Yeah, I used to have Close Date set up as a required field, but requiring that every rep edit that for every deal was a source of ongoing complaints as yet another repetitive data-entry step…
As others in this thread have stated, what would be ideal would be having the ability to change the default value… e.g., My teams’ typical sales take 90+ days to close, so just being able to auto-set the default “90 days after deal creation” would be a better default for the majority of my team… While other companies of course have their own default time-line needs.
So “make the close date a required field” is not the solution I was hoping for on this thread.
However, the workflow-automation listed by @paulschmidt sounds like a great compromise…
RE: “Set the close date to be X days out using deal-based workflows.”
A workflow like that could theoretically be set up to auto-adjust the close-date value right after a deal is created, so the rep creating the deal wouldn’t need to worry about setting or changing the initial value themselves…
I mean, that’d be great if that “Set the close date to be X days out” field can be used in a workflow that updates existing deals vs. only being available for deals that are auto-generated by a workflow in the first place. I’ll have to dig into the workflow settings to see if that’s actually possible (the screenshot above is showing a workflow that’s creating a deal, I think, rather than updating existing deals)…
If that option is only available for workflow-created deals rather than existing deals, then it’s not so useful for reps that are focused on manually-created deals.
However, for situations were it was applicable, then additional cool stuff could be done in conjunction with this -- e.g., with branching logic, this could conceivably be customized per-rep or team, if different people in an organization are working on different close-date timelines.