More and more we’re building workarounds to require associations & labels. The utility of both is hampered by the inability to require their existence on deals (for example, but other types of pipelines we have the same needs such as tickets & some of our custom objects that have pipelines).
Here are two use cases and the messy workarounds:
- We want to require that a contact with a label exists to be in a specific stage (e.g. require at least one contact with the “Champion” label to be in the “Consideration” stage. Our solution to this was a custom boolean field “Has Contact Champion” and a workflow that sets the value based on whether a contact is associated. We then require that this field be set, but we restrict the ability to set the field so our reps can’t move a deal unless a champion is associated. It works fine but it is at it’s core a cludgy workaround that is prone to breaking if we add/change stages or add/change labels.
- We wan to require that a company is associated with a deal - similar solution. We could use a calculated field here, but then we couldn’t use access permissions to a field as a mechanism to prevent moving a deal to a stage.
The ability to require a contact & a company be associated with a deal feels like functionality that is missing and should exist. No CRM customer ever has sold a deal that didn’t have a customer or a contact, and no B2B company in history has ever sold without a company and a contact. This is one of those features that has me shaking my head.
The ability to require a custom object association or to require an association label feel less like gaps than temporary gaps since the products themselves are both new, but eventually it will feel like a big gap.
Also, association labels on custom objects would be awfully nice also (for contacts & companies) and at least at our company, every one of our 4 custom objects would benefit from being able to flag associations.
2 cents. Hope y’all implement these 
