Repost from here: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/crm/thread/29e3a024-b05d-43cf-9939-3df15630830a
Comments
Note that in fact this functionality is broken and does not work post-Polaris as it did before - if you link a Lead to an existing Account, is simply ignores any Contact information provided and does not create a new Contact under the Account, so you lose all the possible value of linking back from sales through the originating Lead to show marketing ROI
Category: Account, Contact, Calendar and Activity Management
Thank you for your feedback. Currently this is not in our roadmap, however, if we indeed get more feedback, we may consider it in future.
Category: Account, Contact, Calendar and Activity Management
We have found this to be particularly difficult to work around. From the CRM help topic about "working with leads" shown below, it almost implies that you CAN convert a lead to a contact. A lead is a potential customer or opportunity. If you want to do business with a lead, you can qualify that lead by converting it to an account or contact.(key word here is "or," yet as you've posted it doesn't work) Turning a qualified lead into an opportunity that is related to an existing customer tracks the potential sale. In other help topics, it says a lead can be used for a new or existing account. I might be creating a new lead for an existing account, but for a different person. As such I'd want to be able to track lots of different information from the lead to the contact, such as lead source, to know how we learned about this contact. We've created our own dialogue process to work around this, but have decided against using it. We don't want to train our users to use the standard Qualify under X and Y conditions, and the dialogue in Z.
Category: Account, Contact, Calendar and Activity Management
This suggestion is unlikely to gain much traction since it seems likely the qualify dialogue will disappear in the next release (Orion) and carry on with the Polaris way of achieving this. Right now, in Polaris (ie UR12 on CRM Online) on the Lead form it has two fields to link to an existing Contact or Account (and uses your duplicate detection rules to try and help identify likely candidates). When you then qualify, it does not create a new record if you have already linked it, so you can achieve exactly what you are suggesting, by choosing an existing Account and then qualifying the Lead so it only creates a new Contact (and Opportunity, not optional, but that's a different issue).
Category: Account, Contact, Calendar and Activity Management
Administrator on 7/1/2020 5:01:01 PM
Thank you for your feedback!
Would like to update you that this capability is planned for 2019 Release Wave 2 in October.
Please refer to 2019 Release Wave 2 documentation for Dynamics 365 for Sales for details.
Sincerely,
Paramita Chatterjee
PM, Microsoft.