K18 is a biotech-powered haircare brand with 20+ billion TikTok views, a presence in 100+ countries, and a rapidly growing network of salon partners worldwide. Behind that network are account representatives who manage the full sales relationship with salons — prospecting, nurturing, tracking KPIs, and building the long-term connections that drive product and class sales. That work demands clear visibility into a complex, multi-stage pipeline. An Excel spreadsheet wasn’t giving it to them.
This is how OrangeDot moved one of those representatives off spreadsheets and into a system built for the way she actually works.
What We’ll Cover
- About K18 and the role of account representatives in their global salon network
- Challenge 1: An entire sales pipeline managed in Excel with no clear status visibility or activity tracking
- Challenge 2: No distributor collaboration layer and no reliable paper trail for sales reporting
- How OrangeDot migrated the full database into monday CRM and built a stage-tracked sales workflow
- How OrangeDot implemented activity tracking, pipeline reporting, and salon-to-distributor connections
- The combined impact: strategic pipeline management, proactive selling, and accurate reports in minutes
About the Client
K18 is a biotech-powered haircare brand on a mission to liberate anyone from the constraints of modern haircare and empower them to express themselves fearlessly. Beloved by at-home users in 100+ countries, with over 20 billion TikTok views and 25+ prestigious industry awards, K18’s biology-first product lineup has earned a devoted global following since launch.
As the brand continues to grow, a key part of K18’s sales strategy involves account representatives who work closely with salons around the world to drive product sales and class participation. These reps handle the full sales lifecycle: prospecting new salons, nurturing existing relationships, tracking KPIs, and maintaining the ongoing account management that keeps K18 top of mind with professional partners. Managing all of that across a large and active salon network requires a system that can keep up — and the spreadsheet wasn’t it.
Two Challenges Slowing a High-Volume Sales Rep Down
The account representative’s challenges were practical and immediate. She was managing her entire pipeline manually, losing track of where she stood with each salon, and spending time on reporting that should have been automatic. And because her work touched distributors as well as direct salon accounts, the absence of a shared visibility layer between those two sides of the relationship was creating additional friction.
Every aspect of the account representative’s sales work — her salon contacts, pipeline stages, activity notes, and KPIs — lived in an Excel spreadsheet. Managing relationships with salons across multiple stages of the sales process in a static spreadsheet meant that as her account list grew, keeping track of where she stood with each salon became increasingly difficult.
She would often lose track of progress: which salons she’d recently connected with, which were qualified and ready for follow-up, which were stalled, and what the right next step was for each account. Without a clear visual of pipeline status, she couldn’t move through her accounts with the speed and intentionality her role required. Every check-in on her pipeline meant hunting through rows of data rather than reading a current status at a glance.
The result was a sales process that was reactive and hard to manage at volume — with no ability to quickly identify which accounts needed attention, which were close to closing, and which could be deprioritized while she focused elsewhere.
A sales pipeline managed in a spreadsheet is a list, not a system. It can store contacts and data, but it can’t surface what matters, prompt the next action, or show at a glance where every account stands in the process. For an account representative juggling dozens of active salon relationships, the inability to see the full pipeline clearly isn’t a minor inconvenience — it’s a direct constraint on how effectively she can sell.
Beyond direct salon management, the account representative needed to connect her salon accounts with the distributors who served them — enabling distributor team reporting and giving both sides visibility into shared sales activity. Without a system that supported those connections, that coordination happened informally, created duplication, and left gaps in the picture she could present to leadership.
The reporting problem compounded the issue. Her leadership team needed regular visibility into pipeline status and account progress, but with everything in a spreadsheet, generating those reports required significant manual effort. The time spent assembling reports was time not spent on selling — and because the data had to be manually compiled and formatted, the accuracy of any given report depended on how recently the spreadsheet had been updated.
When a sales rep’s reporting process requires hours of manual work, two things break down simultaneously: the reports themselves become a burden rather than a tool, and the rep’s ability to demonstrate the value of her work to leadership is limited by how much time she can afford to spend building the case. Automated pipeline reporting isn’t just a convenience — it’s a direct enabler of strategic credibility.
The Solution Part One: Full Database Migration and a Stage-Tracked Sales Workflow
Discovery and full database migration into monday CRM
OrangeDot began with a thorough discovery session, reviewing every spreadsheet the account representative was using to understand how her sales process actually worked in practice. Based on those findings, the team migrated her entire database into monday CRM — ensuring every salon record, contact detail, and pipeline data point transferred accurately and completely, with no loss of historical context.
Stage-tracked pipeline workflow
OrangeDot built a workflow within monday CRM that maps every step of the account representative’s sales journey with each salon. Every account moves through clearly defined stages — including qualified, active nurture, and closed — with status visible at a glance across the full pipeline. She can now see instantly where every salon stands, what the next action is, and which accounts need immediate attention versus which can wait.
High-level and granular views in the same system
The monday CRM setup gives her the ability to toggle fluidly between a 50,000-foot overview of her full pipeline and a granular view of individual account details, tasks, and history. She can think strategically about her portfolio at the top level and then drop into the specific account-level detail she needs to act — all within the same platform, without switching between tools or documents.
The Solution Part Two: Activity Tracking, Pipeline Reporting, and Distributor Connections
Activity tracking for every salon interaction
monday CRM’s activities feature gives the account representative a centralized log of every meeting, call, and visit with her salons. Call summaries, visit notes, and follow-up commitments are all stored within the relevant account record — creating a complete, searchable history of every interaction. She no longer has to rely on memory or hunt through email threads to reconstruct what was discussed with a particular salon or when she last made contact.
Automated pipeline reporting for leadership
With all pipeline data living in monday CRM and updated in real time as she moves through her accounts, pipeline reports that previously required hours of manual compilation are now generated directly from the system. Leadership gets accurate, current reporting that reflects the actual state of her accounts — and she gets that time back to spend on the work itself.
Salon-to-distributor connections for shared visibility
OrangeDot configured the CRM so that salon accounts can be linked directly to the distributors who serve them. This connection gives both the account representative and the distributor team visibility into shared sales activity — enabling distributor team reporting and reducing the coordination friction that had previously come from managing those relationships through separate, disconnected tracking.
The Combined Impact
From Reactive to Proactive Selling
With clear pipeline visibility replacing the ambiguity of an Excel spreadsheet, the account representative can now approach her accounts strategically. She knows exactly where every salon stands, what the next step is, and where to focus her energy to move the needle. Instead of reacting to what she stumbles across in a spreadsheet, she’s working from a system that tells her what matters today.
Multiple Accounts, Managed Simultaneously
The combination of pipeline stage visibility, activity tracking, and the ability to switch between overview and granular views means she can now manage a large and active salon network without losing track of any account. Juggling dozens of relationships — each at a different stage, with different next steps — is no longer a matter of memory and manual tracking. The system holds the context so she can move quickly.
Accurate Reports Delivered Without Manual Work
One of the most significant practical improvements has been in reporting. What previously required significant manual effort to produce — assembling data from a spreadsheet into a coherent view of pipeline status for leadership — is now available directly from monday CRM. Reports are accurate, current, and generated without her having to build them by hand. Leadership gets better visibility into her accounts, and she gets back the time she was spending on manual report preparation.
A Complete Paper Trail Across Every Account
Every interaction, status change, and activity is now logged automatically in the CRM, creating a reliable paper trail across her entire account portfolio. Both she and her leadership team have increased confidence in where things stand and what the future outlook is for every salon in her network — based on data that’s always current and always accessible.
Every salon at a clear pipeline stage · All meetings and calls logged in one activity feed · Salons linked to distributors for shared visibility · Pipeline reports generated automatically, not manually assembled
FAQs
Why monday CRM specifically for this type of account management work?
monday CRM is built with sales teams in mind — it includes pipeline stage tracking, activity logging, contact management, and reporting features that are purpose-built for the day-to-day workflow of an account representative. Unlike a general-purpose spreadsheet or project management tool, monday CRM surfaces the information a sales rep needs to act on rather than requiring her to find it. OrangeDot recommended the transition to monday CRM specifically because its features mapped directly to how this representative was already working, without requiring her to rethink her process from scratch.
How does the database migration process work, and is historical data preserved?
OrangeDot’s migration process begins with a discovery session that reviews the existing data structure in detail — understanding what fields exist, how they’re used, and what the equivalent structure should be in monday CRM. The migration is then carried out to move all records accurately and completely, preserving the historical data that the rep depends on to manage her relationships. Nothing gets left behind or reformatted in a way that makes it harder to use.
How does the salon-to-distributor connection work inside monday CRM?
monday CRM supports linked records between different boards, which allows salon accounts and distributor records to be connected directly. When a salon is linked to a distributor, relevant sales activity is visible from both records — so the account representative and the distributor team have shared visibility into what’s happening with shared accounts. This replaces the informal coordination that had previously been required to keep both sides aligned.
Can this type of setup scale if the account representative takes on more salons?
Yes. monday CRM is built to handle growing contact databases and expanding pipelines without performance degradation. New salons are added using the same record structure, existing workflows apply automatically, and the pipeline reporting updates in real time regardless of how many accounts are active. The system becomes more valuable as the portfolio grows, because the visibility it provides scales with the volume in a way that a spreadsheet fundamentally cannot.
Final Thoughts
For an account representative managing dozens of active salon relationships across multiple pipeline stages, the quality of her tools directly determines the quality of her selling. A spreadsheet can hold data. It can’t tell her what to do next, show her which accounts are at risk, or generate the reports that demonstrate her pipeline’s health to leadership. A CRM built for sales can do all of those things — which is exactly what monday CRM, configured correctly, gave her.
This engagement is a reminder that the case for a better system doesn’t require a large team or an enterprise-scale problem. A single rep with a clear need and the right implementation partner can transform how she works — and what she’s able to accomplish because of it.
If your sales team is managing accounts and pipelines through spreadsheets, we can help you move to something built for the work. Talk to an OrangeDot expert →