Collecting Country and State Data on a Lead or Contact

Parfitt_David
Level 3

Collecting Country and State Data on a Lead or Contact

Hi everyone,

This might be a silly question but I've been pondering it lately nonetheless. My question is around our FORMS and asking for Country, City, and State. Here's my question upfront: When a Lead or Contact is filling out a form, and we require "Country" as a required field, do we want to know the country of the person's residence, work location, or company location? From what I understand, Leads and Contacts can have a country under their respective objects, and the account objects they are associated with also have a country value. I guess since in my scenario, we market to the individual rather than the account, we would want to know where the person lives, as that will help us determine if they require GDPR compliance or not.

  • Take the following scenario. A "person" filling out one of our forms lives and works in Berlin, but the company they work for is headquartered out of New York, USA.
    • When the form they fill out asks for "Country", do we want to know the country where the person lives, works, or where the company is located? I am assuming for Lead/Contact Objects, the Country is where they Live or work (if there is a satellite office in Berlin), and the Account Objects they are associated with have their own Country data.

Thanks for you inputs

Dave

1 REPLY 1
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Collecting Country and State Data on a Lead or Contact

...we would want to know where the person lives, as that will help us determine if they require GDPR compliance or not.

The place where they filled out the form is just as important to this determination, sorry to break it to ya. What you want is the country or countries whose regulations they're subject to. You can help hone this by specifically asking them for "where they do business" or suchlike, and definitely don't trust automatic IP-based detection as anything more than a hint (that the end user may override).

But I think the question is overly broad and these decisions need to be made by your company, generally in concert with your legal team.