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.

[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.