The default monday CRM setup gives you a decent starting point.

You’ve got Leads. Contacts. Companies. Deals. Activities.

You can customise the boards, add columns, create automations and connect things together.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Because building a better monday CRM isn’t really about adding as many features as possible.

It’s about understanding how monday CRM is structured, being aware of some of its limitations, and designing your system so those limitations don’t end up dictating how your business works.

After years of building monday CRM systems for myself and clients, I’ve found there are a few principles that make a surprisingly big difference.

1. Start with your business, not the default boards

One of the easiest mistakes to make is simply accepting the default monday CRM structure as the structure your business needs.

It isn’t necessarily.

The default boards are a starting point.

Before you start customising them, think about how your business actually works.

For example:

How does a lead become a customer?

(And on that note, what is a Lead to you? Are you B2B or B2C? Do you get repeat work from the same clients?)

What happens when a deal is won?

What information needs to follow the customer?

What work needs to be created?

What happens after the initial project is finished?

Map the process first.

Then decide how monday should represent it.

This is particularly important because some of the default CRM workflows make assumptions about how you should work.

For example, the standard Leads → Contacts workflow can move a qualified lead into the Contacts board, but that doesn’t necessarily fit the way every business thinks about prospects and customers. It can also create complications around duplicate contacts and reporting on qualified leads.

So don’t assume:

“That’s how monday built it, therefore that’s how I should run my business.”

Design the process first.

Then build monday around it.

2. Keep your CRM records properly connected

A CRM shouldn’t feel like a collection of separate databases.

Your:

Deals → Contacts → Companies → Activities → Projects → Tasks

are all parts of the same customer relationship.

So the connections between them matter.

One thing to watch out for in the default setup is that some of the connections aren’t as useful as they initially appear.

Activities are a good example.

You can connect an Activity to a Deal, Contact or other CRM record, but the default Activity structure uses a one-way connection. The Activity can know which Deal it relates to, but you don’t necessarily get the same visibility back from the Deal.

That’s a surprisingly important distinction.

When designing your system, ask:

“If I’m looking at this record, what other information would I expect to be able to see?”

Then build the connections to make that possible.

And where practical, think about whether those connections need to work in both directions.

3. Don’t confuse “qualified lead” with “customer”

This is one of the areas where I’d recommend being particularly deliberate.

A qualified lead isn’t necessarily a Contact in the sense that you want to manage them as a customer.

They’re still a prospect.

The default monday CRM setup can encourage a workflow where qualifying a lead means moving it into the Contacts board.

But that can blur two very different stages of the relationship:

“We think this is a worthwhile prospect.”

versus:

“This person is now our customer.”

Instead, define what qualified actually means in your business.

Do they have a genuine requirement?

Have they got the budget?

Are they the right type of customer?

Have they agreed to the next step?

Once you’ve defined that process, your CRM can use it to determine what should happen next.

The goal is to make the system reflect your sales process rather than simply moving records from one board to another because that’s what the default workflow expects.

4. Make the CRM create work, not just record it

This is probably one of the biggest opportunities in monday CRM.

When something happens in your sales process, ask:

“Should this create some work?”

For example:

A deal moves to Won.

That might mean:

• Create a project
• Create onboarding tasks
• Assign responsibilities
• Schedule follow-ups
• Create recurring work
• Connect the project to the customer and deal

You don’t necessarily want someone manually creating all of that every time.

The CRM should be able to do some of the heavy lifting.

But there’s a catch.

The more you rely on automations, the more important your underlying structure becomes.

If you’re creating tasks across multiple boards, connecting records in different places and adding automation after automation, you can eventually end up with a system where everything technically works but nobody is quite sure how it all works.

So automate meaningful business processes, but design the architecture first.

5. Design task management deliberately

Tasks are where a lot of Monday CRM systems start to fall apart – because they rely on the default setup and the default setup is particularly poorly built when it comes to task management.

You can have all the right tasks in monday and still struggle to answer:

“What do I actually need to do today?”

The default monday CRM setup can also leave work spread across different boards and hidden as subitems within individual items, which makes visibility increasingly challenging as your system grows.

So think about:

• Where tasks should live
• How tasks relate to projects and clients
• How recurring tasks are handled
• How priorities are determined
• How deadlines are managed
• How tasks are automatically created
• How people see their workload

The goal isn’t simply to have a Tasks board.

It’s to create a system where the right work becomes visible to the right person at the right time.

And if you find yourself constantly asking, “Where the hell did I put that task?”, that’s probably a system-design problem rather than a productivity problem. 😅

6. Make activities useful, not just record-keeping

Your CRM should remember more than the fact that a meeting happened.

You want to know:

What was discussed?

What was agreed?

What happens next?

Who needs to do something?

There’s a slightly hidden limitation in the default Activity setup here too.

The default structure doesn’t properly map the content of an activity into a searchable field.

So you might have years of activity history sitting in your CRM, but finding the conversation where you discussed a particular topic can be surprisingly difficult.

That’s something I’d think about when designing your system.

Activities should be connected to the relevant CRM records, and the useful content of those activities should be accessible and searchable.

That’s one of the changes I’ve made in monday CRM 2.0, where Activities use two-way connections and have an Activity Content field.

There is a 2,000-character limit on that field, so it’s designed for useful notes and summaries rather than storing complete meeting transcripts.

7. Don’t let automations become spaghetti

Automation is fantastic.

Until you have 50 automations and nobody knows what half of them do.

As your CRM grows, you need to be able to answer:

• What does this automation do?
• What triggers it?
• Which board does it operate on?
• Which columns does it depend on?
• What does it change?
• Does another automation depend on it?

The monday Automations Centre tells you what automations exist.

But it doesn’t necessarily give you the bigger picture of how your automation infrastructure works.

And monday has other structural limitations that can make automation design more complicated than you’d expect.

Sometimes the automation you want simply isn’t available.

Sometimes you need to work around a board or column limitation.

Sometimes you need another automation to compensate for the first one.

That’s when your neat little system can start turning into automation spaghetti.

🍝

That’s why I think documentation is part of the CRM design, not an optional extra.

Every automation should have a purpose.

And you should be able to understand that purpose six months later.

8. Understand the limitations before you build around them

This is perhaps the most important principle of all.

Some of the limitations of the default monday CRM boards aren’t obvious when you first start building.

You might think:

“I’ll just connect these boards.”

Then discover the connection doesn’t work in quite the direction you expected.

Or:

“I’ll just mirror that information across.”

Then discover the information you need isn’t available in the way you expected.

Or:

“I’ll just create an automation for that.”

Then discover that the default board structure doesn’t allow you to automate in the way you had hoped.

None of these things necessarily make monday CRM unusable.

But they can influence the architecture of your entire system.

And once you’ve built hundreds of items, columns, connections and automations around a particular approach, changing direction can be painful.

So before you build something relying on the default board structure, ask:

“Does the Default Monday CRM setup force a limitation upon me that I’ll have to work around later?”

That’s a much cheaper question to answer before you’ve built the system than afterwards.

9. Build for the person who has to maintain it

This one is easy to overlook.

You’re not just designing a CRM for the people who will use it today.

You’re designing it for the person who will have to change it six months from now.

That might be you.

Or someone else on your team.

Or future-you, who will have completely forgotten why you created that weird automation in the first place.

😅

A good monday CRM should therefore be:

Understandable.

Documented.

Customisable.

Predictable.

Don’t create a black box that only the person who built it understands.

This is particularly important if you’ve built workarounds to get around monday’s limitations.

Document why the workaround exists, not just what it does.

So what does a better monday CRM actually look like?

It doesn’t necessarily mean having more boards.

It doesn’t mean having hundreds of automations.

And it definitely doesn’t mean adding features just because they’re possible.

A better monday CRM is one where the structure reflects how your business actually works and where you’ve designed around the limitations of the platform rather than discovering them one by one as you go.

Where:

Leads become properly qualified opportunities.

Deals connect to the right people and companies.

Activities become part of the relationship history.

Winning a deal creates the work that needs to happen next.

Projects and tasks remain connected to the customer.

Recurring work doesn’t have to be remembered manually.

Automations are documented and understandable.

And most importantly:

You can look at the system and understand what’s going on.

This is the approach behind monday CRM 2.0

This is essentially how I approached building the monday CRM 2.0 Kitset.

Rather than simply taking the default monday CRM boards and adding a few extra features, I went through the system and asked:

“How would I design this if I was building the CRM from scratch? What limitations are there in the default setup that can be easily avoided with smarter structure?”

Then I worked backwards from there.

The result is a framework that adds things like:

• More advanced deal and pipeline management
• Better-connected Contacts and Companies
• Two-way activity connections
• Searchable activity content
• Automated record creation
• Advanced task management
• Recurring tasks and subtasks
• Automatic task creation
• Connected project and task management
• More advanced workflows
• Automation documentation and management
• The Monday System Control Centre

But the real value isn’t any individual feature.

It’s the architecture connecting everything together.

And that’s something you can apply whether you use CRM 2.0 or build your own system from scratch.

Want to see how I approach monday CRM?

I’ve been sharing a series of short videos and articles looking at specific limitations in the default monday CRM boards and showing how I’ve approached them differently.

You can follow along in the free MondayWiki community, where I regularly share monday.com tips, hacks, how-to guides and system-building ideas.

Join the free MondayWiki community →

And if you’d rather start with a proven framework instead of building everything yourself:

Take a look at the monday CRM 2.0 Kitset →

A better monday CRM isn’t necessarily about making monday do more.

It’s about understanding how monday actually works, where its limitations are, and designing a system that works with those limitations rather than constantly fighting them.