Using "contains" in filter without pulling the wrong leads

[Anonymous]

I tried pulling a list of leads whse job titles contained "CTO" and realized that Marketo was pulling in thousands of leads whose job title was "Director", as "Director" contains the letters "CTO" within it. I tried using quotation marks in hopes that Marketo would understand that I meant CTO as in Chief Technology Officer, but that didn't work. Anyone know how to use the "contains" and "not contains" fiters for exact values?

Job Title - contains - "CTO"

[Anonymous]

The "Contains" operator in Marketo can be tricky, and is not always forgiving.

Yet, if you're like a lot of companies (including mine) your job title standarization is not good, so the "contains" filter can be tempting.

One of the things to do is to use the "Starts" with filter. You can click on the plus sign and put "CTO" not the search box, from there look for common titles that appear beginning with "CTO" such as "CTO, Europe and Asia." Depending on how good or bad your standarization is, you can capture a wide swath by searching on "Starts with" CTO.

Looking more to the long term, if you're going to be generating a lot of lists based on job title, it is worth the investement of time to make sure that you clean up job titles of data you're importing either into Maketo and/or the CRM.

[Kenny_Elkington]

Hey Val,

You can use an additional filter of this type to say "Not Contains 'Director'"  which should prevent leads from being incorrectly pulled.

[Anonymous]

To build on what Keith said, titles were a huge pain for us until we went through the process of consolidating and standardizing them to a tiered system picklist that eliminates the virtually infinite way you can include the word "director" in a title.

For your issue, in the short term, you could add another job title filter that's looking for "Not Contains" and try to add in parts of words for those titles you don't want showing up.

An example would be "Not Contains" "ctor". This would exclude those directors muddying up your list. Keep adding terms to flesh out the unwanted titles from your list.

If you're going to do a lot of title driven communication, I'd highly suggest you standardize your titles. You also have to account for misspellings which makes it almost impossible to include every lead.

[Anonymous]

You could also use "is" for CTO instead of "contains"

If you take that route, you'd probably want to do a smart list to clean up that field first and standardize existing variations of CTO that exist in your data. 

[Anonymous]

Hello - have there been any updates addressing this issue since this question was posted?

[SanfordWhiteman]

To create a semicolon-delimited list of values that's searchable by individual value, add a semicolon at the beginning and end.

   ;apple;peaches;peach;nickel;pumpernickel;

then if you search for [contains]

    ;nickel;

the search will be unambiguous.