How Do You Use Number of Employees Field? | Community
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A
Anonymous
September 5, 2014
Question

How Do You Use Number of Employees Field?

  • September 5, 2014
  • 6 replies
  • 5127 views
Im in a snag and want to see how others approach this. Marketo's 'Num of Employees' field requires a finite number with no text or characters. So you cant have a range like 0-50 employees or even 1000+. Most people (myself included) do not know the exact number of employees at their company and most forms have a range to choose from. Seeing as you cannot change the Marketo default field type to accomodate this, what are my options? Im not able to capture employee size on imports or forms due to this limitation. 

Are you using the default Num of Employees field? If so, how?
What are the alternatives if you are not?

I want to capture companny size but there is a slim chance this can be done with the current setup. *I cannot believe it is configured like this honestly

Thanks
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6 replies

Steven_Vanderb3
Adobe Employee
Steven_Vanderb3Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
September 5, 2014
That is a limitation of how databases store their data.  The Num of Employee expects an input of an integer (whole number) so ranges will not work.  An alternative you can use on forms is to store just the value of the higher end of the range.  Here's a screenshot of an example from the form editor:



The visitor to your form would see 1-9, 10-99, 100-999, etc in their dropdown box and 9, 99, 999 would be stored in Marketo.

If you are trying to import leads with this information you will probably want to do some magic in Excel to standardize that value to a format the Marketo field is expecting before the import.
A
Anonymous
September 5, 2014
Ok but I want to maintain actual data so if someone selects 0-50 employees, I dont want our database to state they have 50. That would get us into a lot of bad data which is never good. 

Are users creating a custom field that would make more sense than the Marketo default that forces an exact value which is likely not to be obtained? 
A
Anonymous
January 12, 2015
Christina, were you able to get this resloved? I am facing the same issue where Marketo seems to recognize only the first value of a selected range (i.e. lead selects "500-999" and it posts as 500.  
A
Anonymous
January 12, 2015
No. Id have to create a custom field and re-map everything. So for now, Im using Netprospex to find the center point since Marketo doesnt allow us to capture the buckets (they really need to fix this since this is how we are all asking for this data!). Good luck!
A
Anonymous
March 27, 2016

Christina

Any update on resolving this issue? I am looking to create a custom field for number of years work experience using a range of years in each value.

Thanks

Mark

Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
March 27, 2016

Hi Mark,

In fact, this issue cannot be resolved with the Number of Employees standard field. Number of employees is an integer, so you can only store a number in it.

If you want to work with buckets, you will have to use a custom field of type string. If you do so, you will be able to store your buckets.

-Greg

Casey_Grimes2
Casey_Grimes2
Level 10
March 28, 2016

It's a messy question with no easy answer, unfortunately—I ran into this exact same issue when using BrightTALK since they define number of employees in ranges, so I wound up just hiding the standard Num of Employees field in both Marketo and Salesforce, using that to store definite numbers when they were available (along with a workflow to fill a range picklist) and just put the picklist in all public/sales-facing areas.

I actually considered the solution @Steven Vanderberg​ describes but was worried that bus factor would  mean future employees would think we meant that those companies literally had 9 employees. :/

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