Because the Bodhi platform integrates with over fifteen different CRM softwares, we get a lot of questions from installers about which CRM is the best for solar businesses. Unfortunately, there’s no universal answer for the industry. How you operate and what you prioritize make a big difference in terms of which CRM will work best for your team. That’s why, before you make decisions about your solar software stack, it’s important to carefully evaluate what you need. Otherwise, you can end up with a platform that just doesn’t make sense for your business — and in some cases can cause staff to mutiny.
We’ve seen this firsthand. We once spoke with an installer that tried to switch to Salesforce for their solar CRM. They were attracted to Salesforce because of the name brand recognition it had as well as the wide variety of features. However, they struggled to make it work for their business. The interface was too cumbersome. Changes required them to always turn to and pay for a Salesforce administrator. Ultimately, they reverted back to monday.com.
Of all the tools that we’ve seen in the solar industry, monday.com is one of the most popular, which is why we consciously chose to integrate with it at Bodhi.
What is monday.com?
At the highest level, monday.com is a project management tool that focuses on improving team management, communication, and efficiency. By offering different “board” templates — spanning Kanbans, Gantt charts, maps, and more — monday.com allows you to organize and automate workflows so your team can easily manage and keep track of projects and their associated tasks.
Even though monday.com is first and foremost a project management tool, it can also be used successfully as a CRM to help manage customers through the sales process. This can be accomplished by having two primary boards: a sales board that your sales team relies on, and an operations board that your operations team relies on. One key benefit of monday.com is that all your customer and project information lives in one place. In order to choose the best CRM for your solar company, consider whether this system that monday.com offers makes sense for your company’s team culture and processes.
The power of Bodhi and monday.com together
When you’re building your solar software stack, interoperability is key. This means that your different platforms and tools should all have the ability to “talk” to each other, seamlessly passing information from one system to the other. If your different softwares are not interoperable, your staff end up having to do things twice — whether that’s entering information twice, clicking a button twice, or uploading documents twice. In the words of a project manager:
“I hate data entry. I really hate doing it twice”
Proper integrations, like what Bodhi has done with monday.com and other popular CRMs, ensure that data seamlessly moves from one system to another. That way, your team never has to do duplicate work, saving them time to work on more high value activities. For example, Bodhi uses the customer information and the project information to automate hyper-personalized communications to your customers.
Bodhi can integrate with essentially any CRM, but our customers have told us that they like using monday.com with Bodhi for a few specific reasons:
- Monday.com is relatively simple to set up. Most users of monday.com report that it only takes a day or so to set up and get the team using.
- Monday.com is very customizable. Views are user-specific, which means users can create custom views that are tailored to the work they care about. This is especially helpful when you have front-end and back-end focused teams working off the same board.
- Monday.com is highly interoperable. It offers the integrations that installers care about, like Google Drive, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Quickbooks, so that all of the platforms in your solar software stack can easily work together and share data.
The one challenge we’ve heard from our customers using monday.com is that because the tool is so flexible and can be used for many different purposes, users need to be trained to use it consistently. However, with the proper training in place, monday.com is a powerful platform that Bodhi can help further enhance.
How monday.com integrates with Bodhi
At Bodhi, we have a proven onboarding process that helps installers debut a new customer experience to their homeowners quickly and effectively. While the mechanics of Bodhi’s integration differs slightly between CRMs, at the highest level we work with your team to ensure that our softwares are fully interoperable so there’s no risk of trapped data, and there’s no need to repeat processes across platforms.
To integrate with monday.com, we work off of a single board to retrieve all the information Bodhi needs in order to deliver an automated and personalized customer experience. By using columns standard to many solar businesses, we can ensure that the messages your customers are receiving are customized and perfectly timed.
Monday.com’s user-friendly interface means that you can move columns around and apply filters when changing processes in a way that feels easy and natural. Additionally, should you need to add more columns to your board, your team may find it helpful to view a specific record’s data vertically rather than horizontally using monday.com's built-in “item card” view.
The Bodhi team can help advise on the best practices in setting up your monday.com board. We’ll also train your team.
Bodhi accounts for your customers can also be automatically created directly within monday.com. If this is something that your team is interested in, all that’s needed is the addition of a “Create Bodhi” column with possible values of Yes and No.
Bodhi can also retrieve contracts, installation photos, and other project documents from monday.com.
This technical onboarding process allows us to quickly get Bodhi integrated into your company’s workflow, so that you can reduce post-install headaches and maximize the customer relationship.
Building your solar software stack with Bodhi
Today’s solar businesses don’t have to compromise on tools. It’s now possible to build a solar software stack that holistically supports the goals of your organization and helps tackle the challenges of project management and customer communications.
As we explain to all of our customers, a CRM, whether it’s monday.com or a monday.com alternative, is the backbone of the solar software stack. That’s why it’s so important to find other solutions that integrate effectively into your CRM and make the most of this data.
If you already have a CRM system that you love, but you’re looking for ways to grow your business or deliver an even better customer experience, we want to help you. Having an efficient and effective CRM is just the beginning. It’s what you do with that CRM’s data and how it’s automated that will help you drive referrals and reviews. Bodhi's solar business management software helps enhance your existing solar software stack by reducing support costs and helping you own the customer experience. Schedule a time with us to learn more about how you can get started with Bodhi.
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