How a phased Capsule CRM audit and roll-out gave a growing social-impact software group one place to run its sales pipeline, projects and customer data.
Who are The Mondrem Group?
Named after the ancient forest of Mondrem in Cheshire, The Mondrem Group is an ecosystem of not-for-profit community interest companies on a mission to shape places where people thrive. Mondrem CIC works to make public services brilliant by supporting the wellbeing and leadership of the people delivering them, with expertise in local authority planning departments. Its sister company, Nurture CIC, focuses on creating places of happiness in the communities it serves. Both reinvest what they earn back into their social mission, based from Keele University’s Science and Innovation Park in Staffordshire.
Alongside this, the group’s software partner, Openplan, delivers Work View – a SaaS product that helps local authority and case-based teams understand workload, track productivity and forecast the impact of change. As the group has grown, so has the number of people, projects and prospects that need to be tracked day to day, and Capsule CRM sits at the heart of how the team runs its sales pipeline, project delivery and contact data across this work.
The challenge
Before working with VK Business Consulting, The Mondrem Group had Capsule CRM in place but wasn’t getting close to the value it could offer. A CRM audit found usage varied across the team- which meant information sat in silos rather than in one shared place. Email activity wasn’t reliably tracked against contacts, there was no clearly mapped customer journey from enquiry through to contract renewal, and the underlying contact data lacked the structure needed for reliable segmentation and reporting.
As CEO Mike Astbury explains, this wasn’t a new problem: “My past experience of CRM systems was that the balance of effort and change to routine versus the benefit gained wasn’t always right – and that’s part of why we chose Capsule in the first place.”
How the audit-led roll-out helped
Working in the reverse order to a typical build, VK Business Consulting started with projects, then the sales pipeline, and finished with the databank – deliberately sequencing the work so each area was signed off before moving to the next. Key elements included:
- Focused sales pipeline: a much more organised, disciplined view of opportunities, replacing an approach that had previously been a less structured.
- Project delivery boards: Capsule now used for projects in a way the team “never used to do” – described as providing much greater visibility across projects than ever before.
- Databank clean-up: a thorough review of the full contact list to identify what was missing, what needed removing, and what tags and custom fields each contact required, with the team now equipped to maintain and build on that data themselves.
The difference it made
The clearest change has been Capsule becoming the group’s single version of the truth. “When we run the business every week and we’ve got that practical operations meeting, it is Capsule that is our primary source of everything,” says Mike. “Every operational and project update is on Capsule, on the screen, when we’re working through it. That just was not the case previously.”
That discipline has changed day-to-day sales behaviour too. Mike describes now updating Capsule in real time whenever a relevant conversation happens, and says the gap between contacting a customer and following it up has shrunk to almost nothing: “If we’re not contacting a customer, we’re deciding not to contact a customer, not forgetting to.” With reliable pipeline data in place, the team also has a clearer, more confident read on what business is coming – “there’s a lot less judgment about what’s coming and what isn’t. We know exactly where we are.”
Better data has also meant older opportunities can be revisited with real evidence behind them. One example: a sales conversation with a council that ended in “no” two years ago is now back in the pipeline, after the team spotted – through Capsule’s tracked history – that the prospect’s circumstances had changed since. “It’s still going back and being able to see a conversation within an opportunity,” Mike says.
Project Lead Yash Gavali, who hadn’t used any CRM software before Capsule, has seen it become part of how the whole team works: “It’s turned out to be a great software for team coordination. We’ve spent time tailoring it to fit everyone’s role in the company – for Mike, it’s the sales pipeline; for the delivery team, it’s the project boards – and now it’s part of our everyday operations, like our ops meetings, where we give updates from it.”
Advice for others
“Early on, you pushed us to think not about what’s in this for the organisation, but what’s in this for Lucy, what’s in this for Yash, what’s in this for Mike – and how it makes their lives easier. That was extremely good and flexible advice, because a CRM won’t sustain if you don’t think that way.”
Mike, CEO, The Mondrem Group
It’s advice Mike sees as central to why the roll-out has stuck: giving each role a reason to use the system, rather than treating adoption as a top-down mandate.
Looking ahead
With projects and the sales pipeline now embedded, the team continues to build on and maintain the contact data set up during the original project, led by Yash Gavali, who has taken on ownership of it going forward. VK Business Consulting has stepped back into an on-call support role – available for training refreshers, SOPs and further guidance whenever The Mondrem Group needs it, with Yash as the main point of contact.
Is your team’s CRM data working as hard as it could?
If The Mondrem Group’s journey from scattered systems to one shared source of truth sounds familiar, get in touch to talk through a CRM audit for your business.
