The POWER of Circles : Learn to use Circles like a seasoned veteran!

Hello all and welcome to the next installment of the SuiteDash academy my name is taylor and today we're going to wrap our heads around the powerful and often underrated feature circles even if you've only spent five minutes inside of a SuiteDash portal you have some concept or idea about what circles are when i first began my initial thought was they were a simple way to segment or organize your contacts while that is true if we stop there with our understanding then we are only utilizing 10 percent of the feature kind of like how much we actually use our brains on a daily basis by definition circles are SuiteDash's dynamic group permissioning structure now

Removing the tech jargon you as the business owner are able to assign permission to access things like dashboards menu items file folders and more to a particular circle and this helps you pre-create a cohesive experience or process around that circle instead of around an individual contact in your crm then you are able to grant or deny the access to that entire experience or process in just one action by adding or removing a contact from that circle honestly it's a lot like attending a concert for example i was recently at a rolling stone show and because i'm not elon musk i enjoyed the evening from the nosebleeds my almost in

The parking lot wristband meant that i only had access to the upper upper deck had i attempted to sneak into the vip section i would have been promptly shown the exit door now on the other hand had some lovely concert goer gifted me their vip wristband the security guys would have let me right through they wouldn't need to ask my name they would just let me in because i had the right wristband and that wristband was the permission that i needed to go hang out with elon now like they say it's all about who you know now let's see that from the perspective of your SuiteDash portal here i have a contact that has been placed into a circle entitled circle x as a super admin i created a shared folder called

SuiteDash brand assets which is what we're looking at right now and only granted access to those inside of circlex therefore our contact has permission to access the folder and the contents inside of this folder but if we were to remove the contact from circlex they would no longer be able to access the file actually better yet they wouldn't even know the shared folder exists anymore and these changes happen instantaneously before moving forward let's dispel some myths that have been circulating number one people in the same circle cannot

Somehow message or chat one another number two builds on that logic people in the same circle are kept separate they don't know the other exists and finally number three contacts can be in multiple circles at once in fact you'll find using multiple circles to control various access and even menu visibility is a very powerful strategy all right i think this is starting to land so let's set one up together and then get to the good stuff to set one up first navigate to the circles page by clicking crm on your left side menu and then circles from here click on add circle remember

Fresh out of the box your SuiteDash portal already has two circles created all clients and all prospects so no need to create those again now let's give our new circle a name a quick description and before we finish out this process i'm going to take a pit stop on our brand new custom field categories simply put linking a circle to one of these custom field categories will help clean up the potentially overwhelming amount of custom fields that can litter the look of a contact's dashboard now i want to get visual with this concept so bookmark this in your brain because we're going to circle back yep i heard it too before we wrap up now have some fun and change the

Color if you'd like and take note of these two automation options that may come in handy at some point down the road now that we know how to create a circle let's take a look at how to add contacts to a circle now my favorite way is to start within the circle and from here i like to drag and drop the contacts in and if you ever need to know who's been left out simply search the contact by name want to move quicker use the bulk assign unassigned button from here you can simply add people in or take them away

Just don't forget to scroll down and click update before you leave the page another manual way to add a contact to a circle is through their dashboard simply select the circle from the drop-down and add it here at SuiteDash if a process can be automated we're going to make it happen so let me show you a few ways in which you can use our no code automations to accomplish adding or removing contacts from circles throughout the platform when setting up a kickoff form go ahead and assign where incoming clients or prospects will land again don't

Be afraid to add multiple circles here when it's time to configure a triggered action use the add or remove automation to change a contact's circle affiliation we'll touch on this in a moment but this can be especially powerful in conjunction with portal pages lastly don't forget to utilize the circles list when importing contacts via a csv file okay i've been waiting for this moment portal pages and circles are like peanut butter and chocolate both are great on their own but pure dynamite when used together so let's get our brain juices flowing by looking at the most common use

Case for circles and that's the assignment of a start page i grabbed this awesome looking portal page from the ever-growing SuiteDash template library which brings up a great sidebar make a mental note to check in on the template library from time to time you're sure to be impressed now behind the scenes i granted the travel circle access to this page and assigned it as the start page so what that means is for anyone affiliated with the travel circle this will be the first thing they see when they log in now let's check it out real quick i'm

Creating a new test client so we can see the onboarding journey together so welcome to the show ms cecilia circles and i'll say that five times fast let's make sure not to forget the most important part which is assigning cecilia to the travel circle now that our new contact is created let's hop over to the email she will receive cecilia can click either link to finalize her credentials clicking the link in her email she'll finish off this process by creating a password and boom just like we planned there's our beautiful portal page ready to welcome and greet all

Users affiliated with the travel circle now take a moment and imagine all that you could accomplish by assigning different start pages to your various circles and if that didn't blow your mind enough this will think about how you could use the triggered actions of adding and removing contacts from one circle to another and how those no code automations could alter and guide your users experience as they move about the portal i'll pause you can grab your jaw off the floor alright the moment is over so let's move on we've even found a way to harness the power of circles when deciding what your contacts can see and click on their main navigation for example if you only want certain circles

To be able to check out their billing information just toggle the switch and make your selections and what about when it's time to send out invoices to let's say a hundred different people circles for the win again in this example let's pretend we handle the web hosting fees for a hundred different clients all you have to do is group them into a circle check this box when creating a new invoice and make your selection in this instance assigning a circle will generate a hundred individual invoices for each user in that circle once you save can you feel that i sure can we're saving so much time with the use of circles that we'll need to start scheduling more happy hour outings just to

Fill our time okay okay we're about out of time on this one so let's bring the heart rate down and finish off with a final note do you have a long list of contacts in your crm well circles can be quite useful when you need to narrow down your search make sure that you're in list view click on filter and use your trusty circles to help get the job done and just like you've seen before you don't have to stop at just one oh wait i almost forgot remember earlier when i asked you to bookmark our new custom field categories in your brain let's touch on that now if you're like me i've created quite a number of custom fields the more i work inside my portal but

Most of the time i don't need to see all of them displayed for each individual user you see what i mean this has become a bit hectic so we've created a new way to help you clean this up to start this organization out head on up to your flyout menu and select categories scroll down and click on custom fields for crm contacts and then from there add a category now i'm about to go on vacation so that's all my brain can think about these days with that in mind let's call this category travel now let's go test this out with a new custom field so

Let's go ahead and click on add custom field once the modal appears we will give this custom field a name and then drop in a quick description under usage select crm contacts now note this is the only way we can get the categories field to appear let's select our newly created custom field category and then we'll finish the process like you normally would now we have a new custom field and it's linked to a category stick with me because we're about to land this plane now when you create or edit a circle you

Can select to link it to a category let's take a look at a random contacts dashboard to finally see how this all strings together now as we scroll down to the bottom note that we do not see the new custom field we just created together why because it's linked to a circle that our contact is not affiliated with so as we scroll up let's add our contact to the travel circle and now that we've added our contact the associated circle we will see that custom field appear so drumroll please man

Just think of how much you can accomplish or organize by putting this logic to use well that's it we've done it i'm confident that you now have the complete understanding that circles are absolutely key in finding success with your SuiteDash portal the possibilities are endless from here and we're eager to see the ways in which you utilize this fundamental and fantastic feature i hate to say goodbye but it's time to shut this one down my name is taylor and i'll see you next time SuiteMates [Music] you