Potential members are tracked as Leads in Salesforce. Only some basic information needs to be captured about the person at this time.
To get started, I created a new page layout for Leads by copying the default page. The new layout is called Lead (Talent Stacker). It will be assigned to the System Administrator and the Talent Stacker Manager profiles.
There are a few issues with using Standard Salesforce functionality at this point. Talent Stacker is a Business-to-Consumer company. They are signing up individuals, not companies. Out of the box, Salesforce is a Business-to-Business platform, mean to track sales to companies and the employees/contacts at those companies. The standard functionality requires a Company name to be entered when creating a new Lead.
There are a few options available for handling this.
- Enable Person Accounts. Person Accounts are specifically designed for B2C orgs, but they do bring an added layer of complexity to the system and a lot of people don’t like them. I will not be using this method here, although it is the method I used in my original project.
- Enter a unique name in the Company field when creating a new lead. This could just be the first and last name of the customer. When the Lead is converted, an Account will be created using this name. This is an OK solution for our needs, but not the one I’m going to use.
- Enter anything in the Company field and then use a Before Save Record Triggered Flow to update the Company field to something specific and unique. This is the method I’ll be using.
When entering the Lead, manually, a user will need to enter something in the Company field. What they enter doesn’t matter because I’ll be updating the field with a Flow. If the Lead is being created through another method, like Web-to-Lead or HubSpot, other solutions can be used. I’ll be focusing on manually created Leads for now.
Updating Company with Flow
I create a Record Triggered Flow using Fast Field Updates (Before Save) to update the Lead object. This Flow will run when a Flow is created, so it doesn’t need any other entry criteria. However, if you wanted to only have this Flow run on certain Leads, you could add an additional criteria. Maybe you have another field on the Lead object that gets updated if the Lead is not Perhaps you have all of your Leads entered with ‘X’ in the Company field if they are individuals. You could set the Flow to check the field for ‘X’ and only run if it evaluates as true. For my purposes, the Flow will run on all Leads.
This Flow only requires one Update Records component and nothing else. Select the Company field and create a new formula to populate the name. You can’t use the Full Name value here, so you need to create a new formula to concatenate the First Name and Last Name values. Save, test, and activate the Flow!
Lead Layout
I updated the Lead Page Layout to support the new fields I created and created a Lightning Page in order to use a dynamic layout.
Lead Field Mapping
I updated the Account object to include the same custom fields and then updated the field mapping on the Lead object. These custom fields will also eventually be connected to a flow that can update Opportunity records related to the add-ons that are available.
