Capsule

What are opportunities?

An opportunity is used to track a potential sale with a customer such as a bid, deal or proposal.

You can:

• share opportunities for collaboration with co-workers.
• get a quick summary of opportunities on the go via the sales dashboard including potential values, where they're up to and what needs to be done next.
• keep track of where each opportunity is at, using milestones such as prospect -> meeting -> proposal -> won etc. Each milestone is linked with a success factor that is used to forecast potential sales revenues. Capsule includes a standard set of milestones or you can configure your own.
• keep track of the history of an opportunity by adding notes and attaching documents.
• generate reports and extracts from the pipeline using configurable filters.

What is a milestone and how do I set them up?

A milestone is a recognizable point in the completion of an opportunity, such as prospect, champion, proposal. Using these milestones, you can keep track of how your new business is moving through the sales pipeline.

You can create your own milestones, or you can select one of the suggested milestone sets shown on Sales Pipeline Dashboard when you first open your account. You create your milestones by clicking Settings > Opportunities.

You set your milestones to meet your business requirements using the following simple rules:

• The milestone percentage should estimate the likelihood of winning the opportunity at this point in your sales process.
• You do need at least two completion milestones to finalize an opportunity:

One that represents a successful completion (eg. won):



One that represents an unsuccessful completion (eg. lost) - you click Close Opportunity flag and percentage set to 0%

Note: When you have saved your milestones you can begin entering opportunities.

How can I link contacts to an opportunity?

When setting up a new opportunity, you select a contact that this opportunity belongs to. If you select a person, Capsule will automatically link the opportunity to their organization and list the person as a contact:

You can add all contacts interested in the opportunity by clicking Add on Contacts.

How do I send an email to all contacts linked to an opportunity?

You create a list of all contacts in the Opportunity by clicking Open contacts in list, then click Email button found on the right hand side of the screen:

What do the graphs represent?

You can quickly get a summary position of your sales pipeline:

• Pipeline Forecast shows the estimated income generated from your pipeline. It is the Pipeline Value distributed by month.
  
  

  



• Pipeline Value is the sum of all opportunities multiplied by their milestone percentages. This shows your pipeline's expected income.
  Total Value is the sum of all opportunities (excluding milestone percentages). This shows your pipeline's maximum income.

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• Pipeline by Milestone is a count of all open opportunities that have reached each milestone. At a glance you can see if your pipeline is a healthy funnel shape.

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• Conversion Rate calculates the number of successful opportunities against all opportunities that are being closed over the last month, quarter and year.

What if an opportunity has a revenue stream that is likely to be received over a period of time?

You can set the income to be distributed evenly over a period. If you enter an expected income of 5,000 per month for 3 months, then the opportunity will be worth a total of 15,000:

In this example, the opportunity has an 80% probability of winning. Capsule will add to the Sales Pipeline, an expected revenue of 4,000/month for 3 months from close date on 1 August.

Can I have different currencies for each opportunity?

You select the currency to be used for each opportunity:

To create the dashboard summary graphs, Capsule converts the opportunity values into your default currency.

How do I change the milestones and percentages?

You may find that an opportunity's likelihood of winning is different to the default percentage. You can overwrite the percentage and save.

Over time you may realise your milestones' default percentages do not reflect your current likelihood of completing opportunities. You can update these by clicking Settings > Opportunity Milestones. The new percentage is applied to all your new opportunities. All opportunities already running will stay on the old percentage.

You can change a milestone name and it will immediately update on all opportunities.

You can only delete milestones if they are not being used.

How do I assign the opportunity to someone else?

You click on Opportunity > Edit, select the new owner and save.

There is no automatic update of tasks to the new owner. You can also manually re-assign these if required.

Should I tag an opportunity?

Tags can be used to categorize your opportunities:

The pipeline dashboard provides a breakdown by tag allowing you to click through to see the opportunities for each tag. You can also use these tags to filter your opportunities in a list or report.

How do I save an email to an opportunity?

You can move an email from the history of a contact to an opportunity:

• find the email on the contact's history and click edit
• click on the dropdown list Linked to in the top right corner of the email



• select the opportunity and save

Capsule moves the email from the contact history to the opportunity history.

How do I create a list or report of opportunities?

Capsule has a number of standard lists you can access by clicking Sales Pipeline > List:

You decide how you would like to use this list. For example, you may want to export the list or tag all these opportunities.

Instead of a standard list, you may wish to create your own list. For example, creating a list for following up opportunities that have had no action in the last 30 days:

You can save this list by clicking on Save List on the right hand side of the window:

This list becomes available on the dropdown of Saved Lists:

How do I create a sales report?

You create a list by clicking Sales Pipeline > List > Create a new List:

This report lists all opportunities won in the last 30 days. You can select further filters to show all business completed by different reps or for different milestones. You can save this report by following the instructions above.

How do I delete an opportunity?

You delete an opportunity by clicking Actions for this Opportunity > Delete.

When you delete an opportunity, all it's history is removed from Capsule and it will not contribute to the statistics on the Sales Pipeline Dashboard. If you want to keep the opportunity's history then close (rather than delete) by selecting a milestone that is 0% and closed. For example:

Note: deletion is permanent and there is no undo.