The solution is simple. Example, if you need to have a company associated to every deal.
You’ll want to have a report and graphic that shows all deals, by salesperson, which do NOT have a company associated.
Create a dashboard called SALES OPERATIONS PROCESS ERRORS (trust me, you’ll have many reports that fit in to this model and this dashboard will become an easy tool to point all salespeople toward when they are offenders.
In this case, create a two object report of deals and companies (you will add to this dashboard) of all deals with a filter that looks for all deals without an associate company. Be sure to create a bar chart visual that shows the number of deals by salespeople. If you have teams and lots of salespeople, then do this by the team leader or sales manager.
The trick is to send out a couple of messages to the salespeople that show on this report - one before the report to tell everyone what you will be doing and how each deal needs a company. Then, another when you create the dashboard/report you can send to everyone along with the expectation that they associate a company to every deal, but after that stick to only sending to the offending reps and their managers. Be kind in your messages, the shame of being on the report is enough and will keep you from getting crosswise with the sales manager or exec management owners of these people.
If you do it right, lots of people will comply before you build the report. Most people want to do the right thing and want to avoid being seen as a problem. Trust in this process, it works very well.
You will always have a few offenders left. If they are top performers, work with their manager to help them fit the data. If they are poor performers, this is good evidence of more bad performance if you’re organization has been working to remove them (which any good organization should do with poor performers that also break good process and well-communicated policy).
I hope that this helps.
Jon