How to make the most of your Capsule trial

Welcome to your Capsule CRM account; managing your customer relationships, sales opportunities, projects and tasks is about to get much easier.

Getting started with any platform can be daunting, but we want to help you make the most of your trial.

This quick reference guide will help you get going with a bang and make the most of your free trial.

Our guide is split into two weeks of tasks but you can also complete the full guide in just one week if you find yourself progressing quickly.

Week one: getting started with Capsule

1) Account setup and data import

Now you’re signed up, you should see the Capsule home page. Let’s get going.

Invite your team

Do you have team members like sales reps or customer success managers who would also benefit from the CRM? Invite them to join.

Add your contact information

Whether you’re adding all your contacts or just a chunk to test out, it’s easy to import your contact details. In the toolbar at the top of the page, click Add + and select Import. This way, you can add multiple contacts and organizations at once. You can also import sales opportunities.

• If you’ve been using another CRM, we recommend following the route to import ‘from another CRM’: it’s a secure method that facilitates data transfer from dozens of popular platforms. Find out more about migrating data here.
• If you’re taking the plunge and moving away from spreadsheets, you’ll need to import your data ‘from a file’. Before you upload your document, ensure your data is accurate and structured well. Looking for an example? Click here to download our sample file.
• Finally, you can also start by importing your client data from accounting apps like Xero. Learn more about importing from Xero here.

With clean, accurate data from the get-go, you can ensure your sales outreach is efficient and your CRM is error-free. Learn about the importance of data hygiene here.

Once everything’s uploaded, you can find it in list view in the People & Organizations tab.

2) Organize your contacts with custom identifiers

Whether you’re just getting started with a small list of prospective clients or you just imported a whole bank of customers, start on the right foot in Capsule with organized data.

Capsule has all the standard data fields to store contact and personal information. But you can also create Custom Fields to record information relevant to your processes.

Similarly, add Tags for quickly identifiable information like their subscription plan (e.g. ‘Free’, ‘VIP’) or their relation to you (e.g. ‘Customer’, ‘Contractor’).

Organizing your data might seem laborious, but it saves time later, allowing for targeted outreach and simpler campaign implementation.

Unsure how Tags and Custom Fields differ? Our product experts created a best practice guide for using custom identifiers.

3) Integrate with your essential tools

The next step is connecting Capsule CRM with your daily tools and systems. Capsule has a vast and evergrowing integration marketplace including tools for:

• Sending and storing emails (via your existing email service provider)
• Launching targeted marketing campaigns
• Tracking invoices and managing your accounts
• Recording customer support conversations
• Creating and distributing contracts and proposals
• Collect data and generate leads with webforms
• and much more.

So, if your business relies heavily on the Google Workspace or Microsoft Office suites, you can set up integrations that enable instant data transfer. That might sound a little unnerving, but automated transfers helps with:

• Generating new leads in your CRM
• Storing outgoing and incoming emails against contact records in Capsule
• Placing and recording client phone calls
• Receiving updates via Slack or Teams when your sales opportunity progresses
• Creating segmented marketing campaigns
• Connecting with platforms like Zapier and Magical to automate thousands of tasks.

There are countless more automations you can come up with - just ask yourself ‘what would make my job easier?’ Do the research and go from there.

If you’re not too sure where to start, we recommend:

1. Connecting your Google or Microsoft Outlook calendars. You can view meetings from your Outlook calendar in Capsule.
2. Integrating with your invoicing and accounting provider.
3. Whether you’re an experienced marketer or aren’t sure where to begin, setting up a Transpond account helps you take care of your communications with a seamless connection.

For now, we recommend sticking to the basics: you can always come back later to set up integrations that optimize prospecting,, and time-tracking.

4) Explore task management

Capsule CRMs Tasks feature is perfect for getting your to-do list in one place, on something you’ll use every day.

You can store any kind of admin or client-facing task in Capsule CRM with a date. When you need to do it, Capsule CRM will let you know.

Users can even set tasks for other team members which is great for handovers and redistributing workloads.

You can view your tasks from the home page in Capsule, or head to the calendar page to see upcoming tasks – here you can filter by the job category and assignee.

We’ve come to the end of our week one guidance. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop here. If you’re happy to get on with it, let’s continue.

​Week two: putting Capsule to work

Now you’ve got everything in place, it’s time you put Capsule to good use.

5) Personalize your Sales Pipelines

Capsule comes with a preset Sales Pipeline: here you can get a top-line view of your new and open sales opportunities. Whether you view your pipeline in Kanban or list view, you can also filter opportunities by their assignee or by tags like ‘LATAM’ for a focused approach.

Follow our guide to setting up your first Sales Pipeline in Capsule CRM.

Customize your Sales Pipelines

As your business grows, you’ll find yourself and your team pursuing revenue in many initiatives. That’s why we created customizable Sales Pipelines: you can add as many milestones as necessary, add the relevant tags and descriptions at each point, and configure the likelihood of conversion at each stage to forecast revenue more accurately.

If you don’t have any unique initiatives in mind, here are a few examples:

• Region-specific pipelines. I.e., EMEA, LATAM
• Fundraising as a non-profit or for your charity
• Cross-selling - Recommending your customers adopt your other products and services
• Up-selling - Identifying clients who would benefit from extra features or personal assistance.

By customizing your sales pipelines and stages to reflect your sales process, you can see how different teams and initiatives are performing. Not to mention, you won’t have to shoehorn your work into a template pipeline.

Monitor Opportunities

You can import opportunities using the same method as your contacts or manually add them from the Sales Pipeline page. At this point, you can add their expected value and determine if they fall into the ‘New’ milestone, or another stage further down the funnel. Since Opportunities are linked to the relevant contact record in Capsule, all your lead interactions and notes are kept together for immediate access.

You can get an instant snapshot of how all your Opportunities are progressing with either the kanban (or ‘pipeline’) view or the list. Or click each Opportunity to access all the history and data associated with the sale.

Head to the dashboard tab on the Sales Pipeline page to view the forecasting and progress of your opportunities by tag, pipeline, and milestone. This provides greater insight into what’s working and what could be improved.

6) Discover Project Boards

While sales pipelines help structure your deals, Project Boards keep client deliverables organized.

Whether you’re monitoring renewals, managing a client onboarding process, or overseeing client work, setting up a Project Board helps you track progress across different stages.

Start by defining the key stages like ‘Planning,’ ‘Execution,’ and ‘Review’ so you can systematically move tasks forward and ensure you don’t miss anything. Or create unique Project Boards with custom stages that mold to your processes.

Each time you create a project within the Project Board, you’ll be asked which contact(s) to attach it to. This link helps keep everything connected in Capsule for easy reference and tracking. You can zoom in from the board to see all the project details, including linked Opportunities, history, and upcoming tasks.

Discover popular Project use cases here.

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7) Automate admin and follow-up

Capsule takes care of the repetitive work so you can focus on what matters most—the work you deliver for your customers.

Use simple automations* that queue your upcoming tasks for any given client. Or implement more sophisticated workflows that send welcome emails when a sales opportunity moves to ‘Won’. *Available on the Growth, Advanced, and Ultimate plans.

Here are a few ways you could use automation:

• Sales teams: Automatically assign Opportunities to the right salesperson based on the Milestone. Notify your team when a sales deal is won, and set up a series of follow-up tasks to ensure a smooth onboarding process for new clients.
• Manufacturing: Streamline sending samples to prospective customers. When a design proposal reaches a specific stage, an automation can generate a linked project for the sample team to handle.
• Bookkeeping: Ensure that Projects move seamlessly between Bookkeepers and Account Managers. Automate task assignments and status changes to maintain consistency in project delivery.

Add Tracks

Create customized Tracks for structured and repeatable project work: you can build sequences of your to-dos and attach them to Opportunities and Project Boards.

These tasks will then appear on the assignee’s home page and in the calendar, so you’ll always know what’s coming up and deliver first-class service to all your customers.

Once you’ve ticked off a task, the Track will automatically pull up the next item. Add time buffers between tasks for realistic deadlines and to set a steady flow of communication.

Implement Workflow Automations

Time to explore Capsule's automation capabilities to reduce your manual input. What might seem daunting at first may unburden you from lots of stress. So what does that look like?

Maybe you’ve reviewed many new leads in Capsule and qualified a group of them. After creating an Opportunity, your custom workflow can assign an owner to each case, distributing the leads throughout your team for you.

In another scenario, you have dozens of open Opportunities in various Sales Pipelines. A workflow can help move that opportunity through the pipeline to eliminate manual admin.

Here’s an example of using Tracks and workflow automations together:

1. Create a specific track for each milestone in a Sales Pipeline. This means each track is tailored to the exact stage in a specific pipeline, ensuring consistency across the team and throughout every Opportunity.
2. Build a workflow automation to trigger when one track is completed, moving the relevant Opportunity forward to the next milestone and prompting the the milestone’s associated track.
3. As a result, you can focus on nurturing your leads - Capsule will keep the Opportunity moving forward in the pipeline.
4. Go one step further and create another workflow that creates a post-sale project for onboarding, triggered when your Opportunity closes successfully.

Learn more about using automation workflows here.

8) Use integrations for enhanced functionality

Feeling settled in? Now you’ve got your key processes set up, it might be time to explore additional integrations to make Capsule the well-oiled machine to do the work for you.

Here are some further steps you can take to solidify Capsule in your tech stack:

• If you use Slack or Teams, set up a connection to receive real-time updates when deals progress
• Ready to try marketing? Connect Capsule with our dedicated marketing platform, Transpond to launch targeted campaigns directly from your CRM
• And if you’re in B2B sales, use prospecting tools like lemlist or Magical’s LinkedIn scraper to build your pipeline and revitalize your outreach.

The more you integrate Capsule with your apps and tools, the less admin you need to do, and the more time you can spend delivering the work that really matters.

This is only the beginning

We hope this guide helps you get started and settled in with Capsule. Our support documents offer plenty more guidelines and how-tos, while our blog provides real-life use cases for the tools you’ve just discovered.

We hold regular customer webinars to help you make the most of Capsule and improve your skills in other areas of your business too.

As a Capsule CRM customer on any plan, you can always get personalized assistance from our friendly support team on anything Capsule or Transpond related. Or click here for some quick-start video guides.

Thanks again for choosing Capsule CRM!

Still considering Capsule? Try any plan free for 14 days and follow this guide to get started in a flash.