Monday Sales CRM review: Clear sales management without the jargon
An extremely user-friendly CRM, limited only by its email integration
Pros
- Free plan available
- Paid plans are cheaper than rivals
- Spacious and attractive interface
Cons
- Limited email integration
Monday Sales CRM (or Customer Relationship Management) software is a system to help businesses keep track of communication with clients, along with any associated documents, quotes, purchases or tasks. The benefits of this may be obvious – better organisation means greater efficiency, more effective time management and happier clients – and Monday is one of the most approachable CRMs around.
It doesn’t presume knowledge and is light on jargon. Every interaction with a contact is accessible via their profile page, and Monday makes it simple to link to and get an overview of every account, contact and deal. It also has one of the best automation interfaces we’ve seen. It’s highly scalable, and can easily be configured to suit small businesses up to large enterprises. However, by limiting email integration to only two major providers, Monday does fall short of our expectations.
Monday Sales CRM review: What do you get for the money?
Monday offers a free tier that’s suitable for microbusinesses. While there’s no dedicated sign-up path for this, if you sign up for the free trial and don’t then follow up by paying for the service, you’ll automatically be moved onto the free plan. This can be helpful for businesses concerned that they might want to reduce their CRM usage or costs in the future – it’s good to know there’s a free fallback.
Free users still get access to the default main boards for leads, deals, contacts, accounts and activities, but they can’t create extra boards. You do get to use Monday’s standard features, though, including form creation, Monday’s Workdocs collaborative note-taking and brainstorming tools, plus a selection of apps to extend the CRM’s features.
Free accounts are also limited to two users, no guests and a maximum of 100 items (rows) across all their boards, including contacts, deals, accounts and activities – although you can raise this to 200 by referring new customers to Monday.
On the other hand, Monday’s paid accounts are for businesses with three or more users, and are available on monthly plans or more cost-effective annual plans, and are very competitively priced. The Basic CRM tier costs £8.50 per user per month – which works out at £25.50 per month for a team of three – on an annual subscription, for a minimum annual cost of £306.
The Basic tier gives you unlimited pipelines, contacts and custom boards, as well as free, unlimited read-only guest viewers. You can also create templates to help handle leads, contacts and deals, and make a dashboard view for one board. However, integrations and automations, which can automatically create entries or trigger actions in response to events, are not available on this Basic tier.
The Standard tier – priced from £12 per user per month – offers more data views, as well as integrations for DocuSign forensic document tracking, duplicate data merging, Aircall cloud telephony, Zoom videoconferencing and PandaDoc document tracking. This tier also introduces quotes and invoicing – potentially replacing your standalone invoicing suite – more storage, an activity management interface that tracks your calls and meetings, management tools for your leads, deals and accounts, and support for 250 integration and 250 automation actions. At this level, you can combine data from up to five boards in a single dashboard overview. You can also add up to four guests with read-write access to specific project boards, billed as a single seat for all four.
The £20 per month Pro tier is where Monday really starts getting serious, boosting shared storage to 100GB, and increasing your integration and automation actions to a whopping 25,000 per month. This tier introduces custom email templates, signatures, tracking and automation, adds Google Calendar synchronisation, and includes integrations for MailChimp mass emailing, Hubspot CRM and Facebook ads. Other features include authentication via your staff’s Google Workspace accounts, private boards and documents, per-board admins, formulas, time tracking, and forecasting and analytics tools. Read-write guest access is now included at no extra cost, and you can combine data from ten boards on a dashboard.
Enterprise-grade customers get even more features, including vastly increased action allowances, more analytics and post-sales account management tools, as well as more security, single sign-on and personnel management features. Lead scoring is only available on this tier. This bespoke service will require a sales call to determine pricing.
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Monday Sales CRM review: What’s it like to use?
Monday’s interface feels fresher than most of its rivals. It’s spacious, uses colour effectively, displays well on ultrawide monitors – while still being reasonably legible in small windows – and both its table and kanban views are easy on the eye. Its choice of terminology in sample data, default pipelines and tooltips is relatively jargon-free, too, making it easy to work with for businesses that are moving to a fully featured CRM for the first time.
Importing contacts is a breeze, as Monday doesn’t have strongly required field types. So if you’ve just got a name, a phone number or an email address, you’re still good to go. However, if you’ve got a lot of data in your exported contacts fields, you’ll want to add matching columns to Monday’s contacts first, so that you’ve got somewhere to put this extra information. Monday’s flexibility here is excellent, with useful default options such as “titles”, “associated companies” and “comments”, as well as the ability to create columns of your own, from simple text and number fields to formulae and file attachments.
Connecting your sales email accounts to your CRM is business-critical, and Monday’s main weakness is in its limited email support. The core features are there, and they’ve been well implemented: you can add multiple accounts via your Email & Activities settings. For each email account, you can have Monday log all outgoing messages, or only those CC’d to a specific catchment address, and add them to each contact’s paper trail of past communication. There’s an integrated email client with personal and shared templates, you can set custom signatures, and Pro subscribers can remove Monday’s branding.
While all this is great, you can only connect Google and Microsoft addresses. Of course, many businesses already use one of those enterprise email providers, and you can even use personal accounts – handy for the sole traders out there – but if you aren’t part of Google’s or Microsoft’s email ecosystem, you’re shut out of Monday’s, too.
There’s also no formal support for a single sales mailbox, which is unusual for a CRM, although multiple users can add the same email account to their Monday accounts, producing much the same result.
However, regardless of which team member or linked email address interacts with a customer, every one of those interactions is automatically attached to their profile. This means that everyone on the team can see all the activity with a client and, as with a good ticketing system, that makes it easy to seamlessly pick up where your colleagues left off. Alongside a smooth automation system that, once configured, can automatically hand off tasks to different team members, this easy access to customer information and interaction records means that anyone on the team can immediately update themselves on where a deal or a client stands.
As you’d expect, there are plenty of reporting functions, allowing you to get an at-a-glance view of sales, conversions and your teams’ comparative performance. To add context to these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Monday’s boards include mouseover pop-ups to provide extra data and context.
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Monday Sales CRM review: Are there any other useful features?
Monday’s automation interface – and the tooltips and tutorial pop-ups that introduce you to it – are friendlier than most. Rather than the unvarnished database rows or the sometimes intimidating pull-downs of rivals such as Zoho, there’s a friendly choice-based interface that makes it easy to create a clear conditional statement to define a new automation rule.
The quotation and invoicing features, available as an optional app created by Monday, are useful, but don’t feel quite as polished as the equivalents you’d find in a dedicated suite. Notably, the current workflow requires you to download and then manually send your quote or invoice as a PDF, rather than it being an integrated facility. Similarly, the app has no tracking features, so most firms would be best off using a connector to bring in data from their existing invoicing suite.
There are a range of other apps available to extend the CRM with features that you might normally need a dedicated service for, as well as connectors to embed your Google or Microsoft calendars and documents, and connect other services such as DocuSign.
Monday Sales CRM review: Should you sign up?
If your business uses Google or Microsoft as your email provider, Monday is a remarkably strong contender for your CRM needs. Unfortunately, if you use any other mail provider, including if you run your business’s mail servers in-house, then you should probably look elsewhere, as you can’t currently bring in your email via any other route. Similarly, firms that use a single sales-inbox model might be happier with a CRM that also prefers that model, such as Zoho.
However, for polish and ease of use, Monday is a stand-out choice. Its automations and integrations are both useful and easy to use, and if some of its apps are limited, then that’s really only in comparison to full standalone products. For many sales-oriented businesses, particularly those that prioritise personal account manager communication with clients, Monday is fantastic.