Full Sail Partners Blog | CRM (7)

One of the most important tasks within any organization is lead management.  It is vital for the sales staff to have the most comprehensive and up to date information available on a new lead.  With this information the sales or marketing team can seamlessly follow the Lead qualification processes established by your firm.  Once it has been established that a Lead is a qualified prospect, it is time to convert the lead into a company, opportunity and/or contact.

Did you know that you don’t have to create each record in the respective info centers and enter the same information over and over?  Vision can use the information from the Leads Info Center to create the Company, Opportunity and Contacts records in a few easy steps.  Here is how it works… In the lead info center menu, there is a “Convert” option. 

By choosing this option, you will receive a dialogue box that is defaulted to qualify the lead.  There is also the option to disqualify a lead if need be, but we will focus on lead qualification. 

Within the dialogue box you will have the option to convert the information entered into the Leads info center over to a company, contact or opportunity.  You may only want to convert this lead to a contact or maybe you only want to have them set up in the company and contact info centers, you can do so by checking only the radial button next to those options. 

You may also want to associate this lead with the corresponding Marketing Campaign that brought you the Lead.   The appropriate campaign may be selected from the drop down box at the bottom of the dialogue box. 

Once you have checked the appropriate options and associated the Lead with a marketing campaign (if appropriate), you will select the ok button.  Vision will create a new Company, Contact and Opportunity for this Lead.  All the corresponding information such as Company name, address, phone number, e-mail address, company  type, etc for this Lead will be copied into the fields in the new records created in the Company, Contacts and/or Opportunity info centers you have selected. 

Your company now has all of the lead management information necessary to track this client in the Client Info Center, including associating the new contact record with the company.  Within the newly created opportunity is all the vital data your sales team will need to engage and move forward with the sales process.  The transfer of this information has been done without the need to manually copy and paste between the info centers.  Vision has copied the information for you within seconds and the focus can now turn from qualifying the Lead to managing the sales process and closing the deal.  

Learn more about Deltek Vision CRM.

In today’s day and age of fast changing technology, firms must stay abreast of all available solutions to better compete with competition, and win work. Since the ‘great recession’ of 2009, competition on winning work has increased exponentially. Successful firms have combated this increased competition by staying current with technology, and using well thought out techniques to win projects. Included below are five tips that will help your firm better impress clients, and ultimately win more work.

1. Collaboratively share information with your project team. When responding to a client request / RFP, sharing data can become a cumbersome task in itself when working with remote teaming partners or staff. Often, the ability to seamlessly coordinate tasks/assignments, or share large files amongst your team can be the difference in winning or losing the work. To avoid these types of hiccups, leverage collaborative sharing tools such as Deltek Kona to keep your project team on the same page. Deltek Kona allows users to share files, and schedule important dates, seamlessly as though the users were all working in the same centralized office. You will be amazed at how Kona will empower your project team!
    
2. Hasten your proposals process through the use of templates. Unfortunately, many times firms will find out a about a project that they are a perfect fit for days before the due date. These time restrictions can ensnare the proposal process and make it difficult to respond sufficiently. Empower your marketing/business development department by creating templates that will allow you to export your information from Deltek Vision CRM to Microsoft Word or InDesign. This will allow you to streamline the proposal process, and concentrate on the areas of the proposal that require custom attention.
    
3. Avoid boring old PowerPoint presentation. Many firms make it to the short-list process only to utterly disappoint the client through the use of a boring, stale PowerPoint presentation. If you are unable to separate yourself from your competition, you are not doing your best to win projects. PowerPoint has been around since the late 1990’s, and sadly a large majority of presentations look like they came out of that same era. By using presentation software such as Prezi or PreZentit, your firm can immediately stand apart from your competition. With that said, don’t forget the importance of impressing the client by being personable and demonstrating your understanding the project. Overly relying on the use of presentation software is one of the quickest ways to lose a client’s attention.
    
4. Use a CRM solution to track relationships. We have all heard the saying, “It’s not what you know, but who you know!” This begs the question; does your firm know who it knows? If you are not tracking your relationships through CRM software such as Deltek Vision, then you are simply throwing darts at a board, blindfolded. A CRM solution will allow you to track who you know, recent conversations, and other important relationship data such as birthdays or anniversaries. This type of knowledge insight is important for creating meaningful relationships between your company, and your clients.
    
5. Optimize information for smart devices. If you own a smart device, and you have not optimized your marketing contact the device, you are not working smart! You never know when, or where, you might bump in to a perspective client. If you are unable to demonstrate your firms expertise at the drop of a hat, expect to lose out on a lot of potential work. Your firms website should be optimized for smart devices (iPhones, Androids, Tablets, Everything!) allowing you to be ready to show off how great your firm is, at a moment’s notice! In addition to optimizing your website for these smart devices, take the initiative to pre-load content on to your smart phone, in case you are unable to get internet service! By doing this, you will not only impress the client with all of your great works, but you will also demonstrate your ability to think ahead and be ready for the unexpected.
   
   If your firm is utilizing Deltek Vision CRM, make sure to check out Vision Unleashed. Vision Unleashed will allow you to access your full Vision system on teh go, from a mobile device. It also allows MAC users to access Vision without the need for running parallels or bootcamp. This allows MAC users to utilize their workstation to it maximum potential without dedicating resources to addition process just to access Vision!

I hope you learned something from this blog. Some of these technologies or techniques might seem obvious, but unfortunately many times it’s the obvious omissions that cause us to lose out on winning new work. If you use any of the concepts highlighted in this blog, make sure to comment below and let us know. We love to hear success stories!

Once you win your next project, make sure to review these project management concepts.

Now that Spring has arrived, it is an excellent time to clean-up your database. Is your data clean, consistent, and accurate? Almost everyone you talk to would answer this question with an emphatic "NO" for one reason or another. Data is always degrading in any database you review because information is constantly changing. Contacts leave companies, projects progress, and opportunities move through the sales cycle.

Data integrity impacts our ability to determine business trends, success rate, and just know who and what to pursue. Misleading queries and inaccurate reports result in making wrong decisions when data is incomplete or incorrect. With an integrated ERP system everyone can help with the clean-up, but on the other hand they can sometimes add to the mess. So what do you need to keep in mind when tackling data clean-up?

Clean your dirty data by evaluating these four areas: decision points, standardization, automated clean-up, and dedicated resources.  Let’s walk through an example and apply each of these four areas to project data.

• Step 1 –  Decision Points: It is helpful to start by doing a search criteria to help make a decision. First, determine what fields need to be cleaned-up and what fields need to be evaluated so you can narrow down the list.  Maybe we want to update the project status to determine if it should be dormant, inactive, or active. Our first criteria could be to search all projects that are active to see how many we need to evaluate. Then we need to narrow the search. Depending on what information you can search, you could do a search on when the project was opened and/or if time has been billed in the past two months.  Understanding your decision points narrows down the list and reduces the number of projects that need to be evaluated.
• Step 2 – Standardization: Sometimes during the clean-up you realize there are fields or options that are not really needed. This is a great time to establish or re-establish corporate standards and expectations. Is everyone using the same definition? In our example, are you finding employees that are using inactive instead of dormant?  Adding tool tips can provide a definition to help users know how to update the field.
• Step 3 – Automated Clean-up: Now that you have gone through the exercise of cleaning up the information. Think about how you can update the information periodically or better yet provide an alert to you or employees when they should update the information. Is there a specific timeframe that the status should be evaluated? Workflows can help keep the data accurate. By identifying a trigger, a workflow could alert someone to review the information or even update the status to dormant based on lack of activity.
• Step 4 – Dedicated Resources: As the saying goes, the information is only as good as the data on which is based. So dedicate the necessary resources to clean it up and better yet, maintain the data. Setting up a quality control schedule and setting expectations helps keep the data clean and manageable.

Does your firm have dirty data? For a fresh clean feeling, take the time to establish your firm’s process to clean it up! By following these four steps, your firm will improve data integrity.

In keeping up with CRM related forums, someone asked about the best approach to handling and maintaining their CRM system.  It started to make me think about the value of what is communicated in these forums and how much people trust advice from others they believe to be their peers. It made me wonder why people instantly trust others that may or may not have all of the background information that top consulting firms discover when providing their services.  

In this situation, I observed people giving advice as opposed to just sharing experiences.  I found it curious that contributors to the forum assumed many of the variables the person inquiring had not provided and further, the person making the inquiry hoped to find solutions without providing any background or specifics.  

No two companies are alike. Sure there are similarities, but my experience in consulting has led me to believe that if you want a true solution to your issue, you have to take the time to identify the “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why”, and “how” (wwwwwh) questions and the most important question, “What do you need?”.  As the forum conversation continued the inquirer thanked people for their input, but soon added more information as the responses were not really the direction they were looking for.  This occurred to me to somewhat frustrate many of the individuals that had already offered their “advice”.  One such comment was “well if you had told me that when you asked the question.” 

So What Happened?

When we ask a question, individuals drive off of their experience and what worked for them. However, they don’t necessarily provide context of why that worked for them and include those specific reasons. This poses a huge problem to the answers they receive. Many people go directly to wanting a solution without having any true understanding of the context of their question. When the basic “wwwww” are not qualified, the inquirer runs the risk of not addressing their true needs. Even some of the top consulting firms tend to take the same approach with their clients.  In fact earlier in my career I used the phrase, “when I was in industry, what worked for us was…”. 

So why do individuals seek a solution in these forums before building context and clearly defining what they need?  Here are a few thoughts I had on why this may occur:

1)     We seek good ideas from others in the same industry

2)     We crave solutions with little challenge

3)     We need immediate answers

4)     We love FREE advice!

Just like the advice provided by contributors in a forum, consultants sometimes fall into this pitfall of providing quick advice. In order to not challenge a client, consultants may diminish the level of anxiety to both their client and themselves by giving “a solution”.  As a consultant, ready-made solutions give a sense of accomplishment.  But sometimes that solution is short-term because the question asked is out of context of the bigger issue.  Because the question was asked in a vacuum (forum), there is little room for further qualifying discovery. 

Inquiring about what others in industry are doing and or have done allows one to know others experiences.  From this may come ideas that generate further inquiry, but the inquirer should look to put this further inquiry in context of their “wwwww” questions.  The key here is to be able to have these “wwwww” questions already established and to quickly hear the advice against what you already know.  The same preparation should be part of ones working relationship with the consultant. The difference is, one can dynamically interact with a consultant and establish the context.

So an important distinction the next time one works with a consultant: if the consultant is not looking to build the context of your issue, they likely are going to only provide short-term solutions that do not fit well in the long run with your company’s needs. 

Do you have any stories to share about a consultant that applied the “wwwwwh” principals that allowed you to develop a true solution and avoid thinking short-term? Share in our comments section below. 

So, you’ve heard about the new Vision Unleashed, Deltek Touch Time and CRM mobile applications and want your smartphone users to be able to utilize these applications to access Vision offsite. Perhaps you like the idea of your Vision users having the ability to work from home or abroad or maybe you think the new Navigator interface would be really helpful for project managers out in the field.  However, you feel opening up Vision access from the web sounds kind of scary and you have questions. Is it safe? Is it expensive to set up? Is it hard to configure? 

Well, let’s take a look!  

Is it safe?

Yes it is!  When properly deployed using Secure HTTP and a strong password policy, accessing your Vision data from anywhere is as safe as accessing your banking information. 

Is it expensive?

Only in the time to set up (generally an hour or two) and the purchase of a security certificate. The certificate is good for several years and costs only a few hundred dollars. 

Is it hard to configure?

For a single server install the process is simple and can be completed with very little downtime or afterhours with proper planning.  Multi-tier installs offer a bit more complexity and should be discussed to ensure all the nuances are covered before beginning.  Full Sail Partners has assisted many firms with the transition. Feel free to reach out to us for support.  

Here are the steps to open Deltek Vision to the internet to allow your firm access to new features like Deltek Touch.

1. Configure a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) that you will use to reach Vision from offsite. ‘Vision.yourcompanyname.com’ is a common format.
2. Purchase and install a SSL security certificate for your new FQDN on your Vision server.
3. Modify your firewall rules to allow port 443 (secure http) traffic to be forwarded to your Vision server. Note: This is a good time to try visiting your Vision login page to see if everything is on the right track, in Internet Explorer. Visit HTTPS://Vision.yourcompanyname.com and make sure it loads.
4. Verify the FQDN is also reachable internally, DNS may need tweaking.
5. In Reporting Services Configuration Manager, under the Web Service URL tab, add the SSL identities now available since applying the new security certificate.
6. In the Vision Weblink, on the reporting tab, change the Server URL to your new FQDN/reportserver. For example: https://vision.yourcompanyname.com/reportserver. Note: Be sure to click the Test button to verify you have it right!
7. Voila! You should now be able to log in from both onsite and offsite and successfully run reports.  Once verified, you can notify all of your users to use the new link for their Vision needs. 

iAccess, Deltek Touch, and Vision Unleashed can now be deployed.  Enjoy safely and securely accessing Vision, anywhere, anytime! Let us know your experience.

When evaluating your professional services firm, understanding your past trends can provide valuable insight into the future.

In a recent, SMPS Technology Committee survey, only 56% of firms stated they tracked this information, which is surprising. This type of report allows you to evaluate the overall hit rate by the firm, a division, the pursuit lead, or other criteria.  You can also evaluate it by percentage or by revenue.  Knowing both provides you a different story.

Take William Apple, who has a 50% hit rate for the number of projects he has pursued.  He pursued 10 and won 5.  Ann Johnson on the other hand only has a 33% hit rate. She pursued 3 and won 1.  Seems like William is doing better, right?  However, if you evaluate them on revenue, William only has a 24% while Ann has a 73% hit rate.  Why the difference? 

Well, the one project Ann won, was a large project worth millions of dollars.  William however, won a lot of smaller projects and lost out on the bigger project. Both are important to the business.  However, if you start to see that William is constantly losing out on the large projects or maybe particular project types, this type of analysis would be valuable information that could be acted upon.

Key metrics like the Win to Loss Ratio allow a quick snap shot to determine if you need to dig deeper.  The historical progress of an opportunity sometimes provides further clues. 

• Were you realistic with your expectations?

• What stage did you lose the opportunity?

• Did you have an established relationship and effective pursuit strategy?

Is your firm able to answer these questions or are you repeating the same mistakes? Let us know how your firm learns from your success and failures and how your firm is improving your hit rate by leaving a comment. Interested in more historical trends information?

Welcome to the second installment of our Deltek Vision How-To Video Series. Today we will review how to increase efficiency when adding companies/contacts across Info Centers. This video will help save time and increase productivity.

Check out additional how-to videos by clicking here.

Welcome to our first Deltek Vision How-To Video Series. Today we will learn about Deltek’s Vision Info Center Help section. This video will answer some common questions asked by clients are:

1. Do you have a complete list of the fields in Vision?
2. Do you have a help guide so I can learn about the fields available?

Check out additional how-to videos by clicking here.