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Anonymous
Jan 28, 2016 9:35 PM UTC
Question

Country and State Standardization

A lot of our forms are free form fill outs and can cause states/countries etc. to be misspelled, abbreviated, etc.  I was wondering if someone had a list that they use to standardize these across?

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16 replies

Anonymous
Dec 1, 2016 5:18 PM UTC

Question for the group - how did you handle territories (British, US, etc.)? Did you essentially treat the list from Salesforce as the only data set, or did you omit some countries/remove because of them being territories? Any insight to territories or how you edited that Salesforce list would be helpful. Thanks!

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Jessica_Kao3
Jessica_Kao3
Level 7
Dec 1, 2016 7:04 PM UTC

I would also recommend removing embargo countries as well.  Something that is easy to overlook. 

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Kristin_Johnso2
Kristin_Johnso2
Level 2
Sep 30, 2016 4:32 PM UTC

Hey All,

I began creating the batch and trigger campaigns to clean my data, however with 200+ countries the smart campaign continues to crash my instance. I put in a support ticket and their advice was not to have as many flow steps. How have you guys gotten around this? 

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Dan_Stevens_
Dan_Stevens_
Level 10
Sep 30, 2016 4:36 PM UTC

We had to break this up into multiple smart campaigns: APAC, Europe, North America and Other

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Anonymous
Sep 30, 2016 4:40 PM UTC

We did something similar by broken out by alphabetical groupings.

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Frank_Breen2
Frank_Breen2
Level 8
Jan 29, 2016 10:37 AM UTC

Is there are reason you use free form fields instead of a drop down? You can set this up easily in Marketo forms.

If you use Salesforce, they have a standard country list found here: Standard Countries for Address Picklists. If you go into Setup in Salesforce, you'll also see which countries have recognised states too for added value (United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Ireland, Italy and Mexico). Attached is a spreadsheet (2 tabs) I created from here to do my data normalisation and my dropdown creation, this is made up from the above link and the Salesforce State and Country Picklists section (you may need Admin access to see this or I use my Salesforce Developer version [Developer Info - Salesforce Developers | API Documentation, Developer Forums & More / Signup for free - Salesforce Developers​]).

Salesforce -> Setup - > Salesforce State and Country Picklists

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    Bjorn_Erik_Ekst
    Level 2
    Apr 29, 2020 9:47 AM UTC

    Thanks for the helpful Excel, @frank_breen2 ! 

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    Grégoire_Miche2
    Grégoire_Miche2
    Level 10
    Jan 28, 2016 9:39 PM UTC

    Hi Liz,

    You could use this : ISO 3166-1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Also, this is one topic where data management smart campaigns come very handy to fix erroneous entries.

    -Greg

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    Anonymous
    Jan 28, 2016 9:44 PM UTC

    Curious how this would help if they are entered as leads and not associated with an ISO code and if they are misspelled ex: Utd Kingdom, etc. and thanks for your feedback!

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    Grégoire_Miche2
    Grégoire_Miche2
    Level 10
    Jan 28, 2016 9:55 PM UTC

    Data management campaigns will not solve your entire problem. Setting your forms with select fields instead of free entry ones will do on the long term.

    But Data Management campaigns will help cleanse the data you have in the DB. You can start by replacing values you have in the db with correct ones, and continue to enhance your smart lists of bad data that will be corrected. You will not solve all of them, but you will reach quite quickly about 90% clean data.

    -Greg

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