There is this field called “country” which comes standard as a free text field in HubSpot.
The problem: As we target our users by country where they live, we had to find a solution so we can filter by country.
-- The first thing my team did was to convert this to a dropdown field because we noticed that it’s highly misunderstood by our contacts. Some people filled in the regional code, some the country name in their own language (instead of English), many typos, etc.
-- The second thing was to fill in the dropdown field we created with “standard options” that HubSpot provides for every drop down field. It’s a great feature, you can simply choose things like “countries” and you get a list of all countries filled into your dropdown menu. The problem: no standard is respected! Today we’re encountering the situation that our IT department – who writes a private app – cannot really connect to this field as it’s filled with words like “Europe” (which is not a country) and no international standard is respected.
Suggestion:
1. Please make the country list you provide in the “load options” tab respect an international standard like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes
2. Might need further discussion but my second suggestion is to make the “country” field for both contacts and companies a drop down field type so it’s easily usable for filtering.
Wanna discuss this further with me? Let me know, I’d like to talk with you about these issues!
Michael