How Do You Set Up monday CRM?

To set up monday CRM, sign up for a trial, invite your team, import your leads into the Leads board, qualify them into contacts, work your deals in the Deals board pipeline view, connect your email and then add automations. monday.com’s own getting-started article follows the same order (checked Oct 25, 2026). The steps below give the menu path for each, and the limits that decide how far each plan takes you.

What do you need before you start?

You need a list of the stages your deals go through, your lead data as a CSV, and a plan that matches the fields and automations you want. Decide these three things first, because changing them after an import is the expensive kind of change.

Plan	Price per seat per month, billed yearly	Columns per board	Active contacts and deals	Custom automations a month
Basic	$12	5	1,000	Not listed
Standard	$17	15	10,000	250
Pro	$28	75	100,000	25,000

Source: monday.com CRM pricing, checked Oct 25, 2026. Plans start from 3 users and the trial lasts 14 days. If you are unsure whether you need CRM at all, read monday CRM vs monday work management first, because they are different products with different plans. The full limits table, including quotes and dashboards, is on monday CRM plan limits.

Step 1: How do you sign up for monday CRM?

Create the account from the monday CRM homepage at monday.com/crm, start the 14 day trial and choose a plan when it ends. monday’s support article says to sign up on the CRM homepage if you do not already have a monday.com account. Note that a trial is the only free way to use CRM; the free personal plan is for work management and does not include CRM boards.

Step 2: How do you invite your team?

Click the Invite members icon in the top pane, or the Invite button at the top of a board, then type email addresses and pick Member or Viewer for each person. Viewers are read-only. If your permissions do not allow you to invite directly, the same icon lets you ask an admin to send the invite. To cancel a pending invite, click your profile picture, choose Administration, open Directory, choose Users, and use Cancel invitation (monday.com support, checked Oct 25, 2026). Billing follows seats, so invite only the people who will work in the CRM.

Step 3: How do you import your leads?

Open the Leads board, open the New contact dropdown and choose Import contacts. Upload a CSV with Browse or drag it in, use Add items to to pick a group, then match each file column to a board column with Select column, Create new column or Don’t import column. On the next screen, Set duplicate behavior lets you add all rows as new items or update existing ones by matching a column such as Phone. Click Import Now and watch the progress bar (monday.com support, checked Oct 25, 2026).

Three limits bite here:

• The file must have fewer than 50 columns, fewer than 8,000 rows and be 10 MB or smaller.
• If automations are active on the Leads board, imported items take the status New Lead. Turn those automations off first if you want to keep your statuses.
• New columns you create during the import count toward the column cap (5, 15 or 75), so map to existing columns where you can.

The full import walk-through, including what to do with larger files, is in how to import a CSV into monday.com. If your data lives in Airtable, the route is different; see how to move from Airtable to monday.com.

Step 4: How do you qualify leads and create contacts?

Change the lead’s status to Qualified, then click Move to contacts in the Create a contact column. The lead moves to your Contacts board. The Contacts board links to Accounts through a Connect Boards column, and you can turn on automatic account association in your CRM settings under Item association, which matches a contact’s email domain to an account. Two catches from monday’s article: it only works when you type or edit the Email column by hand, and it does not fill in when you use the Move to contacts button, so connect the account manually after moving (monday.com support, checked Oct 25, 2026).

Step 5: How do you set up the deals pipeline?

Open the Deals board and its Pipeline view, then check the stages match how you actually sell. monday’s Ultimate article says you can add, edit or delete deal stages to fit your sales cycle. Set your currency in the Deal Value column settings. The core CRM boards and columns cannot be deleted or duplicated, so edit what is there instead of starting from a blank board. Write the stage names down before you build automations on them, because renaming a status label later can stop an automation from firing, a trap covered in why a monday.com automation is not running.

Step 6: How do you connect your email?

Click the card icon next to any item name, open the Emails & Activities widget on the Overview tab, click the gear icon and choose Add account, then connect Gmail or Outlook. This needs the Standard plan or above (monday.com support, checked Oct 25, 2026). Emails are logged when the contact’s address from the item’s Email column and your connected address are both in the thread. Gmail has its own set of traps, including the difference between the CRM sync and the plain Gmail integration, in how to connect Gmail to monday.com.

Step 7: How do you add automations?

Open a board, click Automate, open the Create tab, choose Create from scratch, click When this happens to pick a trigger, then Then do this to pick an action, and click Create Automation. To chain further actions, click the plus sign to the right of the action. Every action counts against the monthly allowance, which is 250 on Standard and 25,000 on Pro; a handoff that fires several actions on every stage change adds up fast. Basic lists no custom automations. The automation recipes for sales-to-delivery handoffs show how the actions stack.

Step 8: How do you finish with a dashboard and a handoff?

Open the built-in Sales Dashboard and trim it to the numbers your weekly review uses, then name one internal admin and write down who owns each board. monday’s setup article says the Sales Dashboard and Quotes & Invoices need Pro or above, while the pricing page lists 20, 50 and 250 quotes and invoices a month and 1, 5 and 50 custom dashboards on Basic, Standard and Pro (both checked Oct 25, 2026). The two sources disagree on Basic and Standard, so test the feature in your trial before you rely on it. Archive closed deals on the lower plans so you stay under the active contacts cap.

When should you hire help instead?

Hire help when the setup stops being one pipeline: when sales hands off to onboarding or delivery boards, when you migrate years of data from another CRM, when you need more than 15 fields per board, or when several teams share the account. What a project covers, how long it runs and what it costs, including monday.com’s own $10,500, $21,000 and $31,500 packages, is laid out in monday CRM implementation services. Who to hire and how to check them is on the monday CRM expert page. If you are still weighing monday against another tool, see monday vs Pipedrive and HubSpot vs monday, and the market numbers in monday.com statistics.

If delivery work is tracked in Jira, monday.com’s Jira integration covers what syncs.

Sources

All pages opened on Oct 25, 2026.

• monday.com support, Get started with monday CRM: order of setup, plan requirements for email, quotes and dashboards, core boards cannot be deleted.
• monday.com support, Import from Excel to monday CRM: import menu path and limits.
• monday.com support, Account association: item association setting and its catches.
• monday.com support, How to invite users to join an account: invite and cancel paths.
• monday.com support, Emails & Activities: settings and how it works: connecting Gmail or Outlook.
• monday.com support, Get started with monday automations: Automate, Create from scratch.
• monday.com, monday CRM pricing: seat prices, plan limits, 3-user minimum, 14 day trial.