monday.com CRM overview
At its core, monday.com is an online work collaboration suite focusing on project management. Without diving too deeply into the tenants of project management, monday.com’s interface revolves around task boards with linked data. These boards are highly customizable and sharable and provide various view modes that users can modify to fit individual workflow needs. Since the data is linked, team members across departments and the entire business can easily monitor task and project progress while fostering a cross-functional, collaborative work environment.
In short, for medium and large teams that work on complex projects and digital products, monday.com is a powerful work management platform that boosts productivity, improves collaboration, and keeps everyone on the same page.
While monday.com is a great work platform, its focus on project management, task tracking, and digital workflows makes it less than ideal for managing customer relationships and sales pipelines. Although it offers a sales CRM product, the interface is still built on the same taskboards that populate the rest of the monday.com product suite.
The bottom line is that monday.com wasn’t designed with CRM functionality in mind and only offers basic ad hoc features for managing customer relationships. In a sense, monday.com’s task boards are akin to complex spreadsheets. If you need truly valuable CRM features from monday.com, the customizations often require additional resources from dedicated development teams.
What to look for in monday.com alternatives?
Whether it’s a small business with a few employees or a large enterprise with thousands of customers, keep a few commonalities in mind when looking at CRM solutions. Powerful features, user-friendliness, and a fair price point are all given, but there’s more to consider.
Enhanced customer clarity
At its core, a great customer relationship management tool should be a business’s single source of truth for every piece of customer data it holds. This goes much further than a robust contact database full of names, email addresses, and phone numbers. For example, consider how the following information can help your business provide excellent customer experiences:
By understanding your customer’s buying habits, you can reach them at exactly the right times when they’re most likely to buy, exceeding their expectations
When you have easy access to your customer’s previous support interactions, you know what their specific pain points are and how to mitigate them
With personalized information customer information, every point of communication is an amicable interaction, not a faceless transaction
With an unimpeded view and a full understanding of your customers at your fingertips, you can create personalized marketing campaigns and reach them in ways that delight them and foster improved brand loyalty.
Improved lead qualification
While the thought of capturing and converting every lead that passes through your funnel sounds wonderful, it’s certainly not realistic. Like all business relationships, some are good for your business, and others aren’t. This is why lead qualification is a cornerstone of a great CRM platform.
Without robust lead management tools, sales teams can waste a tremendous amount of time chasing leads who aren’t good matches. Even with an excellent marketing department, qualifying the leads who land on the salespeople’s desks is still a challenge.
A great CRM can help your sales teams set aside the cool leads and focus on the warm ones to maximize their productivity and boost your bottom line. It all goes back to data — the more information you have about your customers, the better you can determine what works and on whom. The more data you collect with your CRM, the better you can qualify future leads and refine your marketing efforts.
Improved business productivity
With a CRM as your business’s single source of truth, it’s not just the sales and marketing teams that benefit. With your company’s data in a centralized platform, your entire workforce knows exactly where to find everything they need, especially if you choose a CRM focused on speed, simplicity, and ease of use.
In short, with an easy-to-use, unified platform for your sales, marketing, and customer data, you boost your entire team’s productivity and low business costs across the board. Information moves frictionlessly from marketing to sales to customer service, and operations have clarity across the entire chain.
Why is Insightly the best monday.com alternative?
With an overview of monday.com’s capabilities contrasted with the core tenets of a great CRM solution, you can start to see how monday.com probably isn’t the greatest option for helping your business provide the best possible customer experience.
Insightly takes a different approach. Rather than putting project management front and center, Insightly created a solution that builds a bridge between your business and its number one asset — your customers. Here’s how:
Intuitive interface and ease of use
There’s no denying that monday.com is packed with features. But if your teams spend most of their time setting up a platform, customizing workflows, and developing relevant task boards, there’s not much time left to take care of your customers. The problem is significant enough that poor user adoption is one of the biggest reasons CRM implementations fail.
This is exactly why Insightly is built from the ground up with simplicity in mind. Not only is the Insightly platform simple to use, with easy-to-understand dashboards and an elegant interface, but the setup is also a breeze. Quick installation and simple workflows mean your business hits the ground running with powerful CRM features.
With Insightly’s intuitive interface, your salespeople can quickly move through and interact with dashboards for recent activities, opportunities, projects and leads. While all the information is clear and present, Insightly still has the power to customize each dashboard right from the interface. No coding or developers are required.
Powerful features without the cost
A downside to collecting valuable customer information is maintaining the data that goes into your CRM. Updating customer records, sending follow-up emails and routing leads from marketing to sales — all of these are repetitive but necessary tasks that take up valuable time. Most good CRM solutions include powerful features to handle these tasks automatically. But that level of automation often doesn’t come cheap.
Fortunately, Insightly comes with high-quality automation built in so that you can streamline every one of your small business’ manual tasks. You’ll have access to the same powerful capabilities as big businesses, so your team can spend their valuable time serving customers, creating marketing strategies or working on other high-value tasks.
Consider this: Powerful CRM tools let you track every customer interaction and detail. Take your closest friends, for example, and think about the different details you know about them. Now imagine that you have a tool that helps you build the same kind of profile for each of your customers. That’s what a CRM provides.
The best part is that, since Insightly is built with small- and mid-sized businesses in mind, the extra productivity you gain isn’t cost-prohibitive. With Insightly’s affordable Plus plan, you get the same enterprise power without the enterprise price. When you see the difference a CRM makes, Insightly can grow right alongside your business.
Made for small- and mid-sized business
If you’re a sole proprietor or a business owner with only a few employees, perhaps you’re thinking that in these early stages, a powerful CRM is overkill. But if you’re serving customers, think about your impact in terms of how many customers you have.
If you have 10, 20, or 30 customers who rely on your products or services, how well can you serve each of them? If your business finds a sudden burst of success and those numbers triple, can you maintain the same level of customer care for 50 or 100 people?
Implementing a powerful CRM in the early stages of your business is one of the best strategies for maintaining excellent customer satisfaction as your business grows. Not only do you maintain the same great experience your early customers have come to expect, but you enable your business to scale those experiences exponentially to more and more customers.
Your business might be small now, but incorporating Insightly’s enterprise-level tools provides you with the data and insights to make the best decisions to grow your business.
Highly customizable with tons of integrations
As your business grows, you’ll eventually need access to more tools with more capabilities. While a CRM is invaluable to any size business, you’ll need additional tools to bolster your accounting, marketing, project management and other business operations.
While a single solution that covers every aspect of your business doesn’t exist yet, Insightly provides the next best thing: best-in-class integrations. When your business grows to the point that you need additional tools and platforms, Insightly’s countless integrations mean your valuable customer data is instantly available with your other tools. You’ll have all your business information everywhere, always.
monday.com alternatives available in the market
Whether you’re thinking of starting a business, nurturing a new venture or already established one, you’ll need a tool to manage your customers to stay competitive. The CRM market is steadily growing, so take the time to find a solution that fits your business.
Along with monday.com, here are a few leading CRM solutions you might want to consider:
- Salesforce: As one of the biggest CRMs on the market, Salesforce has a commanding lead in terms of features, but they come at a cost. Since Salesforce aims at larger enterprise businesses, its CRM can be extremely cost-prohibitive for smaller businesses.
- HubSpot: This excellent all-in-one platform is for businesses that need marketing, sales, and customer support solutions. However, HubSpot is often difficult to customize for businesses that don’t follow its prescribed processes.
- Zoho CRM: This platform provides a wealth of powerful features, including an AI-reporting engine and integration with more than 30 other Zoho apps. But the entire Zoho suite is powerful, cumbersome, and difficult to learn and manage for small- and mid-sized businesses.
- Nutshell: While this tool’s robust set of features rivals leading CRMs in terms of functionality and reporting, Nutshell’s customization options are limited. Since it aims at sole proprietors, the tool doesn’t offer much room for business growth.
Whether you choose Insightly or one of the above solutions, you’ll ultimately want a tool that helps you catalog and track your client interactions and provide you with the necessary insights to improve customer satisfaction and experiences. When you find the right CRM that works for your business, the difference is immeasurable.
Why over 25,000 teams choose Insightly
Now that you’re aware of the immense benefits a CRM tool provides companies of all sizes, it’s a good idea to prioritize finding the one that meets your business needs. The quicker you capitalize on a CRM’s benefits, the faster you’ll grow and the better you’ll stand up to the competition.
In terms of flexibility, affordability, customization, and sheer simplicity, Insightly is positioned to help your small- or medium-sized business command the lead in your industry and grow your business into a powerhouse.
If you want a complete demonstration of how Insightly can support your business, contact us for a personalized demo. If you prefer to jump right in and see the difference Insightly can make for your business, get started with a fully-featured free trial today.