How To Bulk-Standardize Country Fields in HubSpot

In HubSpot, standardized address data is critical for reporting, segmentation, and regionally focused decision-making.

Having a number of different variations of a country name, such as U.S., USA, United States of America, or America, can wreak havoc in your data and your operations. There are many possible scenarios that can occur when you don't standardize countries in your CRM, including impacts to teams across your company, such as sales, marketing, finance, and executive teams. Any process that happens within your company based on the location of a customer will be impacted by unstandardized country fields.

These are all unnecessary problems that can happen to any business using a CRM with non-standardized country fields.

Let’s explore some of the unnecessary business problems that unstandardized country data can lead to.

The Business Impact of Inconsistent Country Fields

A CRM filled with inconsistent country fields makes the jobs of your sales teams, marketers, and customer service reps harder. Here are some of the ways that such inconsistencies impact your business operations:

• The sales team can have issues with accurately assigning leads and accounts by country or regions, causing worse experiences for leads.
• Similarly, regionally-based support teams may have tickets fall through the cracks, resulting in slower response times. 
• Marketing teams will have problems segmenting customers for regionally focused campaigns, resulting in wasted marketing budgets.
• Executives may make the wrong decisions based on inaccurate reporting.
• Offers and personalized content based on a user’s location can cause poor and confusing user experiences.
• With global business comes the need for compliance with international regulations, and unstandardized country data can cause records to be overlooked, leading to compliance risks.
• Key HubSpot CRM processes such as quoting and invoicing utilize country data. With standardized and accurate data, you can end up with inaccurate documentation.

Standardized country data is critical for smooth business operations. There are some steps you can take in HubSpot to achieve it. Let’s take a look.

How to Standardize Country Fields in HubSpot

HubSpot allows free-form text entry in country fields. This means your team can enter "USA," "U.S.A.," "United States," or “America” for the same country. The different variations can quickly proliferate in your system, leading to a data integrity crisis. HubSpot does offer a way to standardize your country fields manually. Here’s how:

• Step 1: Perform a manual audit. Your first step is to manually sift through your records, identifying all the variations of country names.
• Step 2: Select companies or contacts to update. Log into your HubSpot CRM, go to the "Contacts" menu, and select either "Contacts" or “Companies."
• Step 3: Select the boxes next to the companies or contacts you want to update. Your CRM will display a list of companies or contacts. Use the filters to find the ones you need quickly. Then, check the boxes next to those you wish to update.
• Step 4: Click “Edit” and then select "Country/Region." After selecting the records to update, click edit, and then select the drop-down menu to find "Country/Region." 
• Step 5: Type in the new country format to standardize it. Once here, type in the country name or abbreviation you want to use for these records.

You might think, "Hey, can't I just automate this with a HubSpot workflow?" The answer, unfortunately, is no. HubSpot Workflows are powerful, but they have limits, especially for the nuanced task of country standardization.

Setting up a workflow to catch and correct every variation of "United States" is like trying to herd cats. It's possible that you will catch them all, but it’s far more likely that some will elude your grasp.

Given the sheer number of possible variations for any country ("United Kingdom," "UK," "U.K.," and "Britain"), your workflow could become a complex web of "if/then" conditions that are more confusing than helpful. So the manual option is really the only option within HubSpot. But unfortunately, the more manual the process, the higher the chance of human error.

There is another way, though.

How Insycle Automates Country Standardization in HubSpot

If the manual approach and HubSpot Workflows feels like fighting a losing battle with country standardization, it's time to make a change—with Insycle.

Insycle makes country standardization simple and automatic. No more manual updates, no more complex workflows. Just clean, consistent country data at your fingertips.

Insycle features numerous templates to standardize country names. One of these functions is the Standardize Country Name to Code2 template, which standardizes any country name to the international Code2 abbreviation standard.

Here’s how the changes would look using this template:

With the template, you can update and standardize your countries in bulk. You can also automate the template to run on a set schedule, as in the image below.

And there’s more. With Insycle Recipes, you can bundle templates together to automate multiple steps in bulk. These Recipes can be set on a schedule or triggered through HubSpot Workflows.

Insycle speeds up country standardization and eliminates the need for human intervention. You can bulk-standardize existing data, automate ongoing standardization, and ensure your country data is always clean and consistent.

Automate Country Standardization in HubSpot With Insycle

Manually standardizing country fields in HubSpot is tedious, time-consuming, and fraught with the peril of human error.

Insycle is the high-speed internet of data standardization, completing processes that would otherwise take weeks in minutes. Automating the standardization of country fields with Insycle saves you from manual corrections and ensures your data integrity is rock-solid.

This means your reporting is accurate, your segmentation is effective, your location-based marketing campaigns hit their mark, and your user experience is as smooth as a well-aged whiskey.

But the cherry on top is Insycle's ability to schedule these clean-ups automatically or integrate them into your HubSpot Workflows. It's like having a data quality butler at your beck and call, ensuring your CRM system remains in tip-top shape without having to lift a finger.

If you're ready to automate HubSpot country field standardization, we invite you to explore Insycle and learn how it can bring your data management to the 21st century.