You’ve had three calls with a prospect.
You’ve sent two emails.
You’ve had a meeting with them and agreed on the next steps.
All of that information is somewhere in your monday CRM.
But open the Deal itself and you may not get the complete picture.
And even if the information is there, finding it later can be surprisingly difficult.
The problem with monday CRM’s Activities board
The default monday CRM setup includes an Activities board for recording things like calls, meetings, and any custom Activities.
That sounds exactly like what you’d want from a CRM.
The problem is how those activities are connected to the rest of your CRM.
You can connect an Activity to a Deal, Lead, Contact or other CRM record.
But the connection is only available in one direction.
For example, you might log a call for a particular Deal. The default Deals Board in Monday CRM will automatically log that call in the Activities board and connect that logged activity to the Deal.
From the Activities board, you can see which Deal the activity relates to.
But when you open the Deal, you don’t get the same visibility back to those Activities.
The Deal knows less about its own history than you might expect.
And that’s a problem.
Your activity history isn’t as searchable as it should be
There’s another limitation that’s even easier to overlook.
When the default monday CRM setup logs a new activity, it doesn’t map the content of the activity into a dedicated column, only the title, activity type, start time, end time and status.
So while you might have a record showing that a call or meeting happened, the actual content of that interaction isn’t structured in a way that you can easily search or see unless you open the Deal, Project or Leads board, and view the Emails & Activities section.
Imagine six months from now you’re trying to answer:
“When did we last discuss pricing with this client?”
Or:
“Which prospects mentioned that they needed Xero integration?”
Or even:
“What did we agree to do in that meeting?”
If the useful information is buried inside a logged activity within the Client/Lead/Deal rather than stored as searchable content, finding it becomes much harder. (Because the Emails & Activities section itself is not searchable via global search).
That’s a pretty fundamental limitation for something that’s supposed to help you manage customer relationships.
A CRM should help you remember what happened
This is one of the reasons I think communication history is so important.
A CRM isn’t just a database containing names, companies and deals.
It’s supposed to give you context.
When you open a Deal or Contact, you should ideally be able to understand:
- Who have we communicated with?
- What have we discussed?
- When did we last interact?
- What did we agree to?
- What needs to happen next?
- What has happened previously?
The more your business relies on relationships and ongoing client work, the more valuable that history becomes.
You shouldn’t have to remember which board something was logged on, hunt through Activities and hope you can find the relevant conversation.
This is where better connections make a difference
One of the changes I’ve made in the monday CRM 2.0 Kitset is to give Activities a more useful structure.
CRM 2.0 uses two-way connections, so the relationship between an Activity and the relevant CRM records works in both directions.
That means when you’re looking at a Deal, Contact or other connected record, you can see the activities associated with it rather than having the relationship effectively disappear in the other direction.
It also means you can instantly see an overview of activity dates, types and even content connected to every Deal, Lead, Contact, Whatever without having to open them and scroll. (This is waaaaaay more powerful than the new Activities Timeline which is trying, but failing miserably, to do the same thing).
I’ve also added Activity Content to the structure.
Instead of treating an activity as simply:
“A meeting happened.”
you can capture the actual content of the interaction and make that content available as searchable information.
(There is one limitation worth knowing about: the Activity Content field is limited to 2,000 characters.)
For most calls, meetings, emails and notes, that’s plenty of room to capture the useful information. But it’s not intended to be a complete transcript of a long meeting or an entire email thread.
The difference is small until you need it
This is one of those monday CRM limitations that you might not notice when you’re first setting everything up.
If you’ve got 20 deals and a handful of activities, it probably doesn’t seem like a big deal.
But imagine you’ve been using your CRM for three years.
Hundreds of deals.
Thousands of activities.
Years of conversations and meetings.
Now the ability to see the history from the Deal itself and search the actual content of those interactions becomes much more valuable.
That’s when seemingly small structural decisions start to have a big impact on how useful your CRM actually is.
It’s not about adding more features
This is an important distinction with monday CRM 2.0.
I’m not trying to turn monday CRM into an unnecessarily complicated monster with a hundred extra features.
The goal is to improve the underlying structure so the information you’re already capturing becomes more connected, visible and useful.
The default monday CRM setup gives you the building blocks, with some limitations.
CRM 2.0 is about putting those building blocks together in a way that makes more sense when you’re actually using the system to run your business. Without the limitations.
Because your CRM shouldn’t just tell you that you spoke to a client.
It should help you remember what happened, what was discussed and what needs to happen next.
And that’s a much more useful CRM.
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