Display non-US states in State dropdown filter

[Anonymous]

We have a handful of international locations and leads and we use the State field as a way to filter them. As we've added more teams abroad, it has become confusing to use this field since the drop-down only includes US states, rather than looking up and returning all of the unique values in our database.

This inconsistency has created some training headaches and troubleshooting for my team. We have a current workaround, but I'm sure there are more instances that run into this problem.



Happy to clarify, let me know!

[Anonymous]

Hey Doug,
I believe this dropdown was made static to help with standardized data in the State field. Often times, many different values for a single state will be in the dropdown (CA, California, Calif. etc...) which makes it hard to pull smart lists of all California leads. Making the list of states static helps to standardize this data and make it more usable. The State field in SFDC can also be changed to a picklist with two-character State codes. When this happens, syncs will fail unless leads in Marketo have one of these valid state codes.

The good news here is that, even though the dropdown is static, State is a normal string field and any value can be entered into this field.

This does have some drawbacks as you are pointing out now. If this behavior is causing more problems then it is solving, I agree with you that it should be removed. I would love to hear from other customers and get their feedback, negative or positive.

Will

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the response, Will.

I ran into this problem before when I was trying to standardize data in my database by searching for common variations (CA, California, etc) and re-writing them as the two-letter abbreviation. The current setup makes it difficult to find all of those variations in Marketo.

There was an example in the foundation training that used a similar process for standardizing data in the Country field (seach for US, USA, U.S.A, and so on), so I found the inconsistency across similar field types to be confusing.

[Anonymous]

Another good point. 

Data standardization is a tricky business and all depends on when and how the non-standard values get into the database. So it is very hard to pick a behavior that would work best for everyone.

Perhaps we could request a feature that finds all variations of a field automatically and does an automatic standardization as our current behavior seems to be aimed more towards preventing bad data from entering the system rather than fixing it if it is already there.

[Anonymous]

How about a country select, and then a state select that is dependent on it?

Or... here's a section of a dropdown we use on a non-Marketo form (which then writes to one or two fields, depending on the selection).

[Amy_Lepre]

What would really be helpful is a place for us (most likely the Admin section) to define the data values allowed for fields in our own instances. That way every time we place the State field (for example) on a form, it will automatically be populated with the values we've set in our instance.