Now, before you get stuck in with your shiny new Capsule CRM, we advice you to take a few minutes to think about how you are going to populate the system, and save yourself some time and hassle in the long run.
We will give you some guidelines based on our experiences. Capsule uses organisations and people. One or more people belong to an organisation (in a B2B situation) so you only have to enter general office details once, for example:
Organisation 1: office tel., office address, web address, sector (custom field), tag
> Person 1: mobile, direct dial, email, LinkedIn, prospect (tag)
> Person 2: direct dial, email, twitter
Decide on using custom fields or tags
- Use tags or custom fields when you need them to create lists. Think marketing campaigns, surveys, product notifications, data exports, etc. For example: A list of all contacts tagged as client and based in London.
- Use tags when you might need to apply more than one tag. For example: Names of services/products, a bike shop with a tag for each make they offer: Giant, Trek and Raleigh.
- Use tags when you can’t predefine all the possible values but still want to be able to select previously used values (not possible with a custom field).
- Use data tags if you want to record extra information on a select number of contacts without creating additional custom fields for all contacts.
- Use custom fields for anything that requires a check-box, date, custom value (client number for example) or a generated link.
- Use custom fields where you want to be able to create lists using partial values in that field (tags need to be specific).
Decide on assigning data to people or organisations
- Most business is focused on people, not on brick and mortar buildings. That’s why we will mostly be creating lists of people. Organisations are useful for grouping employees and minimise duplication of general office data.
- Assign personal details like direct telephone numbers, social media, email addresses etc. to people. Assign general information such as office address details and website to the organisation.
- The one exception here might be that if a contact doesn’t have a direct line or personal email address, you might want to put the organisation number/email on the contact as well. This saves you from having to jump to the organisation all the time and also syncs this phone number to Google Apps and your mobile phone, if you have set this up.
- Where you deal with consumers (B2C) all the details are assigned to the person without creating an organisation.
- ! It is possible to create lists of people based on information criteria on their organisation but not the other way around at present. If in doubt, use the organisation to store details.
Decide on which address fields to use
The field options provided by Capsule are: Undefined (blank) / Home / Postal / Office
- Use the undefined field in a B2B environment where there is no need to differentiate between Home or Office.
- Use the Postal / Office addresses if you are an organisation that works a lot with addresses for sending letters, products etc.
Decide on which phone fields to use
The field options provided by Capsule are: Undefined (blank) / Home / Work / Mobile / Fax / Direct
- For people: We would recommend to always assign categories to each number.
- For organisations: We don’t have a preference, blank is fine too for phone numbers (fax will need to be defined of course).
When importing data, we recommend you to add a tag to identify the source, you can delete this later when no longer needed
We advise you to make a decision based on the info above and your own needs and make a note of these ‘conventions’ to be distributed within your organisation. This will allow you to extract the information that you need for campaigns, support and analysis.
! When importing, it is crucial to import organisations and their details first and then, separately, the people belonging to these organisations. If you do this in one batch, all the contact details will be assigned to people and none to organisations.
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