You can get along fine for a very long time with spreadsheets that keep track of the different aspects of your business. They’re easy to use and don’t need a lengthy training period. But once you start to grow and you need to more staff, you may find spreadsheets don’t give you enough or actionable insights. Even worse, not all historical data is stored.
This is the point when you want to move on from spreadsheets to a CRM software. A customer relationship management software to take you and your sales and marketing teams to the next level. Even knowing this, you may balk at the idea of signing up for an expensive CRM that gives you a ton of options and features but you can’t hit the ground running because you and your team need lengthy training.
Capsule certainly hits the right spot: It’s a CRM software that allows you to keep track of, manage the business relationships between your organisation and your leads and clients, and maximise sales opportunities. All this with minimal user (your) input and it also doesn’t eat into your pockets.
Capsule was founded, because at that time, Duncan Stockdill, Phillip Haines, and Wendy Rule found that the then available CRM solutions were too difficult to use or offered too little. The founders developed and launched Capsule in 2009 to help businesses stay organised, understand their customers, and build stronger relationships with them. The company is based in the UK and currently, it boasts over 10’000 customers world-wide.
Pros and cons of Capsule
Capsule is a cloud-based CRM with which you can organise your customer data, see your sales growth, and help you build deeper relationships with customers. You can also use it to nurture your relationships with your partners and suppliers. It allows you to
- capture, organise and analyse leads
- track communication with leads, customers, partners, and vendors
- allocate tasks to your teams and get organised
- see in which stage your leads are, meaning you can identify leads and how far they’ve progressed into converting into customers
Pros
- no feature overwhelm that translates into costing you an arm and a leg
- cost effective
- signup without credit card
- starter plan is free forever for 2 users and 250 contacts
Cons
- No built-in marketing automation tools – but you can integrate with Mailchimp and others
- Reporting is only for paid accounts
Who is Capsule for?
Since Capsule was designed with ease of use in mind, anyone will find is intuitive. That said, don’t let its clutter-free and user-friendly interface fool you. It focuses on tracking relationships and sales pipelines. You can follow all the interactions that are conducted along the way. As you can see the complete timeline of communication, you’ll find it helps you reduce customer queries and gain better customer satisfaction.
In other words, it’s a good fit if you want a focused, easy-to-use sales tool without a steep learning curve. It’s a practical tool to have for SMBs since it will help you discover bumps and inefficiencies in your sales processes.
How easy is Capsule to use?
Capsule is refreshingly easy to use with a clean, distraction-free, and self-explanatory interface. Capsule main menu gives you access to its features
- the home icon shows you the latest activities, upcoming tasks, and latest updates
- click on the person icon to browse your contacts
- allocate tasks and plan our week in the third tab with the calendar icon
- the fourth icon opens your sales pipeline
- manage your projects in the 5th tab
- understand your customers in the 6th tab which pulls up your reporting
- automate your tasks by setting up your workflows in the last tab
And if you don’t remember where a tool is, there’s a universal search box that can help you find anything from anywhere.
Unless you’re a complete technophobe, you won’t encounter many difficulties using Capsule even if you’ve never used a CRM before.
Capsule makes it even easier for you to be productive immediately: After your first login, it takes you through its main features with a checklist to be completed within 7 days.
Key features
You’ll find that Capsule doesn’t come with features overload but that’s exactly what it wants: to make a useful tool that doesn’t take ages for you to come to grips with. Yet, it understands that every organisation and company is different with unique workflows and needs, especially regarding what it needs to track. That’s why it lets you shape your experience in just the way you want it, with its wide range of configurations.
Contacts
In the first tab, you get all everything you need to add or manage a person or an organisation. You can treat this just as a “simple list of all your contacts” but it’s the core of Capsule. You can segment your entire list into sublists, tag your contacts for easier organisation, and perhaps most importantly, view the entire communication history of a contact.
For this magic to happen, you need to connect your account to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. This means you can see your contacts and events in Capsule. If you want to send email from within Capsule (for the communication history), you need to connect it with your Gmail or Outlook accounts.
Calendar
Create and allocate contact-specific tasks to a team member in the third tab. Cool is that it ties in neatly with its task and project management features. You’ll see all the tasks and can filter by the stage the task is in, the assignee, category, or related to. Helpful is also that you can set up tasks in relation to each other. With that, I mean that task B needs to wait for task A to be marked as completed and then only can it be started.
If you know Trello or Asana, you’ll appreciate that Capsule has a similar project and task management. You can use it as a simple helpdesk for customer enquiries.
Opportunities and pipeline
You could say this is the core of Capsule. At first glance, it may appear basic, yet it’s an effective opportunity management. That’s because Capsule understands that each organisation needs to track different data and so you can create custom milestones and create pipelines to match your sales processes with your goals.
Capsule will then go in and reveal where your sales pipeline is leaking, what new opportunities are, and in general lets you make informed decisions.
Reporting
You’ll only have access to reporting if you’re subscribed to a paid account. If you’re using its Basic plan, you’ll need to work with the pipeline feature.
Depending on your account, you’ll get
- activity reporting
- sales pipeline dashboard
- reporting by team
- detailed sales reporting
and you can tailor your reports to your needs.
Capsule integrations
You want your CRM to talk to a number of services and tools. For one, if you want to have the entire communication timeline with your contacts, you’ll want to connect it to your email client or chat provider.
It also provides integrations to inventory management, invoicing, accounting, project management – in short, it comes with many integrations to household name services that you’re probably already using.
Capsule customer support
Get in touch with the support team from Monday to Friday via its messaging tool. You can also opt for email or if you don’t mind others knowing your issues, ask via Twitter.
Capsule pricing
Capsule offers 3 paid plans. Its professional team is for small teams and costs $18 per month. The Teams plan is for growing businesses since it gives you more reporting options and of course, you can store more contacts. Its Enterprise plan is for you if you got 200’000 contacts and need implementation support.
You can sign up for any of the paid plans and try it out for free for 14 days, no credit card needed.
Is Capsule the right tool for you?
Keeping track of what you talked about or anything you need to know about your leads, customers, partners, and suppliers can be a challenge. And of course, you’ll also want your sales team that may be out and about to log what happened in a conversation with a client. When on the move, you surely also want to start calls, draft and send emails, and have your interactions saved into the timeline with your clients.
Capsule presents an overall great package that would solve the daunting task of keeping in pace with all that’s happening. It has a clean and user-friendly interface both on the desktop and mobile versions. It gives you all you need to uncover any inefficiencies in your organisation’s sales processes.
That being said, it misses marketing or more precisely, built-in marketing automation tools. But that’s easily remedied because you can just integrate it with a provider such as Mailchimp. If that’s a no-go for you, you might like Bitrix24 or Hubspot which has built-in marketing automation.
Original post here: Capsule review
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