Selecting Company from a drop down list

[adele_briggs]

Does anyone have any experience with capturing a company name from is a pick list on a form?  My SFDC admin are looking to implement a rule where a company cannot be added to SFDC unless it matches a predefined list.  I am not sure if it would be a predictive list, and I have not tested to see if a Marketo form would allow this type of field. 

I would normally avoid this type of field for a company because there are so many variations, and would be a bad experience for the user.

[Ishita_Chawra]

Hi @adele_briggs, 

Though I have not experienced this but can brainstorm along to see if there is a solution.

How are you planning to pull the company record names?

• If you are thinking of your database, then wouldn’t that be constantly changing and so will the company list
• Also, if there is an update in company name you would need to manually update the list with new values

Maybe you can get the list by exporting all your company records, getting all the unique names in one spreadsheet column, and then load these values when creating company dropdown field. You can add another value to say if the company they're looking for doesn't exist, they can select "Add New" from the dropdown, which triggers a new text field where they can enter the company's name.

Happy to provide additional thoughts if you can share any further details. In the meantime, I hope this is helpful.

[adele_briggs]

Thank you for this thought. You are right, the list will be forever changing. We have quite a lot of forms so would be a big job to update all the time. 

There would be an awful lot of companies, and scrolling down a list does not seem a great experience. It would have to be a predictive type field, and I'm not sure this is possible in Marketo?

I like the Add new suggestion.

thank you.

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you have a closed universe, it can work.

We’ve done this in a few different cases:

• choosing from K-12 schools in the US (calling a remote service that has that data)
• choosing only from registered paid accounts (calling a remote service that has an up-to-date copy of company private data)
• choosing only from licensed resellers

and so on.

Note with Marketo alone — no remote service — you have to use a static list (i.e. hosted in Design Studio or pasted right into the web page). You can add a typeahead library like Awesomplete to get the predictive part. It’ll work fine.

Of course, in all these cases, a sufficiently curious person could determine if someone else’s company is allowed (by definition, anybody can fill out the form and try other people’s companies). That may not be desirable.

[adele_briggs]

thank you for the information.

There is a remote service they are proposing to use called CreditSafe. I do not have the details of how this will work right now, but I'm assuming in the Company Name in Salesforce, they will do a lookup to CreditSafe database before allowing a save on the record, Unless they use CreditSafe database as the Company name we have to use, I assume this would need to be presented on the form.

I think I have probably used one form where I've had to pick a company name previously. I just don't know if this is the right course of action, that being to avoid duplicates entering the system. 

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Having glanced at their API, it definitely is not suitable for typeahead. The rate limits are too low — typeahead requires repeated lookups as someone enters new characters.

You could call the CreditSafe API from your server when they hit submit, though.

They offer a “fuzzy” lookup that returns a confidence score, i.e. how closely the Company Name matches someone(s) they know. If none of the responses have high enough confidence, don’t let the form post go through to Marketo (“We don’t recognize that company.”)

[SanfordWhiteman]

@adele_briggs please return to your thread and check replies.

[adele_briggs]

Apologies, for some reason I didn't get an alert until Sunday. Not sure if the alerts are realtime?