Slugs not as slimey as you think

I finally got to finish up on a project I've been working on for a while and I thought I'd share it.

My company has a unique situation where the MFG Sales Reps are not employees of the company. And as of right now they do not have access to our proprietary databases or CRM. Therefore they are not registered users of the system.

This complicates things because in some regards we would like them to act as users. We have not reached the point where we can justify buying an additional 45 or so license. Turning them into accounts that we link as sub-accounts to the accounts that they would own is a cumbersome work around, but the best solution we have right now.

We would like to generate a Lead Notification & Follow-Up form that is emailed to the appropriate rep when a lead is pseudo-assigned to them. I say pseudo-assigned because, when a lead is generated, we cannot really assign it to a Rep in MSCRM, since only a user can be an owner. So the assignment is theoretical. Instead we assign it to the Rep’s Regional Sales Manager (RSM). After interviewing an RSM, I determined that not all leads will be pseudo-assigned to a REP.

I decided the best way to handle this is through workflow. I originally attempted to create an email template in MSCRM. The MSCRM email template has certain limitations, and the biggest is that the email template cannot be sent to anyone other than the email address associated with the MSCRM lead.

Swing and a miss…

My next idea was to use the create an email as a workflow action. However there was no obvious way to skim information off the Lead objects and put it in the body of the email.

After discussions with Microsoft, I discovered that we could create an email in workflow and use xml slugs in the body, we could also use HTML format the email. This worked perfectly for the Lead Notification. I haven’t tested it anywhere else yet, but I am fairly certain that this can apply across the board.

The slugs are pretty simple to understand, and the information to create them is readily available in the Schema Manager. You can get to the Schema Manager in the deployment manager on the CRM server.

The basic format for a leads first name is: &lead.firstname;

There is one hiccup in this system and that is when deploying a custom picklist from the schema only the integer is returned as the value in the picklist, not the string that the integer represents.

By using this basis of our Lead notification system we have created the following procedure. When a batch of Leads are entered, the data entry person can the select the leads and apply the LEAD NOTIFICATION AND FOLLOW UP rule. The system will automatically generate an email that includes contact information and follow up questions. The Email is sent to the owner of the record, in most cases the RSM. The RSM can then evaluate the Lead and make any further notation he deems necessary and forward it to the appropriate Rep. The rep can then fulfill the Follow-Up requirements, and email it back, since it is a Registered CRM EMAIL when the rep replies to the email it is already associated with the lead, making it that much easier for the RSM to qualify or disqualify the lead.

Not perfect, but a half decent workaround.