Overcoming Monday CRM Leads Board Limitations

If you’ve ever struggled to set up and use the Leads Board and other default Boards in Monday CRM in a way that actually works for your organisation, you are not alone!

Recently, we shared a video inside the free MondayWiki Community where we teased something we’ve been working on internally at Botsquad. We call it Monday CRM 2.0. It’s not a new product, and it’s not a plugin. It’s a more advanced, more intentional way of building a complete Monday CRM system that offers advanced features you won't find anywhere else, can be installed in any Monday account with a few clicks and doesn't use ANY of the default CRM boards and therefore avoids their built-in limitations.

That video sparked a predictable question:

“What limitations are you actually talking about?”

So let’s unpack them.

This post walks through the key limitations baked into Monday CRM’s Leads Board, what they mean in practice, and how we typically address them when designing CRM systems for our consulting clients.

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Why the Default Monday CRM Leads Board Is (Worse Than) Useless

In practice, the default Leads board in Monday CRM offers almost zero functionality and it's sole purpose seems to be to serve as a temporary holding pen for people who might become contacts one day.

Out of the box, it contains almost no meaningful workflows, very few useful automations, and no real intelligence. It exists largely to delay the moment when a person becomes a “real” contact elsewhere in the system. In other words, it doesn’t do much. It just waits.

Worse, it actively silos your data.

The Monday CRM Leads board is built on a quiet but very specific assumption:
that every enquiry your business receives comes from someone who has never interacted with you before (and therefore does not exist in your Contacts Board).

That might be true for high-volume, cold-lead sales teams. It is not how most organisations actually operate.

In the real world, enquiries often come from:

• Existing clients
• Past clients
• Referrals
• Long-term contacts who resurface months or years later

When you force every enquiry through a standalone Leads board, you dramatically increase the likelihood of duplicate contacts, because the system has no awareness of who already exists. You also lose the ability to see all enquiries from a single person in one place, which is one of the core promises of a CRM in the first place.

This is why, for many teams, the Monday CRM Leads board ends up feeling overengineered yet underpowered at the same time.

Unless your business genuinely needs to support a scenario where one lead can can only ever be associated with one inquiry, the Leads Board adds friction without adding value. In those cases, we typically recommend using an Inquiries Board with a well-defined Sales Pipeline and Workflows rather than the Leads Board. The concept is to set up Match Automations so that if the Company or Contact associated with the inquiry already exists, they get connected. If not, they get created and connected automatically. Allowing you to see all Inquiries associated with any given Contact or Company, avoiding the creation of dupes and giving you a Board that is actually useful!

Fewer boards. Fewer duplicates. And a system that mirrors reality instead of fighting it.

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The Full Name Problem (and Why It Breaks Your Emails)

By default, the Monday CRM Leads board stores the person’s name as the item name, typically captured via a Monday Form.

That means:

• No dedicated First Name column
• No way to personalize automated emails properly

So instead of:

“Hi Robert,”

Your emails say:

“Hi Robert Thompson,”

Every time.

This is a structural limitation of Monday Forms, which can only map one field to one column or the item name.

Our fix:
Use Fillout Forms instead.

With Fillout, you can:

• Capture First Name and Last Name separately
• Automatically concatenate them into a clean item name
• Personalize emails correctly without extra work from the lead

Same data. Better structure. Less friction.

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Stop Using Button Columns for Important Actions

Button columns are tempting. They look helpful. They are also dangerous.

Buttons:

• Don’t tell you if they’ve already been clicked
• Are easy to click accidentally
• Can create duplicate items or actions

For anything important, we recommend status columns instead.

And if you really care about avoiding automation mishaps, don’t use:

• “When status changes to X”

Use:

• “When status changes from X to Y” (and even consider adding a safety condition like "but only if Column Z is/is not empty").

That single tweak prevents a surprising amount of chaos.

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The Leads Board Isn’t Connected to Anything (and That’s a Problem)

Out of the box, the Leads board isn’t connected to a single other board.

That’s… not great.

In a real CRM, leads should be connected to:

• Deals
• Contacts
• Accounts
• Activities
• Projects

If your boards aren’t talking to each other, you don’t have a CRM. You have a collection of spreadsheets wearing a trench coat.

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One Status Column Isn’t Enough

The default Leads board gives you a single status column to manage the entire Sales Pipeline for this Board. Oh wait, there isn't any Sales Pipeline in this Board!

Having only one Status Column in the entire Board is fine if all you're using the Leads Board for is a temporary holding pen for "people-who-might-become-contacts-later", but it's terrible for automation. It means you have no real workflow. You have no sales pipeline.

What we recommend instead is adding milestone status columns that represent real-world sales actions, such as:

• Got reply
• Meeting held
• Proposal sent
• Proposal signed

These milestones:

• Can be triggered automatically by other column changes
• Can update the main Stage column for you
• Remove the need for manual stage updates entirely

For example:

• Uploading a proposal file automatically updates the proposal milestone
• Reviewing it updates the next step
• Sending it triggers an email automation

Your CRM starts reacting to reality instead of relying on humans to remember what to click.

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Monday Forms: Convenient, But Limiting

Monday Forms introduce several structural issues, including:

• Poor item names
• Non-unique records
• Inconsistent data

Fillout Forms solves this by letting you:

• Control item names automatically
• Combine multiple fields
• Enforce clean, consistent records

The user just fills out a form.
Your CRM stays tidy behind the scenes.

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Final Thoughts

The Monday CRM Leads Board offers basically zero functionality, has some serious limitations and is completely unsuited to the workflows of many Monday users. (Unfortunately, many of them don't realise this and build their systems upon this flawed foundation anyway and only discover their mistake when it's too late to fix easily).

The default Monday CRM Boards are designed to be generic. Your business is not.

Understanding these limitations early can save you months of rework, broken automations, and reporting headaches later.

If this kind of structural thinking resonates, that’s exactly the kind of work we do at Botsquad, and it’s why we share content like this inside the free MondayWiki Community.

If you’ve got questions, edge cases, or a CRM that feels like it’s fighting you, jump into the community or get in touch. There’s always another layer to unlock.