To avoid lost deals due to negotiating with non-decision makers, requiring sales reps to identify and designate a contact as the decision maker on each opportunity ensures that the appropriate stakeholders are involved. This approach enforces the validation of the decision maker role, which can help prevent deals from stalling or being lost due to lack of authority on the contact's part. Salesforce allows configuration of required fields or processes to make sure critical information is captured before advancing stages, helping align the sales process with effective decision-making structures.
Refer to Salesforce's Opportunity Contact Roles documentation for further insights on managing contacts in opportunities.

Setting up Account Teams with defaults for each sales rep is the best solution to meet the requirement of ensuring that the assigned sales ops specialist and sales engineer have access to the correct Accounts. An Account Team is a group of users who work together on an Account, such as sales reps, sales engineers, managers, etc. Each Account Team member has a role and a level of access to the Account and its related records, such as Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, etc. By setting up Account Teams with defaults for each sales rep, the admin can automatically add the sales ops specialist and the sales engineer to the Account Team whenever a sales rep creates or owns an Account. This way, the sales ops specialist and the sales engineer can view and edit the Account and its related Contacts.

To align Salesforce with a fiscal year that starts in February and ends in January, updating the Company settings is the correct solution. Here's why:
Fiscal Year Configuration: In Salesforce, the fiscal year settings are configured at the company level. By setting a custom fiscal year start date, Universal Containers can ensure that all reporting and performance metrics align with their specific fiscal calendar.
Salesforce Support for Custom Fiscal Years: Salesforce allows organizations to configure both standard and custom fiscal years under Company Settings, ensuring that financial data and sales metrics reflect the correct fiscal periods.
Reference:
In summary, updating the Company settings (Option C) is the recommended approach to support the SVP of sales in measuring team performance based on Universal Containers' custom fiscal year.

For gathering feedback efficiently from a large group of users (250 employees), sending a survey is the recommended approach. Here's why:
Scalability and Efficiency: A survey can quickly reach all employees and provide a structured way to collect a wide range of input without needing to organize a large-scale meeting. Surveys can include various question types to capture qualitative and quantitative data, making it easier to analyze responses.
Encouraging Participation: Surveys allow employees to provide feedback at their convenience and tend to be less intrusive than group meetings, which may be challenging to coordinate for a large number of users.
Data Analysis and Reporting: Using a survey tool enables the consultant to analyze and categorize responses, identifying trends or common themes in the feedback. This helps in prioritizing changes based on the collective input.
Reference:
In summary, sending a survey (Option B) is the most practical and efficient approach to gathering input from a large group of employees, allowing the consultant to collect comprehensive feedback that can inform strategies for improving Sales Cloud adoption.