A snag that may often come up as business needs change is that your realize that you really care about data you were never collecting before, and now to meet the needs of a new metric, you need to ensure that before you move forward to close deals, you have the data you need populated throughout all the related objects.

In our case, we had a workflow that fired off a variable that was missing on every Account. Every one, several thousand. Some may be active, others aren't, and there is no way to determine based on the information currently captured by the Account or Contact to auto-populate this field...it required user input and classification.

So how can I ensure that the Accounts are properly updated, that only active Accounts are forced to update, and still not create too much of a burden on my sales and customer success teams?

Turns out an excellent solution was a Visual Workflow to create Opportunities...and making it the only way to create Opportunities.

Why Opportunities? Well this ensures that we are only forcing users to update active accounts. Accounts won't be updated if they aren't buying, and the moment they do buy, they are forced to be updated.