How to use Automations with monday as a CRM

Platform discussions Special workflows & use cases
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Hey all, I run a tech startup that helps retailers raise more money for charity through artificial intelligence. We’ve been using monday as a CRM because of how great the automations work and are a huge time saver.

Group Structure

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The 3 main categories we use are Highest Priority, Queue and Finished Queue. The others are people we don’t actively reach out to for sales purposes. This could be because the data was bad, we won/lost the lead or they referred us to someone else. Each of the groups has a corresponding status label.

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Incoming Leads

We have a lead generation system in place where we send 2000 cold emails per day to retail targets. Anybody who clicks on a link gets their phone, emails Linkedin profiles and relevant info passed to monday via Zapier so new leads are automatically brought to our CRM board. We have a cool setup that also lets us connect on Linkedin with anybody that clicked a link in the sales email, message the people that accept on Linkedin and update all their information in monday with 0 clicks in between. When these warm leads show up in monday you want to have some information filled out. We automatically set the outreach day as today, set the Deal Stage status as “Link Clicked” and which point of sale system they’re using to “unknown.”

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Statuses as Triggers

There are two basic status actions you want to take advantage of on status trigger automations: Pushing the date actions and moving groups actions.
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This is where I think monday’s automations really shine. Let’s say I change a person’s status to 2nd Linkedin Message Sent. This can trigger both pushing the due date by 1 day and moving the person from the Queue group to the Finished Queue group. Then when the follow up date arrives the next day, the pulse will automatically jump back up into the Queue for the following day so I can call them. Higher priority statuses get sorted to the Higher Priority group so that when we run out of time the most important things got done first.

We’ve also set it up so that it goes and actually sends the follow up message on Linkedin when the status is marked in monday. We use the Slack integration to pass the person’s name to a muted Slack channel when the status is changed. A new message in that channel is the Zapier trigger to go look up their Linkedin URL in a Google Sheet and pass that URL to another Sheet. New URLs in the 2nd Sheet are automatically sent a personalized follow up. It’s possible to have different statuses send different follow ups depending on where they are in your sales process. The result is that we never spend time on data entry or list building and our sales team’s time is freed up from manual tasks like follow ups.

Hope you all enjoy!

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Wow, Patrick this is super amazing! I’m going to share this with our integrations team for them to see this workflow and incredible use of automations, as well as your feature request (https://community.monday.com/t/google-sheets-public-csv-integration/135/3) for integrating monday.com and Google Sheets. I hope we can speed up your workflow and make it even smoother with this integration in the near future!

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Thanks so much Julia! I really appreciate it!

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Epic Patrick. Did you find any valuable resources that helped you to setup the Zapier workflows? I’m trying to organise our Monday.com contact list for our CRM and struggling.

Also, love the idea behind your start-up. What’s it called?

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wow, this is amazing! Thanks for taking the time to share. We find with automatons that they do not work 100% of the time - are you worried about losing leads because of this?

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Hey Tara, thanks! It’s a fair criticism. The movement ones and updating statuses on creation can be buggy. Fortunately the worst thing that happens is they wouldn’t move themselves to the correct group. The leads coming in from Zapier will make them always at least show up on the board. I’ve been waiting for more stable automations and while I don’t think it’s all the way there yet, I have seen that the stability is getting better and the errors are becoming less frequent.

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Thanks! My startup’s name is Parvenu.

I didn’t really use guides when setting it up and what I’ve done has grown over months, but mostly from just playing around with what’s possible. I wanted a lead strategy that was integrated across multiple platforms (email, Linkedin and phone). We’re a small startup, so I see automation as a really big advantage for us. I can recommend some tools we’ve used for setting up our workflow.

Linkedin Sales Navigator - Finding the prospects. You can build a list of 2000 qualified targets in ~20 minutes.

Seamless.ai. - Turns those 2000 qualified targets into corresponding emails and phone numbers. Integrates natively with Sales Navigator, so between the two you end with name, email, phone, Linkedin URL and plenty of other data.

Mailshake - Cold email outreach. Drop the 2k emails into a mail campaign to A/B test and see who bites.

Phantombuster - Phantombuster can do a lot of things, but we use it for Linkedin automation. It’s 10x better than alternatives like Linkedin Helper because it’s cloud-based (so it works with Google Sheets, thus Zapier). Non-cloud-based Linkedin automation softwares you have to manually add the people you want to connect with. Phantombuster just runs on a schedule and checks a Google Sheet for new links. The basic flow is Mailshake link click -> Zapier to search Google Sheet with all contacts for their Linkedin URL -> drop that URL into the Phantombuster Sheet. 0 clicks to connect with warm leads!

Phantombuster can then extract your contacts on a schedule of a few times per day. New ones get added to a Sheet automatically. New contacts in that sheet are the trigger for Zapier to search the Master Sheet. If they aren’t in there, the Zap stops (so you don’t send automated messages to non-sales targets you connected with on Linkedin). If they’re in the Sheet, it adds them to another Sheet. Phantombuster runs on a schedule to send messages to people in the third Sheet.

You want to build in some filters as well. For example, a reply in Mailshake unsubscribes them from future mail campaigns (they either said no and you want to unsubscribe them, or they’re interested and you don’t want to send them another automated message anyway). Zapier will add the email reply to their row in the Google Sheet. The Zap that adds people to the message sender Sheet checks if there’s an email reply before adding them to the Sheet. If a reply exists, it doesn’t add them to the Sheet and they don’t get a message. If a reply doesn’t exist, it adds them to the Sheet and they get a message.

I highly recommend using Zapier to add the pulse ID to a person’s row in the Master Sheet. This lets you essentially search for a pulse in monday via Zapier (it can’t do this natively).

Monday is essentially the frontend of our CRM that everyone sees and Google Sheets is the backend. Sheets is the backend because it works with more apps than monday and Zapier allows you to search for a row (if you have 1 piece of information such as their name, the search step gives you access to everything else about them) and you can automate monday from there.

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Props to you @Patrick great use and even greater sharing.

I agree… this (and you) are epic and while troubleshooting issues, finding sharing like you took the time to do is inspiring. Thanks!!

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