What Does CRM Success Actually Look Like?

At some point, most companies realise they could benefit from a CRM.

If you’ve been relying on spreadsheets, overflowing inboxes, or even just pen and paper to track your customers and pipeline, you’ll be well aware of the limitations of traditional methods. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms promise to organise all that information and make running your business a whole lot more efficient.

But while modern CRMs can be incredibly powerful, success isn’t guaranteed. Just because you’ve given your employees access to a CRM, it doesn’t mean your sales and customer service teams will see a transformation in how they work.

Cian Brennan, a Customer Success Manager here at Provident CRM, works with our clients to roll out monday.com’s popular CRM. Here, he shares his take on: 

• What success with monday CRM looks like
• The pain points and challenges CRMs aim to address
• Obstacles to success with CRMs
• How effectively rolling out monday.com’s CRM can benefit you
• Ideas for how to succeed with your CRM rollout

What good looks like with monday.com

In 2024, we started working with a fast-growing Irish construction company. They were using pen and paper to track essential business-winning information, including their tenders pipeline and their customer contact details.

When the firm started out, this method had worked fine. But, as the company grew, their approach to managing leads and bids caused headaches. Their pipeline was unclear, and their sales forecasts were based largely on guesswork. They also lacked a comprehensive database of all their contacts.

After seeing ads for monday.com’s CRM, the firm got in touch with us. Our team did a discovery workshop with them to learn about their specific processes and requirements. Then, we set up monday.com for them so they could have:

• A single, centralised contacts and accounts database with all duplicates removed
• An opportunities board to easily track tenders
• A procurement board to monitor their outgoings
• An invoicing and quote generation solution
• A dashboard to view all deals and the company’s financial health

Using monday.com has transformed the way the company works, improved how they manage information and given them a far clearer view of their sales pipeline.

And the proof is in the pudding: since they started using monday.com, they’ve seen a significant increase in deals closed and revenue growth. Those are results the Provident CRM team loves to see. 

A CRM is ultimately about solving business pain points

Customer relationship management platforms are fundamentally about solving your business pain points. Configured well, CRMs can address all kinds of issues: 

• Lack of visibility: If you rely on spreadsheets, whiteboards or pen and paper to track deals, it’s extremely difficult to get a feel for what’s really happening in your company, what the future looks like, or whether you have cashflow problems.
• Manual work: If you rely on traditional methods for sales management, then much of your work will be incredibly manual. Whether you’re producing a report about your company’s sales forecast, need to update customer details, or simply want to drill down into your financials, using spreadsheets takes a huge chunk of time out of your day.
• Data problems: Using traditional methods for sales and pipeline management can create all kinds of data problems. One common issue is duplication, where you have multiple records for the same customer. There’s also the problem of missing data. If information about customers is kept in your people’s heads, their notebooks or their inboxes, vital information could go missing (or get forgotten).
• Missed opportunities: Using traditional methods for managing sales and customer relationships means you’re running a serious risk of leaving money on the table. It’s all too easy to forget to make that follow-up call, send that reminder email to a warm lead, or add a new contact to your database. Let a CRM remember that for you.
• Inability to scale: As your company grows, traditional spreadsheets or pen and paper are simply no longer suited to the way you work. It’s one thing to rely on spreadsheets when you have, say, 10 customers and a couple of new business enquiries each month. But when those numbers start to multiply, traditional methods soon get chaotic.

Success isn’t guaranteed with a CRM

CRMs are incredibly powerful tools. But just opening an account with monday.com or any other CRM platform doesn’t automatically guarantee success. Here at Provident CRM, companies often ask us to help them after their initial attempts at rolling out a CRM have proved disappointing.

So, what are the obstacles to success with a CRM? 

• Not tailored to your needs: To have a genuinely transformative effect on your business, a CRM needs to be tailored to how you work. But plenty of companies try to use CRMs without adapting them to their employees’ actual workflows. As a result, you end up with an unwieldy system that doesn’t match what your people want. And, unsurprisingly, they simply stop using it.
• Resistance to change: Your sales and business development staff are professionals. Many of them will have been doing their jobs for years, they know how to build customer relationships, and they rightly pride themselves on their ability to remember important information. If employees feel they can sell without a CRM, it can be difficult to convince them to change time-worn behaviours.
• Lack of training: Modern CRMs are designed to be easy to use. But they’re still business applications — and they can be relatively complex to understand when you’re getting started. But many companies that invest in CRMs simply give employees licences and expect them to get on with it. While there will be some technically minded employees who enjoy the challenge, most need or want a hand to figure out how to use these apps to their maximum.

Because of these kinds of obstacles, many companies eventually end up believing that CRMs just aren’t suitable for them or their business needs. It’s a real shame. Because, when they’re well configured, they really can be transformative.

What are the benefits of using a CRM like monday.com?

When they’re deployed correctly, CRMs like monday.com can bring so many benefits. We’ve worked with companies across Ireland and the UK to roll out this platform and tailor it to their specific needs. Some of the clearest benefits we see include:

• Goodbye to the endless information search: A CRM can save you hours every day. We often speak to businesses who describe searching for customer information as being almost like detective work. They hunt through multiple spreadsheets, files and inboxes to find basic bits of information. With monday.com, everything’s in one place and easy to find.

• Do work faster with automation: monday.com gives you powerful artificial intelligence tools that can help automate a lot of traditionally slow and tedious tasks (while keeping information private and GDPR compliant). Whether it’s data entry tasks like shifting customer details from PDFs to the CRM or sending email reminders to customers, monday.com has tons of automation features that speed up your work and win back time.

• Do more of what you love: Many of our clients tell us that, after deploying monday.com, they win back hours of their day for doing more of the work they like. Let’s be honest, few salespeople enjoy admin work. They want to be interacting with customers, building relationships and closing deals. Using a CRM means all information related to an account is held in one place. That means you can focus your time and energy on developing your pipeline.

There are, of course, lots of additional benefits of a CRM besides those, but these are the ones our clients tell us about time and again.

How to succeed with a CRM like monday.com

If you’re thinking of investing in a CRM, these tips can help you get the most out of the technology:  

1. Start with a vision

What do you actually want your CRM to achieve? How would you like it to transform your company? What would you like work to be like after it’s been deployed?

Having a vision for what you want your CRM to do is more important than you might think. Having an end state in mind gives you an idea of where you’re going. It reminds you and your colleagues why you’re making the change. And it can help people to get on board with the new technology. 

2. An opportunity to improve

It’s perfectly possible to roll out a CRM like monday.com and get it to replicate all your existing processes and workflows. But that would be a missed opportunity.

A new CRM gives you a chance to get people from different parts of the firm together in a room and talk about business processes — which can be more exciting than it sounds! You can talk about ways to streamline workflows, rethink how you move information around the company, or improve how you build relationships with clients. 

Then, you can build these new and better processes into monday.com.

3. The value of an internal champion

At Provident CRM, we’ve helped hundreds of companies install various kinds of CRM. While our teams are very skilled at deploying this technology, we know that the most successful roll-outs happen when companies have an internal champion. This is someone who understands the value of the CRM, who promotes it across the business and is trusted within your firm. 

That internal champion is so important when it comes to convincing colleagues to try something new. Put simply, if the encouragement to try the CRM comes from a colleague, it’s a lot more persuasive than anything an external consultant can say.

4. Customise it

We can’t overemphasise the importance of tailoring a CRM to your business and its specific needs. Without customisation, most CRMs are essentially glorified spreadsheets — and offer relatively little value to your employees. In monday.com, you can build boards, automated workflows and dashboards that are specifically tailored to the way you work. 

monday.com is used by everyone from start-up fashion brands to accountancies through to heavy industry, and is flexible enough to fit around those diverse business models. But it has to be tailored to each firm’s processes.

On a related note, you should also consider extending your CRM by connecting it with other apps your employees use, so it becomes even more useful.

5. Plan an effective roll-out

It’s also really important to have a plan for deploying the software. In some companies, particularly smaller businesses, it may be possible to simply switch everyone over in one fell swoop. But this can cause quite a bit of disruption. 

It’s usually wiser to do a phased migration. You might shift the sales department first, or even just one team within the sales department. Get them familiar with the platform and migrate their files into the CRM. Once it’s bedded in, you can start moving more teams over. 

6. Training and support

Modern CRMs are very easy to use. But you can’t just expect people to instantly know how to pick them up. We always suggest giving employees training and ongoing support to ensure they get how to use the technology to make their work-lives better.

See what success could look like

CRMs like monday.com can have a transformative effect on how your company works. We see every day how it helps our customers manage their pipelines more effectively, win more business and build better relationships.

But that transformation won’t happen automatically. By developing a vision for what you want your CRM to do, and then planning out how you’ll get there, you give your company the best chance of reaping all the possible rewards of this technology. 

To see what a CRM could do for you, visit monday.com for a free trial. You can start experimenting by securely feeding it your company’s data and getting it to automate some of your workflows. That’ll show you how the CRM works, so you can decide if it’s the right choice for your business.

Sign up for a free monday.com trial today via the link below.