exist in the CRM yet. It created a lead from the email address and an opportunity without an account. Is there a way to have the functionality to create new leads and new accounts?

Sync Policy Settings

In this situation, the Riva sync policy SmartConvert options were configured to:

“If no contact is matched, match against Leads”
“If recipient is not matched, create Lead instead of Contact.”

Answer

Riva follows an industry best practice where a lead is a "contact" that is not associated with an account or does not have specific information about a sales opportunity. It is basic information on a prospective customer with no relationship to anything else in the CRM. When you qualify a lead and determine it represents an opportunity, you convert that lead to a contact and assign the opportunity. A lead does not have an associated account since it is not yet qualified for business. Leads would be created if you come back from a trade show and have business cards: There is no relationship between the people whose business cards were collected and you. A relationship would be defined as having made a phone call, archived an email, or created an opportunity.

By default, when Riva converts an email to an opportunity or when it detects an email in the "Create New Email" folder, Riva creates a contact instead of a lead, because a relationship has been established by creating the opportunity or tracking the email in the CRM. This is when a lead is converted to a contact in Salesforce.

By default, Riva matches the domain information of the “from:” field to create a contact and account if it cannot match the email addresses of the recipients against a contact in Salesforce. In your configuration, you have told Riva to create a lead if it cannot match a contact or a lead when it tries to match the contact email addresses. Because a lead is created instead of a contact, there is no account that Riva can associate the opportunity with, because leads are not associated with accounts.

It is not possible for Riva to create the combination of a new lead AND a new account. With your current configuration, when an opportunity is created, it is associated with a lead — leads are not associated with accounts. If you want Riva to associate an opportunity with an account, Riva must be configured to create a new contact rather than a new lead.