folk vs monday : Which CRM for agencies wins?

In the fast-paced world of agency work, maintaining consistent pipeline execution while ensuring project delivery is a constant challenge. Many agencies grapple with the fragmentation of prospect context, which often sprawls across various inboxes, calendars, and spreadsheets. This disorganization can lead to missed follow-ups, broken handoffs, and unreliable forecasting. A CRM for agencies must not only accelerate new business but also preserve historical account data crucial for renewals, upsells, and referrals.

Enter folk and monday CRM—two robust platforms that address these challenges from unique perspectives. Folk is an AI-driven solution that centralizes contacts and conversations with minimal setup, catering particularly to agencies juggling multiple relationships. On the other hand, monday CRM offers a highly customizable platform built around adaptable workflows, making it perfect for teams already leveraging monday.com for project management.

The choice between folk and monday CRM hinges on the complexities of your agency's processes, required customization levels, and the degree of ongoing management you can commit to implementation and administration.

Perché le agenzie avranno bisogno di un CRM nel 2026?

Le agenzie non perdono entrate a causa della mancanza di domanda. Le entrate diminuiscono quando le informazioni sui lead vengono disperse tra caselle di posta elettronica, calendari, thread Slack e fogli di calcolo e quando i follow-up dipendono dalla memoria anziché da un sistema. Un CRM crea un'unica fonte di verità per potenziali clienti, clienti, partner e rinnovi, in modo che i passaggi successivi rimangano visibili e la responsabilità sia chiara.

✔️ Visibilità della pipeline e previsioni senza fogli di calcolo

✔️ Contesto centralizzato di potenziali clienti e clienti attraverso e-mail, chiamate e riunioni

✔️ Follow-up, passaggi di consegne e passaggi successivi standardizzati all'interno del team

✔️ Chiara attribuzione della responsabilità su ogni lead, accordo e account per evitare perdite

✔️ Monitoraggio delle prestazioni per fonte, linea di servizio e fase di conversione

Nel 2026, le agenzie gestiscono più canali, cicli decisionali più brevi e un numero maggiore di parti interessate per ogni accordo, con clienti che si aspettano tempi di risposta più rapidi e un coordinamento più stretto. Senza un CRM, le proposte rimangono in sospeso, i lead caldi si raffreddano, i rinnovi avvengono in ritardo e i referral vengono gestiti in modo incoerente perché il team non può vedere la cronologia completa e il piano attuale in un unico posto.

Che cos'è il folk?

folk is an AI-driven CRM that centralizes contacts, conversations, and deal context with minimal setup. It is particularly beneficial for agencies managing numerous parallel relationships across clients, partners, and prospects, where context is often scattered across emails, calendars, and messaging platforms. Features like contact enrichment and deduplication ensure that records remain accurate and usable, even when sourced from various channels. Additionally, pipelines and tasks facilitate the tracking of new business, renewals, and referrals in a streamlined manner. This solution is ideal for agencies seeking a CRM that emphasizes coordination and follow-up without the complexity of a robust operational stack.

What is monday?

monday CRM is a customizable platform built on monday.com boards, featuring adaptable columns and views to represent sales and account workflows. It's ideal for agencies already utilizing monday.com for project delivery and seeking to incorporate sales, onboarding, and client operations within a shared workspace. The platform offers pipeline views and dashboards for enhanced visibility, while automations facilitate seamless handoffs and reminders based on status changes. Integrations with marketing tools, forms, and communication platforms allow flexibility depending on your needs. This CRM is typically preferred when adaptability and workflow modeling take precedence over traditional CRM models.

Feature comparison of folk and monday

Multi-pipeline and Custom Stages

folk empowers agencies to structure their pipelines around various revenue streams, such as retainers, projects, partnerships, or hiring. Stages can be tailored to reflect actual handoffs and qualification criteria, ensuring that the pipeline accurately represents the journey of deals. By utilizing separate pipelines, reporting remains organized by service line, preventing any single process from imposing compromises across the entire team. Additionally, updates are kept lightweight, allowing the CRM to evolve alongside the agency.

Setting up pipelines in monday CRM generally occurs on the Deals board, where deals progress through a clearly defined set of stages. These stages can be adjusted to align with the agency's sales process, and the pipeline view serves to visualize advancement by stage. Different workflows can be modeled by creating separate boards and stage structures, depending on the organization's account setup. Stage logic remains linked to the configuration of the board and its columns.

Monitoraggio delle attività dei clienti e delle transazioni

folk ensures that relationship context is seamlessly linked to the appropriate contact and deal by consolidating communication history and activities into a single timeline. Notes, tasks, reminders, and past interactions remain easily accessible where the team collaborates, minimizing those frustrating moments of searching for context during handoffs. This approach streamlines agency workflows, accommodating the multiple team members who engage with the same account throughout sales, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. The objective is rapid access to past events, key insights, and upcoming actions.

In monday CRM, activity tracking is managed through Emails and Activities, connecting to Gmail or Outlook to log communications and present them in a chronological order. This feature supports email logging and tracking, along with various activity types such as meetings, call summaries, and notes. Agencies can also add custom activities, ensuring the activity log reflects their unique documentation of client interactions. Consequently, the timeline serves as a comprehensive overview of what has occurred and what is planned for the future.

Automazione e flussi di lavoro

Folk offers pipeline visibility to monitor deal progression, stage health, and overall momentum, enabling leaders to identify risks early on. Agencies can analyze conversion patterns and cycle lengths from a high-level perspective before delving deeper to understand what is stalled and why. This reporting facilitates discussions surrounding forecasting, capacity planning, and performance by source or service line, ensuring the emphasis remains on clarity and informed decision-making rather than cluttered dashboards.

In monday CRM, automation rules utilize trigger action recipes that respond to changes such as status updates, due dates, item creation, and movement across boards. These automations can send notifications, assign responsibilities, update fields, and create items based on specific conditions. This functionality is often employed to standardize handoffs when a deal progresses to a new stage or to generate follow-up tasks as deadlines approach. The precise actions taken depend on the chosen recipe and the configuration of the columns.

Reportistica e analisi

folk offers pipeline visibility that enables leaders to monitor deal progression, assess stage health, and gauge overall momentum, allowing them to identify risks early. Agencies can analyze conversion patterns and cycle lengths at a high level, and then delve deeper to understand what is stalled and why. Reporting facilitates discussions on forecasting, capacity planning, and performance by source or service line, emphasizing clarity and informed decision-making over convoluted dashboards.

Reporting in monday CRM typically utilizes dashboards that aggregate data from one or more boards, presenting it through widgets like charts and tables. While dashboards facilitate real-time monitoring, reports provide in-depth analysis generated on demand, tailored to specific workflows. Pipeline visibility is determined by the structure of the Deals board and the metrics displayed on the dashboard. Access and sharing are governed by account permissions and dashboard settings.

Integrazioni e igiene dei dati

folk prioritizes clean records by facilitating enrichment, deduplication, and structured fields, which minimize manual data entry. Integrations link popular agency tools to ensure that contact and activity data remain consistent across all channels, effectively combating the common CRM issues of duplicates, outdated information, and missing context that can compromise reporting. A cleaner database not only enhances automation reliability but also maintains a scalable pipeline.

Integrations for monday CRM can be seamlessly implemented through native connectors and external automation platforms like Zapier, allowing for item synchronization and workflow triggers across various applications. Additionally, monday’s documentation describes CRM integration as a means to sync customer data across business tools, further reducing manual entry. To maintain data hygiene, monday.com offers a Manage Duplicates feature that helps identify and resolve duplicate items on boards, which is particularly important when leads are imported or integrated. Ultimately, data cleanliness relies heavily on the design of board structures and the management of incoming flows.

Conclusione

In summary, folk stands out as the premier CRM for agencies by centralizing relationships and providing effortless follow-ups, ensuring clean data and seamless transitions between team members. While monday CRM excels in adaptability and workflow customization, it demands more ongoing management. Both solutions address core challenges, but folk minimizes complexity and maximizes efficiency, making it the ideal choice for agencies looking to maintain consistent pipeline execution without administrative overhead. Choose folk for a streamlined, effective CRM experience.

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