Ensuring the integrity of your data can be a never-ending battle, however there is a feature available in Salesforce that can help alleviate a small part of it. By implementing standardized state & country picklists, you can eliminate different variations of those values & ensure the data is clean. This can also help your reps save valuable time, by giving them the drop-down options to pick the correct values. When these fields are left as free text – you can end up with several variations of the same value – just think of the United States for example: “US”, “U.S.A.”, “United States of America”, and so on.

State and country picklists are available in the shipping, billing, mailing, and “other” address fields in the account, campaign members, contact, contract, lead, order, person accounts, quotes, and service contracts standard objects. The picklists are also available for managing users and companies in Setup. To use the picklists, first choose the country and then choose from the options that automatically populate the state or province picklist.

You can use the state and country picklists in most places that state and country fields are available in Salesforce, including:

· Record edit and detail pages

· List views, reports, and dashboards

· Filters, functions, rules, and assignments

· State and country picklists can also be searched, and they’re supported in Translation Workbench.

State and Country Picklist Limitations

· State and country picklists include 239 countries by default. They also include the states and provinces of the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Ireland, Italy, and Mexico. State and country picklists that contain more than 1,000 states or countries can cause degraded performance.

To implement this feature, there are a few steps that you will need to take to execute this field change:

· Configure the values you want to use

o First you will want to configure the values you want available to your users, you can always start with the default list (as we mentioned above). However, there may be specific countries you do business in that you want to ensure are included.

· Scan Your Org’s data

o Before switching from text-based state and country fields to standardized state and country picklists, scan your org to see how the change affects it. This discovery process shows you where and how state and country data appears in your org. The process also shows where this data is used in customizations, such as list views and reports.

· Convert existing data & values

o Next you will select specific text values and choose which standard values you want them mapped to. For example, you can select all occurrences of “USA” and change them to “United States.”

· Activate picklists for your Users

o Once all previous steps are completed, you can enable state and country picklists, the picklists are immediately available to users. However, it can take some time for Salesforce to populate the ISO code fields on existing records.

There are some examples of how this feature might not be the right fit for your Org, such as:

· It’s a time-intensive feature to convert to unless your Salesforce org is quite small.

· It requires a lot of maintenance around any integrated systems that use that data. The more integrations you have, the more complex that maintenance becomes.

· It doesn’t work with custom objects. If your organization relies on any custom objects for address data, state and country picklists can’t be used with them.

· In general, the larger your organization and the larger your Salesforce org, the more intensive the process.