Hi,
I have set up a couple of additional required fields on the contact form so when the BDM’s are inputting data they put in all the necessary information. One of the required fields is Country/Region. However on a number of new contacts this field is blank. When I go in i see the contact is newly created and it says “This contact was created from Offline Sources from Contacts”. Any idea how they are doing it/getting around the required field?
TIA
@JMH7 with a space perhaps. You wouldn’t visually see a space if it is in the field. You might consider turning this into a drop down or other selection field so that blank is not an option.
Thanks Crystal_Hopper I tried that but it doesn’t work so it is not it. I think I will have to look at adding a list.
Hi @JMH7,
There are multiple offline sources, manual contact creation is only one of them: Contacts added to HubSpot from an offline source
You can check by navigating to the contact record, clicking View all properties in the left sidebar and searching for “original source”. This should give you some clue as to how exactly this contact was created. If it was in fact manual contact creation (by user input), the user might have just hit the spacebar, like @Crystal_Hopper said. In that case making the field a dropdown selection might do the trick.
Hope this helps!
Hi @JMH7 hope you are doing well.
I’ll go with Crystal here
I’d create a dropdown list of all the country/state/City you have
and make it a requiered field from the list.
This way you will avoid spaces, dots, or any invalid word.
hope this helps!
This is also something to watch out for when creating records through automation. I’ve found workflows allow you to create records with less required information than normal.
Thanks all for your replies.
When I try to edit the property to make a drop down it doesnt allow me as it’s in use so it would mean recreating it completely and then go back and update every contact which would be huge.
Surely there has to be an easier way?
(All this because one person refuses to spend 5 seconds typing extra data! - sorry rant over!)
Workflows would help either edit properties en mass and/or create a task for the rep every time the state/region is unknown if you have access.
Hi @JMH7,
Correct, properties that are in use can’t be changed in field type. You’d have to create a new property. You could then use a workflow to copy the information from the single-line text property into a radio select type property. It could look like this:
The challenge here, however, are going to be the values from the single-line text field that do not exactly match your dropdown options. They need to match exactly. Otherwise HubSpot will return an error for this contact. One easy way of finding all existing values in your single-line text property is to export all contacts, filter the Excel file and see all the values that have been input so far. You’ll probably get a headache because there are too many, with different spelling. If it’s not too bad, you can create the appropriate radio select dropdown values and use the workflow above to copy over the information. If it’s bad, you might have to clean-up the Excel file and then re-import.
(Or talk to the person who made the change.)
Let me know if you need any help with the steps above, happy to provide more details and step-by-step instructions.
Cheers!
Hi Karsten,
Thanks for the information.
(I have tried to talk to the person but unfortunately they are refusing point blank - I think they enjoy being difficult.)
So I have set up a drop down list of countries and tried to create the workflow like you did above but the radio select option (or the dropdown country option in my case) does not appear? Is this because I made it a drop down and not radio button?
Thanks.
Hi @JMH7,
My apologies – single-line text properties cannot be copied into radio select properties, that was an oversight from me, see here.
In that case, you would have to export your contacts after all. In that export file, you would copy the values from the old property into a column for the new property – making sure that the values match exactly with the radio select dropdown values that you’ve set up.
During import, you can now match the new column with the new property. Except for the email address or contact ID and this new column, you don’t need to map/import any of the other properties. (Make sure to check the error log after importing, there are usually a few. One never catches all values.)
Let me know if you need further assistance here!
Thanks Karsten, I will try that.