Salesforce integration - State picklist - 2-letter abbrev. vs. full text of state.

[Anonymous]

I know this is probably better posed to Salesforce support... but 1st level email support never responds timely, nor provides a satisfactory answer....

I've inherited a Salesforce org that uses the full name of state in the picklist, instead of the two-letter postal abbrev. i.e. "Michigan" instead of "MI"

This seems to be causing some problems with the Marketo synch where records have the 2-letter abbrev.

I'd happily switch Salesforce to the 2-letter abbreviation, but it's not clear how to accomplish this.

Alternatively, I'll put a fix into Marketo if there's an easy one to deal with it.

 What have others done?


Addendum: This may be a matter of simply disabling state and country picklists. I'm finding other discussions about the lack of a choice between 2-letter abbrev's and full-spelling for states in the picklist feature.

[Josh_Hill13]

I would just get the full list out of the SFDC Picklist and paste it into your Marketo Form select box.

SFDC Support will not help with this sort of thing- it's really up to you which values you want.

Do not disable the picklists. This will lead to data chaos.

[Anonymous]

*Josh has the right solution going forward for you. If you still find yourself getting 2 letter abbreviations from other lead sources, this could help clean your data.

You could do trigger data value change that looks for state abbreviations and changes to full state on all form fills before you sync to SF. Would take an hour or so to build out, but it would solve your issue short term.

Smart list: Data Value Change = State w/ constraint -> new value = (your list of state abbreviations combinations)

Flow: Change Data Value = State w/ add choice -> if state = (state abbreviation) .... attribute state = full state name
(replicate add choice for all states).

[Anonymous]

Actually, this problem cropped up on a list import, not a form.  Normally we're importing lists and attaching to the acquisition program that is synched to the salesforce campaign.

Will need to think about how a triggered data value change would work in that environment. I'd prefer to not have to go and manually re-run the synch after the flow to fix the states...
 

[Anonymous]

You can use lead creation as the trigger and filter state values = state abbreviation, run flow steps as above to adjust your state field. Also, you can run a macro in your excel list to just populate or correct state name before you upload. Either way works. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks all.

I think what I'm settling on is a daily batch job to normalize the values. We get fire drills such as having to upload trade show leads in almost real-time - no time for a macro in Excel. Get them into Marketo and Salesforce and clean them up at midnight. It's not like we're in a rush to send any direct mail with a proper postal address. 🙂