One of the best ways to keep your sales pipeline flowing in the right direction is to make sure that your contacts are right at your fingertips, properly cataloged, and integrated with the rest of your workflow. With monday CRM and our team's expert tips, that's a given! Let's dive in.
Entity boards
As a monday CRM subscriber, your account comes set up with a collection of boards that we call entities. Entities are boards that are core to the product and were built with the other monday CRM entities in mind. These boards are interconnected in several key ways. Each board contains thoughtful details that make the board uniquely useful for CRM users.
Your Contacts board
The monday CRM Contacts board
In the following example, you'll see that the Contacts entity board has an Account column. This is a Connect Boards column that connects to the monday CRM Account entity board:
There are many thoughtful details that make this board the ideal way to manage your contacts. A few of the highlights are:
- Account column connected with the Accounts board. This allows you to associate your contacts with relevant accounts and view pertinent account details directly within your Contacts board.
- Automatically associate accounts. You can automatically associate accounts with contacts based on the contact's email domain. This takes some of the manual work out of maintaining your Contacts board and connecting key data in your CRM.
- Create items from form. You can create a simple form for agents to fill out when creating a new contact. When creating the form, you can designate required fields for new contacts. This helps you to maintain uniformity amongst your entries.
- Send and receive emails. You can send and receive emails directly within your Contacts board, using Emails & Activities.
Starting from scratch
If you're setting up a new Contacts board, a board that is not an entity, keep the following tips in mind.
To get started, create a board from scratch.
Add columns for the following data points: email, phone, title, company, and location. We also recommend adding a Connect Boards Column for connecting the contact to other boards, such as a board for your accounts and an additional Connect Boards Column for any deals that you may later want to attach to your contact. These are the basic columns that will allow you to keep a record of all the information you need to stay in touch with your current and potential clients.
As you go, you can adjust the board to include any other data that you collect from your leads.
Create a contact
There are two ways to create a contact. You can generate contacts from your Leads board or you can add a contact manually.
Generate from your Leads board
Once a new lead has populated your Leads entity board, you can easily add it to your Contacts entity board. If you're using monday CRM entity boards, it's as easy as clicking the Move to contacts button in the Create a contact column on your Leads board.
If you'd like to make any changes to how this button works or where it creates a new contact, hover next to the column header and click on the three-dot menu. Open the Settings and click on Customize Button column to make changes:
On the settings page, you'll see the automation that the button triggers. If you want to edit it, click on the pencil icon:
As the automation indicates, by default the item will be moved from your Leads board to your Contacts board.
Use a monday WorkForm
You can collect contacts using a monday WorkForm. To add a form to your Contacts board, select the + to Add View and select Form:
Add a form:
You can customize your form according to your preferences. You have the ability to change the text of your header, questions, buttons, and more. You can schedule a cutoff for form submissions, customize the Thank You screen after submission, and designate which group you want submission to populate within:
There are many more customization options!
Once you're done setting up your form, share the link to collect your contacts. Anyone with a link to the form can access the form and fill it out. Once the form is filled out, the information is transformed into an item on your board and the data collected is filled into the relevant columns.
You and your team can add a contact manually. When you add a contact to your board manually, you can set up the board to populate a form with required fields for your team to fill out.
To enable the ability to create a new contact using a form, open the three-dot menu in the upper right hand corner of your board. Go to your Board options and select Enable item creation form:
To edit your form, open the form by creating a new item. Then, select the pencil icon:
You can choose:
- which fields are shown
- the order that the fields are shown in
- and which fields are mandatory
Mandatory fields will be marked with a red asterik. When the form is enabled, it isn't possible to create a new item in the usual way, by typing into a column's field on your board.
You can use a form to create new items on any board, but it's especially helpful when manually creating a new contact! This feature is only available on monday CRM.
Manually connect to an account
There are two ways to connect a contact to an account. The first method is manually.
Once a new contact is created, you can link it to its relevant account on the Accounts entity board in the Connect Boards Column that is already set up on your Contacts entity board:
You can select the account associated with the new contact by clicking on the space in the Account column next to your contact's name. This will open up a menu that you can browse to find the correct account.
From the Accounts board, you will be able to see how many contacts are associated with each company.
Automatically connect to an account
With the new Account association setting, monday CRM can automatically assign a company or account to your contact.
How it works
When you add a contact’s email address on the Contacts board, monday CRM will use the email address domain to match the contact to a company with the same domain. For example, if you add a contact with the email address “example@monday.com”, monday CRM will search for an account with the domain “monday.com” on the Accounts board. If a match is found, monday CRM will assign it to the contact. If a match is not found, a new account will be created on the Accounts board and linked to the contact.
Turn it on or off
This setting will automatically be enabled for monday CRM accounts. To turn the setting off, visit your CRM settings:
Select Item association from the menu on the left, and toggle the setting off:
Send and receive emails
To communicate better with your contacts, use Emails & Activities. With Emails & Activities, your team can manage hundreds of client or customer relationships within monday.com. Send and receive emails, capture meeting notes, events, and more. Then view it all in one timeline.
Keeping your communication centralized means that your team will spend less time tracking down the details for every interaction.
Track your contacts' activities
Since client relationships are more than just emails, Emails & Activities gives you the power to keep track of activities too. From meetings to calls and more, log each interaction to see a full timeline of events in one concise view.
Each activity created will automatically be added to the Activities entity board. With all activities on one board, you can keep track of what's coming up and create reports.
Overview of your contacts' data
At monday.com, we love making your life easier. That's why we created The Item Card. If you click on any of your contacts, you will see everything you need to know in one easy-to-navigate view!
The Item Card is set up with various widgets that allow you to see all aspects of your customer's information in one place:
- The Information widget displays every column on your board in a simple card.
- With the Emails & Activities widget, you can manage all of your communication, meetings, and notes.
- The Deals widget shows all deals connected to the contact.
- The Accounts widget shows the account(s) connected to the contact.
These widgets and their position in the Item Card are entirely customizable. Managing your contact's information has never been easier!
For more information on setting up The Item Card, check out The Item Card article.
Add automations
Our automations allow you to automate and streamline your workflow. The options are nearly limitless and increasing all the time. You can read more about our automations in the monday.com Automations article.
Our suggestion? Add automations to get notified! You can create an automation that will notify you every time a new contact is added to the board.
Once notified, you can assign that contact to a sales representative.
Everything else!
From lead capture to generating invoices when the deal is done, we've got you covered! To learn more about how you can work with your contacts and clients using monday CRM, check out our Get started with monday CRM article.
If you have any questions, please reach out to our team right here. We’re available 24/7 and happy to help.
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