🔄 Flagship Trail · Object: Lead → Account, Contact, Opportunity
Lead-to-Cash: Convert Your First Lead
The single most important click in any CRM: turning a raw inbound lead into a real customer record and a tracked deal — atomically, with no duplicate typing and no lost marketing attribution.
5
Units
~15 min
Time to Complete
120 pts
Available
1 Badge
Lead-to-Cash Specialist
Unit 1 · Business Problem
Why Lead Conversion matters
PS
Priya Shah · Sales Ops Lead, Northwind Distributors
"Before SmartLite, every lead that turned into a real deal meant a rep retyping the same name, company, and email into three different screens — one for the Account, one for the Contact, one for the Opportunity. Some reps forgot a step. Some created a second Account for a company we already had. And once the lead was 'used up,' nobody could trace the deal back to the ad campaign that actually generated it."
This is the exact problem Lead Conversion solves. A Lead is a rough, unqualified interest signal — a name and company from a form fill, a trade show scan, or a cold call. Once sales confirms it's real, that one Lead record needs to become up to three permanent, connected CRM records:
📇 Lead
→
🏢 Account
+
👤 Contact
+
💼 Opportunity
Without a purpose-built conversion engine, teams either do this by hand (slow, inconsistent, duplicate-prone) or skip Accounts and Contacts entirely (fast, but you lose the ability to see "everything about this customer" in one place). Neither is acceptable at scale.
💡
Business outcome
One click replaces three manual data-entry screens, guarantees the Account/Contact/Opportunity are correctly linked to each other, and preserves the marketing campaign that originated the deal for attribution reporting.
Unit 2 · How It Works
Anatomy of a Lead Conversion
When a rep clicks Convert on a Lead, SmartLite runs a single atomic operation. Here's what it does and — more importantly — why each decision point exists as a real business lever, not just a technical option.
All-or-nothing, by design
The whole conversion — creating the Account, the Contact, the Opportunity, and deleting the original Lead — happens inside one database transaction. If any step fails (say, the Opportunity name is missing), nothing is created. Your reps never end up with an orphaned Account and no matching deal to show for it.
✅
Why this matters to the business
Data integrity, not just code quality: sales leadership can trust that "number of Opportunities" and "number of converted Leads" always reconcile — there's no such thing as a half-converted lead cluttering reports.
Don't create duplicate Accounts or Contacts
If the lead's company, Riverside Manufacturing, is already a customer, the rep isn't forced to create a second Account. They can search for and link the existing Account (and existing Contact) instead — the new Opportunity attaches to the record you already have, keeping one clean customer history instead of two fragmented ones.
Not every lead is a deal yet
Some leads should become a Contact but shouldn't create a deal in the pipeline — for example, someone who only signed up for a newsletter. Conversion supports Skip Opportunity for exactly this case, so your Opportunity list stays a true reflection of real sales pipeline, not inflated with premature "deals."
Nothing gets lost in translation
Leads often carry custom fields your team cares about — annual revenue, industry, lead score. The admin-configured Field Mapping engine automatically carries those values onto the new Account, Contact, or Opportunity, so nobody has to remember to copy them by hand. You'll configure one of these yourself in Unit 4.
Marketing attribution survives the handoff
If the lead was generated by a campaign (an email blast, a webinar, a paid ad), SmartLite automatically finds that campaign and tags the new Opportunity with it as the primary campaign source — so Marketing can still prove which campaigns produced real revenue, long after the original Lead record is gone.
Decision point
Business lever
Result if you choose "existing" / "skip"
Account
Is this company already a customer?
Links to the existing Account instead of creating a duplicate
Contact
Is this person already known to us?
Links to the existing Contact instead of creating a duplicate
Opportunity
Is this actually a sales-qualified deal?
Skipped entirely — Lead still converts to Account/Contact only
⚠️
One-way door
Once converted, the original Lead record is permanently deleted — its data now lives on inside the Account, Contact, and Opportunity it produced. There's no "unconvert." Make sure the Account/Contact links are correct before clicking Convert.
Unit 3 · Hands-On Challenge
Convert your first Lead
Try this in your own SmartLite org (login: admin / admin123 at localhost:5173). We'll convert a fictional inbound lead, Jordan Lee from Riverside Manufacturing, into a real customer record and a tracked deal.
Open the Leads tabNavigate to Leads and open Jordan Lee's record (or any qualified lead in your org).
Click "Convert"Found on the Lead's detail page action bar. This opens the Conversion screen.
Resolve the AccountChoose "Create New Account" (default) — or search for an existing Account if Riverside Manufacturing is already a customer.
Resolve the ContactSmartLite pre-fills a new Contact from the Lead's name, email, and phone. Link to an existing Contact instead if this person is already known to you.
Decide on the OpportunityEnter an Opportunity Name (e.g. "Riverside Manufacturing — Q3 Expansion") and a Close Date — or toggle "Skip Opportunity" if this isn't a sales-qualified deal yet.
Click "Convert Lead"SmartLite creates the Account, Contact, and Opportunity together, links them to each other, and deletes the original Lead — all in one atomic step.
Verify the resultOpen the new Opportunity — its Account and Contact fields are already populated. If the lead came from a campaign, check the Opportunity's "Primary Campaign Source" field — it's filled in automatically.
// what the Convert button sends to the server
POST /api/leads/{leadHexId}/convert
{
"opportunityName": "Riverside Manufacturing — Q3 Expansion",
"closeDate": "2026-09-30",
"existingAccountHexId": null,
"existingContactHexId": null,
"skipOpportunity": false
}
🎯
Try the edge cases too
Convert one lead with "Skip Opportunity" checked, and convert a second lead by linking it to an Account you already created. Notice how the outcome — and the message SmartLite returns — changes each time.
Unit 4 · Admin Configuration
Configure Lead Conversion field mappings
By default, only the obvious fields (name, email, phone, company) carry over automatically. If your Lead object has custom fields — say, annual_revenue__c or industry__c — an admin needs to tell SmartLite where those values should land after conversion.
Go to Setup → Lead Conversion MappingsThis page lists every configured mapping for your org, grouped by target object.
Click "New Mapping"Pick the source field on Lead, the target object (Account, Contact, or Opportunity), and the target field.
SaveThe mapping applies to every future conversion immediately — no restart, no deploy.
Lead Field
Target Object
Target Field
Business reason
annual_revenue__c
Account
annual_revenue__c
Sizing the new customer for account planning
industry__c
Account
industry__c
Segmenting customers for industry-specific playbooks
lead_score__c
Opportunity
initial_lead_score__c
Letting sales ops correlate lead quality with win rate
🔧
How it's applied
At conversion time, SmartLite loads every mapping for your org once, then overlays each mapped value onto the new record's data — after the built-in defaults (name, account link, owner) are already set, so a mapping can enrich a record but never break the required relationships.
Unit 5 · Knowledge Check
Test what you learned
Answer all four questions to earn the Lead-to-Cash Specialist badge.
1. The Opportunity step fails validation during conversion (e.g. missing Opportunity Name). What happens to the Account and Contact that were already created in the same request?
They stay — only the Opportunity is skipped
The entire conversion rolls back — nothing is created
They're created, but left unlinked to any Opportunity
2. How do you avoid creating a duplicate Account when converting a lead from a company you already do business with?
Delete the old Account before converting
You can't — SmartLite always creates a new Account
Choose "Link to Existing Account" on the Convert screen
3. What happens to the original Lead record after a successful conversion?
It stays in the Leads list with a "Converted" checkbox
It moves to a separate "Converted Leads" archive tab
It is permanently deleted — its data now lives in the new records
4. A lead originated from a paid campaign. What happens to that attribution when the lead converts to an Opportunity?
SmartLite automatically tags the new Opportunity with that campaign as its primary source
The attribution is lost — campaigns only track Leads, not Opportunities
An admin must manually re-attach the campaign afterward
🏅
Badge Earned: Lead-to-Cash Specialist
You now understand how SmartLite turns a raw inbound Lead into a fully connected Account, Contact, and Opportunity — atomically, without duplicate data entry.