Demand Tools - MATCH module - is there a way to do a contains match comparison type?

[stevecottrell]

Hi All,

I have a data file of company names which I would like to match back to our current Salesforce account records using a loose 'CONTAINS' comparison type. Does anyone know how this can be achieved?

For example:
Match file has a company as: Economist
I have accounts in Salesforce with: The Economist Group, Economist Impact, The Economist Intelligence Unit
If I could do a match of: Company > Account Name (contains) this would pick up all the above accounts in Salesforce.

I have been looking at Regular Expression as the comparison type but it doesn't seem to be working as intended and the content on the DT community is pretty light on this at the moment...

Here is what I'm using: .*[value].*

Thanks!

[AnthonyValidity · Accepted solution]

Hi @stevecottrell ,

I did some testing and I think this would work for you.  DemandTools 5.x does not have a way to match a cell to a field that "contains" a word/string.

We can, however, create a pipeline delimited list of every account name in your file and add it to the regex Comparison Type.

The formula would look something like this but probably much longer:

\b(Interface|Tangram|Environmental|Tangram|Aquathim|Superior|Bug4573|Platinum|Secure|Telus|Unknown|Saluda River)\b

You can easily create a pipeline delimited list in an excel file by using TEXTJOIN.  Let me know if you need more details on how to do that.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

[stevecottrell]

Thanks for replying to this @AnthonyValidity 

This is a great suggestion, it worked when I tried it and I think will work for my specific use case going forward too. A few follow up questions:

1. Do you know what the character limit is for a pipeline delimited list?
2. I checked the alpha clean option for this match but can you think of any way to clean up the accounts even further via the Regular expression (like what we do when using cleaned account name as a comparison type)?
3. Do you know if a simple CONTAINS comparison type is on the Demand Tools product roadmap at all?

[AnthonyValidity]

Hi @stevecottrell,

I'm so happy to hear that it worked!

1. Do you know what the character limit is for a pipeline delimited list?
   1. I don't have the exact number but tested 50k characters and it worked.
2. I checked the alpha clean option for this match but can you think of any way to clean up the accounts even further via the Regular expression (like what we do when using cleaned account name as a comparison type)?
   1. Using the RegEx constructed above will at like a prefix and suffix "cleaner" like Cleaned Account Name.  The replace occur but then again we're only searching for the keywords that you provide anyway.  What matters is what you have in your excel file since for that paticular field that is the only thing we're attempting to find.  You could use fuzzy matching to see if the items sound the same as well.
   2. I think you would want to run multiple match steps - some including the RegEx and some using other comparison types.
3. Do you know if a simple CONTAINS comparison type is on the Demand Tools product roadmap at all?
   1. This is not on the roadmap - yet!  Please add it as a feature request. You can find instructions on how to vote on or add a new feature request by reviewing this article:
   2. https://knowledge.validity.com/s/articles/Requesting-a-Feature-in-DemandTools-V-Release?language=en_...

Hope this helps!

[stevecottrell]

Thanks for the additional responses @AnthonyValidity. I have also submitted the feature request idea.