Get lead assignment to ignore business name prefix

Question

Essentially, we have business records coming in with company names, but we'd like the lead assignment rules to ignore prefixes such as "The" or "A", etc. Formula fields have been tried, but it seems the assignment fires before the formula calculation.

What would be the best way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

You could use before trigger on Lead object, and replace whatever prefix is to be ignored. As per the salesforce documentation, before trigger fire before assignment rules, so you should be good.

Sample Code

trigger LeadTrg on Lead (before Insert) {
   for (Lead ld: trigger.new)
   {
       if (ld.Company.contains(<ignored string>)
            ld.Company = ld.Company.replace(<ignored string>, '');
   }
}

Above code is create on-the-fly and not tested.