Jessica Andrews
VP Marketing
Choosing the best CRM for your needs can be overwhelming with so many things to consider. If you’re evaluating monday sales CRM for your team, we have all the info you need to make a decision.
The platform has some strengths and weaknesses that you should be aware of before moving forward with it as your CRM.
So, is monday sales CRM the right CRM for your business? Let's take a look.
What is monday.com and the monday sales CRM?
Founded in 2012, monday.com is a work management platform designed to help organizations increase efficiency by tracking workflows and projects. They specialize in project management and team collaboration.
Recently, they realized that there's a bit of crossover between project management and CRMs, so they began offering templates that adapt their platform into a light CRM.
monday sales CRM basically works on top of their existing work operating system. So, companies can build a CRM using the platform's templates and core features. In short, monday.com is best known as a project management tool, but it also has some CRM capabilities.
Questions to ask before moving forward with monday sales CRM
At this point, you've probably realized something. monday.com's CRM functions aren't their bread and butter. Instead, CRM is more of an add-on to their existing tools. Still, there’s a chance it might be the right choice for your company.
We have a few questions to help guide your decision.
1. How is your team structured?
Look at your current organization. Is your team primarily comprised of project managers with fewer client-facing roles? If so, monday.com might be a good fit because you can layer in some light CRM capabilities on top of a more robust project management tool.
But if your team is more of a mix between client-facing and project management roles, you may find that monday.com's CRM capabilities aren't powerful enough to manage your customer relationships adequately.
Start by getting a good overview of your team and which tools and functionalities those teams need. If your team is primarily pre-sales or customer management — say a mix of sales, partnerships, or account management — then you might want a more customer-centric CRM.
2. How personalized do you need your CRM to be?
monday sales CRM positions itself as a “customizable CRM.” If you really need some customizability in your CRM and you haven't found a cost-effective option, monday.com might be a good option for you.
Keep in mind, though, that you and your team need to be prepared to invest significant time in building your dream solution. While monday.com provides live chat support for one-off questions, dedicated support is only reserved for enterprise customers.
In other words, you might be able to build a personalized solution with monday.com, but be aware that those custom features will require a lot of time and expertise — which likely won’t be offered to small business customers by monday.com.
3. How tech-savvy is your team?
The more you customize monday sales CRM, the less intuitive it might become. As a result, working inside the CRM can become confusing without significant technological resources backing you.
Making your CRM work for your needs might result in a hard-to-use platform with a steep learning curve, potentially decreasing your team's usage and adoption.
4. Where does your sales team work on a day-to-day basis?
More specifically, does your sales team work in Google Workspace? monday.com does offer a Google Workspace email integration. But monday sales CRM doesn’t offer a Chrome extension, which means all the enhancements like email templates and activity logs can only be used inside monday.com’s platform.
This means that to use any of the features monday.com provides, you must work within monday sales CRM rather than using your own Gmail account. If your team doesn't work inside Google Workspace (or any other productivity suites), this might be fine, but for many companies, this lack of a full integration is a dealbreaker.
5. How much admin work is your team willing to do?
monday sales CRM can store a lot of information, but it requires every detail about your contacts, companies and opportunities to be added manually. Given that many sales reps say they hate admin work, it could lead to low adoption or incomplete information, defeating the purpose of investing in a CRM.
This may not be an issue for your sales team, or you might have a dedicated administrative team. In that case, the manual entry may not be a concern. But it’s an important consideration before moving forward with the platform.
Final verdict: Is monday.com right for you?
Bottom line, monday.com’s speciality is project management, while their CRM is a secondary add-on function. If your team primarily consists of project and task managers, monday.com might be the one.
But if you need a CRM that offers all the intuitive customer and sales-centric functions you expect from a CRM, you might want to go with an actual CRM, like Copper.
Copper makes your life easier by eliminating manual data entry. It automatically suggests recent contacts you've been emailing to be added to your CRM contact list so you don't lose track of anyone. It also automatically pulls in contact details like phone numbers, email addresses and social media accounts, so you don't have to enter it all by hand.
Plus, Copper takes Google Workspace integration to the next level. You're able to surface Copper alongside your emails and calendar invites, use email templates, access shared documents, and see reminders and tasks all within Gmail and Google Calendar.
Ultimately, you may not need to choose between monday.com and a true CRM. Copper CRM integrates with monday.com, allowing you to handle all pre-sales and customer-facing activity within Copper, then sync details to monday.com for post-purchase projects. Each team has access to the tool they prefer, leading to higher adoption.
