Do you have Lead records appearing in Salesforce with [[unknown]] in the company field? Isn’t Pardot (Account Engagement) meant to work that out for you?
Conversion rates plummet with the more fields you include on lead capture forms. It could be a smart decision to keep only the essential fields: first name, last name, and email address. A little experimentation will give you the answers to what works for your specific audience.
Email address: The golden key. You can derive a lot of information from an email address. The email domain (e.g. @salesforceben.com) tells you which company this prospect belongs to. So, marketers leave off company from the form to reduce the fields to fill out.
Luckily, as a Pardot (Account Engagement) user, you have the luxury of built-in data scraping capabilities that enrich prospect record data on your behalf. There are three fields that support each other when trying to figure out where a prospect works:
- Company
- Website
Without a value in the company field, the Salesforce Lead conversion process will be cumbersome; the company field assists users by finding matching existing Accounts to associate the converted Lead to. Without the field populated, there will be extra clicks for users, or worse – duplicate Account records created.
Before we move on, there are two Salesforce features I’d like to highlight on the Lead to Contact/Account relationship:
Why Do You See Company [[unknown]]?
When a prospect is created in Pardot (Account Engagement) and has no value in the company field, Pardot will display the company’s website in the company field. Pardot has scraped this from the domain of the prospect’s email address.
Great, so we have something to go on, then? Wait – if the company field has been automatically populated with a website URL in Pardot (Account Engagement) when it syncs to Salesforce, this URL won’t be picked up on the Lead record.
Essentially, the Lead record company field remains blank – however, instead of showing a blank company, the Salesforce-Pardot Connector populates this field with [[unknown]]:
Fix [[Unknown]] Using Data Import
Want to avoid company [[unknown]]? Let’s be honest, it looks spammy. If you were a sales rep, would you like to “work” that Lead?
With a periodic data import, you can improve the overall quality of Lead data in Salesforce.
- Create a Lead report in Salesforce, with the minimum columns: Company, Website, Lead ID. Filter for “company | equals | [[unknown]]” and “converted | equals | false”.
- Export the report into Excel/CSV.
- Use the “split to text” function to remove the ‘www.’ and ‘.com’ (and any additional suffixes).
- Reimport the file, using ‘Lead ID’ as the match criteria.
How frequently company [[unknown]] records crop up will vary from one organization to the next. While this isn’t the most ideal solution, at least you have a way to identify and clean up these mystery records. Surely, it’s a good trade-off from asking prospects to fill out many form fields? That’s for you to decide 😁