Right now the organization doesn’t have Titles, suffixes for names. they have been adding things like “Dr.” the first name and “md” or other accreditations to the last name field. What are the best practices around this?
Hi @SFowler3,
This is a great question! I personally hadn’t come across this before, but looking further into this I found a couple of threads that could point you in the right direction!
Also tagging in some community members to see if they have any additional suggestions for you!
Hey @CHawkins, @val_kouba, @jolle – Do you have anything you’d like to add here for @SFowler3?
Thanks!!
Sam, Community Manager
Hey @SFowler3, I’d recommend keeping name fields strictly for names and avoiding titles or credentials in the default First name and Last name properties.
A few best practices that have worked well for CRM data quality:
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Keep First name = John and Last name = Smith.
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Store Dr., Mr., Ms. in a custom Prefix/Title property.
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Store MD, PhD, RN, CPA, etc. in a custom Suffix/Credentials property.
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If these values already exist in name fields, run a one-time cleanup and update your forms/imports to prevent the issue from recurring.
This approach keeps personalization tokens, deduplication, reporting, integrations, and email greetings accurate while preserving professional credentials where they’re intended.
HubSpot also recommends using default contact properties for their intended purpose and creating custom properties for additional information:
HubSpot Default Contact Properties: HubSpot Knowledge Base
It’s a small data hygiene change that pays off across your entire CRM.
Hope it helps!
Agreed!
@SFowler3 If you have Data hub, here’s a workflow “template” that will help with the cleanup. I just recently went through similar cleanup and standardization.
Versions of the workflow are running for the main prefix culprits we see. You can also maintain a single workflow with branches based on the Prefix groups
@Alex_Boissonneault Thanks for inspiring me to run the same for Suffix/Credentials!
This is great. Thank you for sharing!