Form settings - pre-population with obsolete information

[Sydney_Frusteri]

We currently set our forms to prepopulate with a customer's information with several of our fields using picklists. About two years ago, we increased specificity in a few of these picklist (my company is in the technology industry, so we specified fields like "engineer" to "hardware engineer","software engineer", and "Systems engineer").

The dilemma I'm facing is that it seems like obsolete information (like "enineer") are populating the picklist fields even though that option is not available, thus making it harder for our sales team. What are my options in this instance? I would hate to have these forms un-populated.

Any ideas?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi Sydney,

We had a similar issue with a field we use. We asked leads to indicate their buying timeframe. Over time, this would change, but since the field auto filled, they were less likely to update it.

One workaround that I came up with was to force that field to always have a default option (thus overriding the auto fill).

Drag in an html element and paste this code in:

<script language="Javascript" src="/js/public/jquery-latest.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    // use no conflict mode for jQuery
  var $jQ = jQuery.noConflict();

    // when the page is ready, change Opt-In
  $jQ(document).ready(function() {
    $jQ('#Buying_Timeframe__c').val("-");
  });
</script>

Change the "Buying_Timeframe__c" to the field name of the field you want to use it for.  Make sure to use the field name and not the field label (if you labeled it differently on the form). And in the .val("-") section change the "-" to whatever your default is.

For example, if you wanted your default to say something like Select, it would end in .val("Select"). The "Select" option needs to be an actual dropdown option in your picklist for it to work.

By having the form default to that option, it should keep the generic "engineer" from popping up.

Hope this helps!