There have been some really interesting best practice ideas emerging from customer and partner blogs. This week Scott Hemmeter wrote about how you could use dependent picklists to create dynamically required picklists.  

The example he used was a field to capture reason lost, a field that often appears on the opportunity page layout. Are you loosing deals based upon company viability, features, price, lack of references? This is valuable information. The challenge that most companies face is that they can’t make it a required field because the rep won’t know the reason for the loss until it’s closed. On the flip side they can’t ensure that it’s filled out consistently without it being a required.

His simple solution makes the reason for a loss required only when the stage is equal to closed lost. To learn how it’s done, visit Perspectives on Salesforce. Scott great work!