How to deal with people that write their job title differently (CMO, C.M.O, Chief Marketing Officer.

[ffeugas]

Frequently, I need to write emails to the CMOs of my database (same with CFO, CTO, etc..).

When I do create the account in hubspot, I compute the data myself. But, if a colleague does it, or if it's automatically added by an external integration (for example from an event through eventbrite), people can write whatever they want, with different syntaxes, or even different language (french, english, etc).

How to automatically regroup all people with the same function ?

I was thinking about making a list with researches that includes different possible syntaxes. But as everybody write their job title differently (including some mispelling) it's hard to predict every possibility.

How do you do from your side? Do you have any advices?

[Phil_Vallender · Accepted solution]

Hi @ffeugas 

Yeah, free text job title is not a good segmentation field. You can do as you have suggested and try to catch various spellings/formats and try to reassign them but you can never be 100% sure. 

The ideal alternative is to control what people put in, for example by using persona rather than job title, at least in early lead gen forms. A well crafted persona property should have a value that every visitor feels comfortable choosing, without opening you up to all variations of each individual job title. 

Hope this helps.