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Case study · CRM + Pipeline
The margin was hiding in plain sight.
How a week of deliberate CRM work — and a new website wired directly into it — surfaced an $80K deal, freed a sales team from spreadsheet reporting, and reshaped how a 50-person company decided which deals were worth chasing.
- Client
- Technology reseller & radio service provider (anonymous)
- Engagement
- CRM rollout, website build, pipeline & sales process
- Industry & size
- 50+ people · $10M+ revenue
- Published
- 2024
At a glance
One deliberate week. Five focused days.
A 50-person technology reseller and radio service provider had started a CRM rollout, but adoption was uneven. Sales lived in five private spreadsheets. Website inquiries arrived as emails. Nobody could see the pipeline. In one week I aligned the team, configured Monday.com around the agreed model, shipped a Next.js site with forms wired straight into it, and trained sales and ops on the live system.
- Client
- Technology reseller & radio service provider (anonymous)
- Engagement
- CRM rollout · website build · pipeline + sales process
- Industry & size
- 50+ people · $10M+ revenue
- Published
- 2024
Headline stats
$80K+
Single upsell in the first two weeks, from signal already in the pipeline.
25+
Reporting hours per week reclaimed across the 5-person sales team.
~50%
Qualitative handoff efficiency gain reported by the 10-person ops team.
1 wk
From kickoff to fully deployed CRM, website, and trained team.
This $80K didn't require a new product, a new pricing model, or a new hire. It required one view of one pipeline. The deal was already in the building. Nobody could see it.
01
The challenge
A stalled rollout and a spreadsheet tax.
The client was a 50+ person, $10M+ technology reseller and radio service provider. They sold parts, they installed systems, and they serviced what they sold. The work was there. The problem was that nobody could see it clearly.
They had started onboarding Monday.com, but adoption was uneven. Most teams were still running the business out of their own Excel spreadsheets — each one a private source of truth, none of them talking to each other.
Symptoms on the ground
- 01Five salespeople pulling numbers out of multiple spreadsheets every day to produce their own reports.
- 02Invoicing data re-keyed and reformatted by hand because no two spreadsheets matched.
- 03Website service inquiries arriving as emails, then copied into whatever system the receiving rep happened to use.
- 04No pipeline view across the team — deals sat in individual inboxes and individual tabs.
- 05A shared suspicion that money was being left on the table, with no way to prove it or point at where.
Five salespeople. Five private spreadsheets. One pipeline nobody could see.
Stalled rollout → live in 1 week
02
Why I got the call
Someone who would build it, not scope it.
I came in through a prior colleague who knew two things about me: I handle project management and tooling end-to-end, and I don't spend the engagement building a deck about the engagement.
They needed the system stood up, the website built, and the team trained — and they needed someone who could do all of it without handing off the hard parts to a second vendor.
Three reasons this engagement got the call
Build, don’t brief
I wasn't there to describe the stalled rollout back to them. I was there to finish it.
Full-scope, one seat
CRM configuration, website in Next.js + TypeScript, API integration, training — one person, one accountability line.
A quick note from me — this engagement needed alignment before it needed software. The reason it landed in one week is that leadership was already bought in. Tools don't fix culture. When the culture is ready, tools move fast.
03
Phase 01 — Align, then build
One week. Five deliberate days.
Normally I'd open with “measure the waste first.” This one was different — the measurement didn't exist yet. The CRM was half-adopted, the website wasn't feeding anything, and the pipeline was a concept instead of a view. You can't diagnose a system that isn't running. So the first phase was building the seeing.
The five days
Day 01
Alignment
Sat down with sales leads and PMs. Agreed on pipeline stages, qualification criteria, what a "deal" looked like across service, resale, installation, and maintenance. No software touched yet.
Day 02
Build
Configured Monday.com around the agreed model. Built a Next.js + TypeScript website with custom forms wired into the Monday.com API — service and lead requests dropped straight into the pipeline.
Day 03
Validate
Ran real inquiries and real deals through the system with the sales team. Found the rough edges. Fixed them same-day.
Day 04
Train
Walked sales and PMs through the live pipeline, dashboards, and the handoff points between teams.
Day 05
Train again, tweak
Second training pass after a day of real usage. Small adjustments based on what people actually did, not what they said they would do on day four.
04
Phase 02 — Kill the spreadsheet tax
Real-time dashboards where there used to be a daily reporting chore.
The first thing the new system took off the team was the thing nobody had been tracking: the hours spent every day reproducing what the CRM could now produce for free.
Before, each of the five salespeople was pulling numbers out of multiple spreadsheets daily. Invoicing was its own tax — reformatted and re-entered by hand because no two source spreadsheets used the same structure. After, dashboards lived inside Monday.com and updated in real time. The daily reporting chore disappeared.
What the dashboards returned to the team
25+ reporting hours / week
Reclaimed across the 5-person sales team. Roughly 5 hours per rep, every week, returned from manual spreadsheet work.
~50% handoff efficiency lift
Qualitative gain from the 10-person ops team. Handoffs now include complete, accurate needs on the first pass.
Many sources of truth → one
Private spreadsheets replaced by a shared pipeline every team could see and act on.
05
Phase 03 — The reveal
15–20% on parts. ~80% on services. Nobody could see the split.
Once the pipeline was live and the data was clean, a view opened up that leadership had suspected for years but never been able to put on a screen: where the money actually came from.
What changed once it was visible
- 01Faster disqualification of parts-only small deals that were eating sales time.
- 02Cleaner sales-to-ops handoff so small deals got processed and cleared off the backlog quicker.
- 03More time to chase packages, installations, service contracts, and white-glove maintenance.
The deal-shape split
Small parts deals — $4–9K · 15–20% margin
Quick, low-friction, low-margin. The team had been treating them as bread and butter.
Packaged installs / service contracts — $50–120K · ~80% margin
Longer cycle, higher complexity, far better economics. Suspected but never visualized next to time-spent-per-deal.
The pivot wasn't “stop serving small customers.” It was “stop treating small deals like they deserve the same attention as six-figure ones.” The visualization made that call obvious to everyone at once, which is the only way a sales culture actually changes.
06
Phase 04 — The $80K unlock
A pattern that was invisible in five inboxes became obvious in one pipeline.
In the first weeks of the new system live, a client showed up in the pipeline with multiple small opportunities spread across more than one sales rep — parts, installs, small service asks. Individually, they totaled under $10K in disconnected deals. Individually, that’s all anyone had ever seen.
On one pipeline view — with lead qualification showing it was a larger business and the deal shapes suggesting an in-flight larger project — the pattern was unmistakable. The team formulated a package and presented it before the next verbal contact. The website integration kept feeding this loop: parts requests became early signal for sales to formulate a package before the first call.
The view that made the call obvious
Previous view: ~$10K disconnected
Small deals spread across multiple reps. Nobody had the whole picture.
New view: $80K+ package
One client, one pipeline, one offer — identified and won because the pipeline made the pattern legible.
Time to unlock: <2 weeks
From go-live to the first material upsell that only existed because the system existed.
07
Change management
The tools work when the teams want them to.
Not every team at the client adapted. Sales, project management, and operations — the teams I was directly engaged with — were ready, aligned, and executing from day one. Other groups (finance, purchasing, admin) were slower to move, and some were still running the old spreadsheet-pulling routine the CRM was designed to eliminate.
It didn't hurt the outcome for the teams in scope. It did create a foreseeable pain point: every team that stays on the old workflow becomes a manual bridge the others have to walk across. The bottleneck doesn't disappear — it moves.
Final impact
What one deliberate week actually did.
Reporting hours saved
25+ per week across the 5-person sales team.
Handoff efficiency
~50% lift reported by the 10-person ops team.
Single upsell
$80K+ — surfaced and won in the first two weeks of go-live.
Time to live
1 week — kickoff to fully deployed CRM, website, and trained team.
Sources of truth
Five private spreadsheets → one shared pipeline.
Conclusion
Visualizing your data in real time — without spending hours producing the view — inevitably surfaces waste you didn't know you had and opportunities already sitting in the pipeline.
The margin was always there. The system made it visible.
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