Standard Naming for companies with special characters in their name

[craigc]

What is the best practice for companies that have special characters in their name? For example, B&B Repair.  Would you rename to BB Repair or B and B Repair?

[SanfordWhiteman]

In what context are you concerned about an ampersand?

That's just an ASCII character, there's nothing special about it except in certain contexts (and in URLs & HTML, where it is special, it can merely be escaped — doesn't need to be removed).

[rish_tracktik]

Ideally, the best practice is to keep the company name as to how you got it first place. Why would you try to rename? Any specific use case?

[craigc]

If a lead inputs it incorrectly or doesn't match dnb.com business name 

[craigc]

Some contacts use their Trade Name vs their Business Name.  When reporting we will get 5 contacts for "B&D Const", 2 for "B and D" Construction",  7 for "B&D Construction", 3 for "B&D Co.", etc.

We would like to see if there is a way to standardize Trade Names into legal Business Names.  This is a valid reason to change the customer provided entity name for more accurate reporting.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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We would like to see if there is a way to standardize Trade Names into legal Business Names. 

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Well, that wasn’t exactly what you originally asked... you originally asked whether there was one universal way of representing a corporate name without further info. There isn‘t, it depends on the corporation.

Now, if you have a database of legal names to query, that‘s different. Then the legal names become the standards to normalize/canonicalize to.

However, within the Marketo platform alone, this can’t be done. You would need use Call Webhook to use an external service. Or at the point of intake (on the form) you could have people choose from a dropdown, based on public info. Using Google Places, for example (although that’s not as accurate as D&B but at least it only gives one spelling for a given entity).

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hi @craigc, when you get a moment pls expand on this q... @rish_tracktik and I would really like to know what scenario would lead you to ask about forcibly changing company names.

[craigc]

Renaming them to be standardized. For example, when a lead fills out a contact form and states their company is 'B&B' but when we look up their company on dnb.com is it listed as 'B and B Roofing LLC'

[SanfordWhiteman]

A company can have

• a stylized name, for example "Gulf + Western"
• a formal legal name (which may exclude some non-alphanumeric characters), for example "Gulf and Western Industries, Inc."

Except in very old legacy environments (i.e. mainframe-era systems where nothing but upper-case ASCII letters is available) there's no reason to use anything other than one of these.

As the stylized name is often the popular name of a company, from a sales standpoint you can lose valuable info if you change the stylized name into something the salesperson doesn't recognize.

[craigc]

Trade Name vs Business Name.

Is there a way to globally combine contacts under Gulf + Western, Gulf and Western, Gulf & Western.  This is my question.