Capsule CRM Guide

What we covered

• Why you started looking: your practice management system covers patients but not the business behind the practice.
• Your A2 desk pad and the spreadsheet dashboard it led to.
• How patients reach you, and why that side stays out of Capsule.
• One-to-one notes, and the contacts you call feeders.
• What you want to see: daily activity building into longer views, and progress against your targets.

Notes

Where this started. Patient data, clinical notes, scans and letters all live in your practice management system, which works well for patients but gives you no way to zoom in and out of the business itself. You designed a branded A2 desk pad with KPI metrics and daily tracking, found after a few days that it needed to be digital, and had a spreadsheet dashboard drafted. The question was whether a proper system would do that job better. You used Capsule years ago, and it has changed a great deal since.

How patients arrive. Patients book online, are referred to you, or ask you directly, for example at a BNI meeting, and your secretary books in anyone who rings the practice. There is no drawn-out sales process on that side, so patients stay in your practice management system. Clinicians who refer to you, such as surgeons, an anaesthetist and a podiatrist, are already kept there too, but general networking contacts, like a web designer you meet at BNI, belong in a CRM.

Activities and feeders. For each piece of growth activity you want to record who it was with, what you intended, what came of it and any follow-up, much as you would review patient notes before the next appointment. One-to-one notes currently go in the BNI notebook and are usually a line or two. The ones you do keep are for feeders: people who are a source of referrals rather than patients, such as commercial staff at two football clubs in your chapter.

Your growth actions fall into two groups: building relationships with partners who bring patients to you, and generating awareness to attract and convert patients directly. Networking is the only marketing you do at present, which suits a face-to-face, local business.

What you want to see is daily activity that builds into weekly, monthly, quarterly and longer views, with targets set against actuals, for example patients seen against a weekly target, so you can see the gap and decide what to do about it. That means looking back at what you have done and forward at the plan.

Actions

Jay

• Send a photo of the desk pad (done on the call).
• Email your own lists of growth activities (done on the call).

Jaanika

• Build a skeletal example in Capsule and show it on Tuesday 15 September at 3pm.

What we covered

• A walkthrough of a demo Capsule account set up around your referral partnerships and networking, with sample data in it.
• Keeping patients in your practice management system and using Capsule for the business side only.
• How referral partners and potential patients could sit in a sales pipeline, and whether they need a value.
• Logging growth activities, and using goals and reports to see what each week has achieved.
• The mobile app, the Outlook sidebar, Capsule plans, and how the implementation works.

Notes

Contacts and referral partners. In the demo, every contact had fields for their networking group, the date of your last one-to-one and the number of referrals received. A referral partner tag added a second set of fields, partner type, relationship stage and next action, which only appear on contacts that carry the tag. That keeps ordinary contacts uncluttered.

Two kinds of opportunity. You want both in view: referral partnerships, and individuals from networking who may become patients. A referral partnership has no fixed value, so it is measured by how many you convert. A potential patient can carry an average value, knowing that two patients with the same condition may need a different number of sessions. Two ways of handling this were shown: one pipeline with each opportunity tagged as a referral partner or potential patient so you can filter between them, or two separate pipelines, which needs the higher Capsule plan.

Activities, goals and reports. The activity types are deliberately descriptive so you can report on what you did by type over any period. Goals look forward, for example an activity goal of two one-to-ones a month, and reports look back. Activity that is not about another person, such as publishing a blog, can be logged against your own contact record.

A one-to-one is logged as an activity. You can type notes live, or photograph handwritten notes and attach the photo, then add any follow-up as a task. Pinning a note keeps it at the top of the record, so the next one-to-one with that person picks up where the last one left off.

Tasks show as a list and in the calendar. The schedule view shows your week, and you can drag tasks to a different day when networking or clinics fill it up.

With Office 365, the Outlook sidebar lets you file emails against a contact, send email from Capsule and add tasks straight from your inbox. Capsule also has a mobile app for phone and iPad.

Once it is built, you will be able to add and change activity types, custom fields and tags yourself, for example a new growth activity that was not on your original list.

Plans and implementation

Capsule starts at £17 per user per month with one pipeline, and multiple pipelines are £32. Your account is directly with Capsule. Jaanika is a Capsule affiliate, which makes no difference to what you pay.

The implementation is £500 and covers a detailed session on your processes, the build including an initial data import, and a walkthrough session. It runs on an agreement and NDA, invoiced up front.

Actions

Jay

• Think through a typical one-to-one, a typical referral partner, the actions that follow each, and the types of contact you deal with, ready for the setup session. Nothing needs sending in advance.

Jaanika

• Send the agreement, NDA and invoice.
• Send the invite for the setup session on 24 September (done on the call).

What we covered

• Opened your Capsule account on the Starter plan and showed where to add your card.
• Your one-to-one process and the follow-ups that come out of it.
• The networking groups you are part of.
• Your referral partners: who they are, how a partnership forms, and what you want to track.
• Where contacts who are a way in, rather than a partner, should sit.

Notes

Your account. Starter plan, paid monthly, with a 14-day free trial. Add a card under Account Settings, then Account and Plan. Nothing is charged until the trial ends. Your previous Capsule account is closed, which is why the new web address has a slightly different ending, so bookmark it.

One-to-ones. You arrange them by message, email, phone or in person, and you would rather type notes live on your laptop and save them than keep a notebook. Follow-ups, such as adding someone to a WhatsApp group or making an introduction, can be set as tasks in Capsule, since you prefer electronic reminders to a notebook. Introductions do not need a separate system: a short note on the contact, such as "Intro to" and the name, is date and time stamped, so six months later you can ask how it went.

Networking groups. BNI, and Pro Networking, which you have recently joined and which brings you people outside BNI. Groups you are only visiting go down as Other until you join them.

Referral partners come mainly through networking, plus partners you already work with across the clinics, some for many years, and direct approaches, such as a spinal surgeon who replied to an email and asked to meet. The types include podiatrists, anaesthetists, sports medicine doctors, GPs, personal trainers, sports massage therapists and sports clubs, and the list will grow as new ones come on board.

A partnership forms through an approach, a call or meeting, sometimes an in-person follow-up, and then an informal arrangement to refer to each other when it is clinically appropriate. There is no formal agreement and no numbers attached, and as regulated professionals there is no financial incentive. Contact carries on through progress updates and discharge summaries sent back to the referrer.

What you want to see on each partner is how many patients have come from them and how long the relationship has run. The start of the relationship will be recorded as the month and year it was agreed, so you can see its length at a glance without opening the record. Some partners will refer rarely or not at all, and a relationship can be silent for months before a referral arrives, which is normal.

Contacts who are a way in rather than a partner, such as people at a football club where you sponsor a player, stay as contacts with tasks against them and do not go into the pipeline.

You use a Mac, with Mac Mail for email and Dropbox for files. Your contacts are currently on business cards and place mats, and you will add them to Capsule yourself.

Actions

Jay

• Add a card under Account Settings, then Account and Plan, before the trial ends.
• Bookmark your Capsule web address.
• Add your contacts from business cards and place mats.

Jaanika

• Set up your Capsule based on this session.
• Walk you through the build on Thursday 1 October, 11:15 to 12:15.

What we covered

• Where your own settings live, and where the account's settings live.
• Adding a team member, and what each type of user can see.
• Exporting your data, and getting back anything deleted.
• Adding a contact, linking it to an organisation, and logging a one-to-one with a follow-up task.
• Custom fields, tags and the Referral partner section.
• Adding a referral partnership to the pipeline.
• Signing in on the mobile app.

Notes

Split over two sessions. This one ran short, so the rest of the walkthrough was booked for the next afternoon. The plan after that is for you to use Capsule with real contacts for a while, then review how it is going.

A team member for outreach. You are bringing someone in to take on outreach and partnerships, and he wants to log his work in Capsule too. On a monthly plan you can add a user for as long as they are working with you and remove them afterwards, so you only pay for the seat while it is used. A standard user sees all the data but not Account Settings, and an administrator can change the set-up. On the higher plan there is also a restricted user, who sees only the records assigned to them.

Export your data every six to twelve months as a backup. Anything deleted sits in Trash for 30 days and can be restored, but not after that.

Search for a contact before adding one, so nobody is entered twice. Tags describe your relationship with the contact, and a contact can have several. A website goes on the organisation rather than the person. A one-to-one is logged as an activity, and the follow-up added as a task with a category, so the calendar can be filtered to show only one kind of work.

In Account Settings you can add options to a dropdown yourself, such as a new networking group. An existing option cannot be reworded, so remove it and add the new wording. Dropdowns are better than free text wherever the answers are fixed, because free text picks up typos and is hard to report on. The fields in the Referral partner section only appear once the tag is on a contact.

You asked to track referrals both ways on each partner, because you send more to some partners than others depending on clinical need, and an agreed partnership needs regular contact so it does not go cold. Jaanika added that during the call.

A referral partnership opportunity is won as soon as you have agreed to refer to each other. It does not need a written agreement. The value stays empty, because what matters is the conversations, not a figure. Once it is won, make sure the contact carries the Referral partner tag.

On the Starter plan, reports could count notes, meetings, calls and completed tasks. Jaanika had set your growth activities up as task categories as a stopgap, and whether to upgrade was left for the next session.

The app only needs the first part of your Capsule web address. A new device is sent a verification code, and two-factor authentication adds a further layer.

Actions

Jay

• Add a live contact you already know and try it out.
• Install the app (done on the call).

Jaanika

• Continue the walkthrough on Friday 2 October at 2:30pm.

What we covered

• Moving up to the Growth plan, so your growth activities can be activity types.
• Setting a goal for new patients and seeing your progress on the home screen.
• Reports, and building your own dashboard.
• Pinning notes, and restoring something from Trash.
• Task categories, and adding tasks from the contact.
• Tracks, built from one of your own processes.
• Adding a referral partnership opportunity.
• The app on your phone and iPad.
• Adding your team member as a user.

Notes

You moved up to Growth. Starter does not allow your own activity types, so your growth activities could not be counted towards goals. You upgraded during the call, paying monthly. Capsule's price rise on 1 October does not affect you, because your prices stay at the rate you joined on, and 20% off runs until January 2027. You can move back down at any time.

Activity types and goals. After the call Jaanika moved your growth activities across to activity types, along with New patient, which was added during the session. A goal counts activities of one type over a period. You set new patients at two a month from 1 October to 31 December to start with, since some weeks bring two or three and others none, and you can raise it later. A goal's title can be changed but the activity type it counts cannot, so to count something else, delete the goal and add a new one. Goals can be recalculated, including for activity logged before the goal was set. Anything not about a particular person goes on your own record.

Reports and your dashboard. Reports look back, for example activity by type for any week, and clicking a figure opens the records behind it. Jaanika set up My dashboard showing activity by type, and more panels can be added with the plus button.

Pin a note to keep it at the top of a record. Anything deleted by mistake can be restored from Trash under Account Settings, as Jaanika showed.

Task categories are for the headspace a task needs. You chose business areas such as sales, marketing and networking, plus Urgent, and Jaanika is replacing the old categories. Deleting a category leaves its tasks in place. Add tasks from the contact rather than the calendar, so they are always linked to someone.

A track is a set of tasks applied in one go, each appearing once the previous one is ticked. You can add notes to a task, such as "left a voicemail", and move its date without ticking it. You built a New member one-to-one track together: contact the member to book a one-to-one, then meet. Count the days between tasks in weekdays.

Add an opportunity from the contact so it is linked, and put the word "Opportunity" in its title. How it came about now has BNI at the top. Growth allows more than one pipeline, but one keeps it clear.

On the iPad the app only shows at phone size, so the browser works better there. Log Activity in the app offers the same activity types.

Your team member can be added under Account Settings, then Users and Teams, once his email address is confirmed. Jaanika offered a half-hour session to take him through it.

Actions

Jay

• Use Capsule day to day, and delete any test entries left from the session.
• Add your team member as a user once his email address is confirmed, and let Jaanika know to book his session.

Jaanika

• Move your growth activities across to activity types (done after the call).
• Replace the task categories with business areas and Urgent.
• Set up forwarding from Apple Mail using the Mail Drop Box.
• Run a half-hour session with your team member when he is set up.
• Check in with you in about three months.