Workflow not working for contacts with property values containing part values from another conta

[SStacey]

Hello,

I'm looking for some help,

I am trying to set up workflows for the contacts in our database that will assign contact owners automatically based on postal codes so that our contacts are assigned to their respective Area Sales Managers.

I am having issues as UK postal codes can contain the start of other postal codes in other regions - as an example, S40 is in Chesterfield, Derbyshire in the UK and S4 is in Sheffield, Yorkshire in the UK - these are entirely different regions and have different Area Sales Managers.

Contacts who have S40 postal codes have been enrolled once and then have re-enrolled in the S4 workflow and this assigns the wrong contact owner.

I hope someone can shed some light. I have tried 'Contains any' 'Starts with any' 'Is equal to any' filters and all aren't working as they should.

Thank you

[APrice9]

I am having this same issue, I attempted to format all my postcodes with a space. E.g. BS48 ; BS4 ; but it removes the space. I was using 'starts with' not contains any. That should solve your S40 vs BS40 issue? 

Did you find a way to resolve this? Thanks

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @SStacey,

Could you please share more details? Instead of looking for only parts of a postal code, why are you not filtering for the full postal code, for example? How many branches / area sales managers are there?

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@SStacey wrote:

I have tried 'Contains any' 'Starts with any' 'Is equal to any' filters and all aren't working as they should.

Could you specify exactly what you're experiencing?

The filters can sometimes be a bit finicky. My suggestion would be to spell out all area codes as opposed to filtering for how they start or what they contain. If the list is too long to type in manually, you could create a list for each branch and use this 'hack' to copy/paste them in bulk into a list. The workflow would then branch based on the list: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/Filtering-a-view-with-a-comma-separated-list-of-company-IDs/m-p...

Best regards

[SStacey]

Hi,

Thanks for your speedy response.

The reason I haven't tried to filter by full postal codes is because there are 1.8 million in the UK. There are 3019 initial sections for which I've created workflows for each. But the problem I'm having is there are 2 digit and 3 digit initial sections for postcodes so the postcode 'S40' is picked up in 'S4' workflow - different regions entirely and different ASM contact owner. 

We have 7 Area Sales Managers currently but this is due to grow.

It may be a limitation of the system and not possible for which another solution would be helpful.

Thanks,

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @SStacey,

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@SStacey wrote:

The reason I haven't tried to filter by full postal codes is because there are 1.8 million in the UK.

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The more you know... that's insane! That's one postal code for every group of ~40 people in the UK.

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@SStacey wrote:

But the problem I'm having is there are 2 digit and 3 digit initial sections for postcodes so the postcode 'S40' is picked up in 'S4' workflow - different regions entirely and different ASM contact owner.

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It sounds like you may have tried this already – in this particular case, have you tested:
'Postal code starts with any of S4 AND Postal code doesn't contain any of S40'?

If so, what happened? Can you share a screenshot / export of your workflow?

Best regards!

[SStacey]

Hello,

Thank you for this, unfortunately, it hasn't worked - I did think this could be an option but was hoping for something that wouldn't incur significant work but I have gone ahead and tested it. In this instance, I'm looking at 'Sheffield' Postal codes which are: S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S7, S8, S9, S10, S11, S12, S13, S14, S17, S19, S20, S30, S35, S69, S94, S96, S97, S98 & S99 - I've gone through and searched and found postal codes of other regions that contain these and set these as 'doesn't contain any of...' - I've found a contact who meets the criteria - complete postal code is 'S40 2TZ' - as this is in the 'doesn't contain any of' I expect this wouldn't. Please see the screenshots. .