The marketing director at Northern Trail Outfitters has requested that the budget field is populated in order for the Lead Status field to be marked as qualified. What tool should the administrator…

Lead Conversion is the process of converting a lead into an account, contact, and opportunity - it is not a declarative tool for enforcing field-level conditions on a record.

Marking a field as required on the page layout or field settings makes it unconditionally mandatory on every save, not conditionally required based on another field's value.

Workflow Rules can update field values automatically but cannot block a save or enforce that a specific field must be populated before another field can be set to a given value.

A validation rule uses a formula expression to block record saves when defined conditions are not met. In this scenario, a rule can be written to check if Lead Status equals 'Qualified' and the Budget field is blank, preventing the save and displaying an error message. This enforces the conditional requirement without making Budget universally required on all lead records.