[SalesForce] Why do some leads have a ‘lead source’ value which is not in the picklist

I just inherited a salesforce account from a previous owner, which is integrated with a number of custom forms and services. I'm not clear on all of the details to be honest, but I think this is a reasonably straight forward question.

I have a (custom?) field on leads called "Lead Source" with values like "conference," "website," "existing customer," etc. Occasionally I get a lead with this field populated by the value "Website":

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The problem is that "Website" is not in the Picklist Values. Here is a screenshot of the picklist values, and you can see, it does not contain the value "Website":

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To make matters even stranger, I can edit these leads and see a picklist with "Website" in the allowed values list:

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So my question is, what could possibly be creating these leads? And, whatever is creating these leads, how is it able to assign a value which is not in the picklist?

Best Answer

Lead Source is a standard picklist field. It contains values that describe where a lead was obtained from in a general manner, such as from the web, from an email, etc. This list is customizable by administrators.

However, Salesforce allows you to capture any value you want in some cases. For example, a Web to Lead form on a website can insert any value it likes, so long as it doesn't exceed the maximum value length, even if the value doesn't exist in the picklist.

Also, when performing imports from other systems, either through a CSV file, a third-party lead service, or API-based software, such as the Data Loader or Relation Junction, they can generally inject any value they would like without regards to your available options.

It's also possible to delete a value from the list without altering existing values, so the value could have been legitimate in the past, but is now defunct. You can always use the Replace function on the field to mass replace all records that contain a certain value (e.g. Website), with another, currently legal value.

Note that once the lead has been edited to a legal value, you won't be able to use the UI to set it back to the invalid value, as it will disappear from the list.

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