The Lead Entity within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is used to track your relationship with prospective customers. At some point in the relationship, they change from being simply a Lead into either a customer or someone who is no longer a prospect.

The Lead Qualification Process

Here is how leads are generally worked by a salesperson:

New Lead

When a Lead is first entered into the system, you may not know much about them so the status is simply New:

First Contact

After you make the initial contact, via email or phone, for instance, you change the Status Reason to Contacted:

Qualified

If the relationship progresses to the next step, or if the relationship doesn’t progress at all, you can Qualify the Lead as either Won or Lost by clicking the Qualify button on the toolbar:

This will display the Convert Lead dialog:

At this point you have two choices:

1. Qualify the Lead
2. Disqualify the Lead

Both offer you a status to help further identify the reasoning behind the qualification/disqualification.

Now the dialog you see above cannot be changed because it is part of the CRM itself, but we can change the values of the Status’ to better match your business and its processes.

Let’s walk through the steps required to change the Status Reason fields:

Changing the Lead Status Reason Field

1. Click Settings, Customizations, Customize the System.

2. Click the Entities group:

and the list of Entities within Dynamics CRM will be displayed.

3. Scroll down until you find the Lead Entity. Double-click the Lead Entity:

4. Click Fields, to show the field list:

The list of fields found within Lead will be displayed.

5.Scroll down the list until you find the statuscode (Status Reason) field. Double-click the field to view it’s properties.

The Lead statuscode field has three status’:

• Open
• Qualified
• Disqualified

Each status has a variety of sub-status’:

You can change any of these status’ to match your business processes.

DO NOT delete any of the built-in status values. If you need to add your own, consider simply changing the name of an existing status.

Deleting a built-in status can lead to very bad things happening to your system and you can’t replace the deleted value without a lot of work.

SO DO NOT DO IT.

6. After you have made your modifications, click the Save and Close button on the toolbar.

7. When you have returned to the Lead field list, click the Publish All Customizations button to activate your changes.

8. Test your work by opening a lead and clicking the Qualify button on the ribbon and verify your new values are in place.