As the kiddies go back to school, many entrepreneurs and side hustlers are getting back to business. And there’s no better time like the present to whip our businesses into shape. For the entire month I am going to be sharing tools that I have used to help kick my business into shape. For myself, I’m always checking out new tools that can help me be a better businesswoman. Before I ever start freelancing, I wish someone had told me the importance of having a CRM.
Two years ago, I came across Capsule and immediately thought of my accountability partner I had at the time. There was this one feature that stood out and it was the “Sales Pipeline”, where you can monitor your leads and how many deals you are closing. All of the data is display in these really neat graphs. So I pass along the recommendation and then thought to myself, “Maybe I should take Capsule for a spin?” The only other CRM I ever used was 37 Signals’ Highrise. It was working for me, so I wasn’t actively looking to switch to anything new.
After about a week or so, I was hook and made the switch to using Capsule and haven’t looked back. I’m a big advocate of maximizing your use of free tools until (a) you have enough income coming in to justified paying for it or (b) you can get a return on your investment fairly easy.
Currently, I am using the free plan that Capsule offers but I would pay for it if I needed to. Under this plan I’m allowed to have two users but I’m a solopreneuer. If and when I grow beyond a 2-person team and my income is higher than my expenses, then I wouldn’t mind paying the $12/month per user. If you are doing the math, you and two partners using the same Capsule account will cost $36 or $432 a year.
Also under this plan you get 250 contacts, which is personally way more then what I need. The only thing I don’t like when it comes to the contacts (and this is with all CRMs) is that the person and their company name are counted as separate entries. This means you can keep track of a minimum of 124 clients (assuming they each have a company name). Your information (and other users you add) are counted against that 250 as well. There’s a little bit of a learning in the beginning, if you are not familiar with working with a CRM but things start to run smoothly once you have it set up the way you like. Below is more of breakdown of my pros and cons.
Pros
- Daily email reminders of tasks with the ability to have repeating tasks (this was on my wish list when i started using this tool so I was happy when it was added)
- Custom fields that allow you to customize it to your business
- The tracks feature which you can use to help you create systems within your business
- Using tags to group contacts, making it easy to create segmented lists
- Restoring from trash
- Linking with other tools such as Mailchimp (most will need a premium account)
Cons
- Don’t like the calendar. It’s more for the tasks than a regular calendar.
I know what you are thinking, “There must be something more that you do not like about it?”. Honestly, not at the moment. Since I have been using it two years now, so many of my cons have been addressed and fixed. For example, the first version of the mobile app for the iPad sucked. The interface was tiny and when you zoom in it got bigger but also blurry. Therefore I had to use a third party app. And like I mention before the adding of repeating tasks, restoring items from trash, and more, all which they didn’t have two years ago.
Here’s how you can use Capsule in your business
- Take a weekend or however long you need to pull all of the information you need into place. You are going to use that time to input your contacts and their information into the CRM.
- You need to have a business email address that is separate from your personal email. This should be standard practice. In that email you need to create a new contact with your Capsule mail drop address. Every time you email a client, reply to them, etc., you are going to BCC or blind copy to your capsule account. This will create a copy of the email in your CRM so you can have a history of the conversation and not have to search your inbox looking for a needle in a haystack. You have to make sure the email address you have for your client in the CRM matches the one you are email so this work smoothly.
- Every Sunday or the day you choose to map out your workweek, add all of them into Capsule. You can also assign tasks to users and link it to a specific client. Make sure you check the option to get email reminders and when you complete a task check it out your list.
- Take time to understand the sales pipeline and case features. Figure out how to use it for your business. Every time you get a potential new client lead put this in the CRM. Sets up your tracks to keep you on the right path.
As you get comfortable with the tool, you can start adding custom fields, like birthdays so you can send your clients a card. Overall I am very happy with Capsule. They had made a lot of improvements over the last two years from the mobile app to repeating tasks. It’s has been a great asset to my business and I hope it will be for yours.
Do you use Capsule or any other CRM in your business?