How Backswing Golf Events made time for explosive growth with monday CRM

Backswing Golf Events has a mission of supporting female golfers while they fund their professional golf careers while helping non-profits raise money for charitable causes. They do this by matching charities with professional golfers who bring unique and fun golf experiences to their fundraising events.

Backswing was founded in 2013 by 2 professional female golfers who realized how expensive it can be to get started on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour. They now have 25 full-time employees and a roster of more than 200 female pro-golfers who are involved in more than 3,500 events a year. “They're making a really big impact for the charities, but it's also making it possible for women to pursue a career in professional golf,” says Co-Owner and Director of Sales Taylor Grider.

When Taylor and her co-founders started Backswing, the team was lean and they managed everything through traditional tools, like spreadsheets and email. But as they added more sales representatives and started working with more golfers and events, these manual processes became unmanageable.

“Trying to stay organized within that was a mess,” said Taylor. “I didn't have the visibility I needed. I couldn't look at our company as a whole. It all lived in these individual spreadsheets that didn't communicate with each other.”

Their workflow was time-consuming, and details were getting lost, potentially holding back their business. Taylor knew things needed to change. “I knew right away we needed something but it took a long time to figure out what would work for us,” she said.

Taylor looked at CRMs that were built around other types of similar businesses, like construction. Backswing even adopted their terminology like “job sites” and “contractors” in place of “event locations” and “freelancers.” Ultimately, these workarounds still were not a good fit without customizations that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

One must-have Taylor was having trouble finding was a system that Backswing’s 200+ freelance golfers could access without exorbitant fees. When she learned Backswing could have unlimited guest users at no extra cost with monday CRM, she signed up for a free trial of monday CRM to see what it could do.

“Just seeing that I could build it to be anything I wanted it to be was perfect,” she says. “It actually felt like it fit our business instead of trying to make our business fit a CRM that was built for something totally different.”

Once Taylor set up the framework, she rolled it out to the staff, and they got comfortable using it quickly. “It makes sense to them as people who didn’t have experience with other CRMs,” says Taylor.

Starting with the CRM, Backswing eventually incorporated Work Management alongside it. They now use the two for every part of their business, from tracking leads and managing sales relationship to recruiting golfers and managing events — and plugging it all into finance.

Before using monday CRM, Backswing’s sales team spent a lot of time going back and forth between email and spreadsheets to track leads and clients. Now everything happens in the CRM, making the workflow more streamlined and faster for reps.

“You’re not bouncing back and forth trying to figure out where did I leave off with this client last year? It’s all right there,” says Taylor. “It’s saved everyone so much time, and in sales that's the most valuable thing we could get.”

The Backswing team makes heavy use of automated custom emails at different stages of their workflow. Thousands of emails per month that used to be done manually now happen effortlessly. This means countless hours of work saved and communication that is always on time.

All team members are synced to the same dashboard overview that tracks metrics like number of events per month and types of clients booked. Taylor can see each stage of the sales pipeline and instantly track important stats that drive strategy, like how many leads are at each stage, events booked by client type, and more.

The Backswing team quickly realized they could overhaul how they manage the more than 200 pro-golfers that work with them. Their director of recruitment was able to get that information out of spreadsheets and into monday CRM to better track recruitment, onboarding, and more. And all those contractors have permissions to join boards related to the events they are working at no extra cost.

“With monday, it felt like I got to build it exactly how I wanted it to be; it was able to be completely custom to our business,” says Taylor. They continue to make tweaks every month to fit their processes, and they know that as the business grows monday CRM will be able to adapt with them.

“Our business blew up in the last few years, which is such a blessing, but we wouldn't have been able to support it if we weren't on a system that kept us organized and allowed us to do what we do,” says Taylor.