Tracking sales pipelines with monday.com and Screenful
Feb 1, 2024
We’ve always wanted to keep our product generic in a sense that it doesn’t dictate how your team works, or even what type of work you do. After all, the concept of work items, boards, and workflow are quite universal and apply to all kinds of activities - like your sales pipeline. Here’s how to do it.
Contents:
Setting up monday.com as a CRM tool
First, you need to create a workflow for your sales team. You can get started with Monday's Basic CRM template, or if you need more complete CRM capabilities, you should check out Monday's Sales CRM product.
In either case, you'll end up with a board that allows tracking leads according to stages such as:
New
Discovery
Proposal
Negotiation
Won
Lost
You’re not limited to these stages. You can add or remove stages to make it suit your specific workflow. Go ahead and tailor it to fit your needs.
You can take your workflow a step further with automations. Monday allows you to create your own automation or choose from pre-prepared templates.
Every automation has a trigger, a condition, and an action. For example, when the stage changes (trigger) to Won (condition), move item to Closed won (action). You can customize your own automations to fit your specific workflow.
Integrating Screenful with monday.com
The Analytics & Reports by Screenful is available on the monday.com Apps Marketplace. Once installed, it adds an entry to the left menu that allows you to access your charts and reports within the Monday UI.
You need to authorize Screenful to access the Monday API to get started. Once done, you will be shown a list of boards. Select one or more boards from the list to be imported to Screenful.
Once you have selected the boards for importing, the next step is to review your workflow.
When importing a board to Screenful, you will be asked to pick the status column that contains your stages. Once selected, Screenful will automatically map those workflow stages to Not started, In progress, and Done. You can learn more from the workflow settings guide.
In this example, the New stage contains leads waiting in line for someone to start pursuing them. It is mapped to Not started. Once someone starts working on a lead, it goes through the states from Discovery to Proposal. Those lists are mapped to In progress. Finally, the lead ends up in either Won or Lost.
You can confirm the suggested mapping by clicking Looks good to me. The data import process starts, and you can access the automatically generated charts and reports within a minute.
Measuring the sales pipeline velocity
Wanna see how many leads you’ve closed? Head to the Insights->Completed tab to see your pipeline velocity and trends. The topmost list shows the most recently completed items. Clicking the name opens the item in Monday.
The Work completed per week/month/quarter shows the total number of leads closed within a date range. The numbers in the chart are item counts but you can change the unit to be any number column in your board. For example, if you have set monetary values, such as total value in USD, you can switch the chart to display total amounts in USD.
The Type of work completed chart allows segmenting the leads by any drop-down column in your board. For example, if you change the grouping to Owner, you'll see how many deals were closed per deal owner.
In addition to grouping by Owner, you can group by any other property of a lead, such as Country, Priority, or Stage.
The Completed work trend shows how many leads were closed over time by Owner:
Looking at the trends lets you see whether your team is closing more leads than in the past.
You can also track each step in your funnel separately by following the steps in this how-to guide.
You can learn more about the Insights feature from this guide.
Tracking the cycle time of your sales pipeline
The Insights->Timings shows how long it takes to close a deal. The cycle time is the total time that elapses from the moment when the work is started on a lead until it's closed. Understanding the cycle time of your sales process is critical as it helps you understand which leads are likely to be quick to close and which are likely to take longer.
The Cycle time trend chart shows the average time it took to close a lead over the selected time period:
You can get even more specific by looking at the cycle time of each stage in your process separately. Do you know which step is taking the longest time? The Cycle time per workflow state chart shows you that.
Each bar represents a stage, and the numbers show how long leads have stayed on each stage on average during the selected date range. In this example, the Discovery phase takes the longest on average.
You can dig even deeper by filtering this data. For example, if you're labeled your leads by company size, you can see how much company size affects the cycle time. Alternatively, you might want to know whether leads in specific industries are quicker to close than on average. Playing around with the data can reveal new insights that help you prioritize which leads to pursue first.
Creating custom charts
To create a custom chart in Screenful, go to the Charts tab and click Add new chart on the top right corner. A modal is opened with a set of chart templates. You can either create a new chart from scratch or pick one of the predefined charts.
Clicking one of chart templates opens a preview with real data. You can select the data sources from the Data source menu above the chart. You can pick one or more data sources for your chart and see the results immediately.
After picking a template, you can click the Configure icon on the top right corner to open the chart for editing.
The chart editor opens revealing the chart settings. If the chart is anywhere close to what you’re looking for, you should be able to make it perfect with just a few adjustments.
When you click Create chart, the chart is created and you can find it under the Charts tab under the main navigation.
Once you have created the charts you need, you can schedule them to be sent as automated reports.
Summary
Monday.com is a great tool for tracking all kinds of work, including sales work. One thing that salespeople don’t like to do is spend a lot of time updating a clunky old CRM system. But Monday CRM is a different breed. It provides much flexibility and allows you to configure the board to match your sales process.
However, you'll start losing visibility if you’re working with many leads and closing them in masses (which I hope you do!). That’s when you need to add a bit of analytics to the mix.
By measuring your sales pipeline, you can see how well you’re doing. But more importantly, it helps you to find insights that improve your sales process.
To get started, read the Getting Started guide and sign up for the free trial.
Let us know if you have questions or feedback by contacting hello@screenful.com. To stay on the loop, read our blog, or follow us on LinkedIn.
