Dealing with Multiple Address Blocks on Lead Conversion

I've had a few clients that needed the ability to track multiple address blocks on the lead and have them convert into the two account address blocks.  It seems like a fairly common requirement and Salesforce is a bit limited here.  It's easy to map and convert custom field to custom field but there is no facility to map into the Account address fields.

The first time this happend, I asked Tom to write a trigger to facilitiate this.  It worked perfect.  The second time though, I wanted to try and push the envelope and here's what I came up with.  As a refresher, this article describes how standard fields are mapped during lead conversion.  (Basically the one Address block on Lead maps to the Billing Address on Account and the Mailing Address on Contact)

Disclaimer - this fix requires Enterprise edition since it utilizes workflow.  (Sorry my PE,GE friends...)

My requirement was that I needed both address blocks on the lead to map into the Account address blocks.  So here's the workaround:

1. Create another set of address fields on the Lead object.  I created Street, City, State, Zip to keep things simple.
2. Create another set of address fields on the Account object.  I called these "Temp Street, Temp City, Temp State, Temp Zip", since they are a holding location only.
3. Map the 2nd Lead Address Block to the Shipping Account Address block.
4. Create a workflow rule that runs upon create.  Create 4 field actions in the workflow rule to populate the Shipping Street, Shipping City, Shipping State, Shipping Zip block.

And that's it!  When the Lead is created, two address blocks are filled out.  The custom 2nd address maps to a secret 3rd address block on Account, and then a workflow rule moves things back to the standard address block on the Account.

What do you think?  Do you have any other snazzy tricks using the great features of the Salesforce platform?  Post a comment here!

-Garry

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