Full Sail Partners Blog | Marketing (4)

Business development is crucial to the future of any company. Therefore, efficiently tracking it should be a top priority. So why are so many firms still using outdated spreadsheets that require so much effort to review? Well, once they get their hands on the Informer business intelligence (BI) tool, executives, business developers and marketers alike will be asking themselves that very question. Let’s see how the Informer BI solution will add value to your firm.

Colorful Graphics Save Time

The days of having to spend hours reviewing the specifics of opportunities and the sales pipeline on black and white pieces of paper are over. With Informer, colorful graphics draw attention to the information you seek. Essentially, you can set up your graphical dashboard using whatever dash parts you feel are the most important and drill down into the details as needed. These dashboards refresh automatically to keep your data up to date.

Different Visual Options

With Informer BI, there are different visual options available. Based on the fields selected, Informer automatically creates different visuals and you can choose from a saved list. You can customize your chart visuals depending on what you would like to see and how you would like to see it. Chart types vary from trends to pie charts to bar graphs to scatter plots. There are even geographic heat maps that show where your core opportunities are and where your firm needs to do more business development.

Keep a Finger on the Pulse of Business Development

Business developers are concerned with the health of the sales pipeline. They, of course, want opportunities sold as fast as possible and a way to track the win rates. Another great feature of Informer BI is the option to set up alerts when opportunities are closed. When an alert comes in, you will be drawn back to your dashboard to see what has changed. Informer even allows you to set up comparison boards with side by side displays. You can track win rates from month to month, year to year or even by location.

Get Informer Now

There is no need to waste any more time with those old fashioned and dated spreadsheets. Informer BI shows you exactly what you need to know about your business development as the opportunities unfold. Even more, Informer integrates with Deltek Vantagepoint and Vision. So, what are you waiting for?

Digital marketing, which includes email marketing, is a very effective strategy to growing your business. Most significantly, email marketing and outreach allows you to gain valuable insights into what information and messaging is important to your prospective and current clients. With each email sent, marketers can see open and click rates, and who opened and clicked on a link in the email. As a result, prospects can be easily identified, and messaging modified to grab the attention of other targets.

Email Marketing is Alive and Well

For many people, mainly the non-marketing folks, understanding how email marketing is effective can be difficult. In fact, many believe that email marketing is ineffective since they get so much spam and find it to be an annoyance. However, this is not the case. Email marketing actually has a very positive impact on your business. Here some are staggering facts about email marketing:

• There are 3.7 billion email users in the world and that will increase to 4.1 billion by 2021 (Statista)
• Email marketing has a 28.5% ROI compared to snail mail which has a 7% ROI on average (Chief Marketer)
• 59% of marketers agree that email marketing generates their biggest source of ROI (Emma)
• Email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new clients than Facebook or Twitter (McKinsey)
• 72% of people prefer to receive promotional information via email compared to 17% who prefer social media channels (MarketingSherpa)
• Email marketing is 6 times more likely to result in a click-through than a tweet (Campaign Monitor)
• 90% of people said they will opt-in to receive a newsletter to obtain updates about a company while 10% elected Facebook (Nielsen Norman Group)
• 70% of B2B marketers agree that increasing their email list quality is their top priority (Delivra)
• The average office employee checks their email 30 times per hour (Marketing Insider Group)
• Checking email is the number 1 activity on the internet (Marketo)
• Companies in the United States will spend more than $350 million dollars on email marketing in 2019 (Statista)
• Email marketing drives on average $44 for every $1 spent (Campaign Monitor)

Email Marketing has a Bright Future

With all of these facts about email marketing, it is evident that the strategy works. While your firm is probably using email marketing as part of your overall digital marketing strategy, are you seeing the ROI and maximizing the benefits? Learn more about tracking and measuring email marketing success rates here!

If you’re a marketing professional that uses Deltek Vision, you should definitely be taking advantage of the marketing campaigns Info Center available in Vision. First and foremost, any marketing effort from email blasts to clients to attending a conference can and should be tracked in a marketing campaign. Also, marketing campaigns in Vision provide visibility into the success of your marketing efforts and people within your firm can see prospects that were targeted for a specific campaign. Here are some ways you can use marketing campaigns to improve your firm’s marketing efforts.

Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Let’s say you have a segment of an industry you want to market your services to - how does Deltek Vision and the marketing campaigns help you? Using Vision’s advanced search functionality, you can drill down in your CRM system to identify prospects you want to reach with your campaign. Even more, you can associate them to a marketing campaign in Vision to allow you to track these prospects and easily create lists.

Want to create an email blast to send to your identified prospects to promote your services? If you use marketing campaigns in Vision and a third-party email marketing platform like Constant Contact or MailChimp, there’s an integration to make this happen. You create the email in the automated marketing platform you use and then quickly associate the targets in your Vision marketing campaign to the email you created. The need to export and import contacts is eliminated.

Furthermore, in the Vision marketing campaign, you can see your email stats such as clicks, bounces and unsubscribes. All of this data allows you to evaluate the success of your effort. If it sounds too good to be true, learn more here.

Industry Conferences

At industry conferences, you’re likely to attend educational seminars and social events in the expo hall. You’ll have many opportunities to network with existing clients and prospects, as well as find new leads. So, what do you do with all those notes and new business cards? If you created a marketing campaign prior to the conference, you can simply add these people with notes to the marketing campaign in your spare time at the conference.

Additionally, if you attend the same conferences every year, marketing campaigns can track who was there in prior years. The campaign notes also show which people are consistently spoken to at each event. This allows you to preplan who you want to target and what you want to talk to them about next time.

Wait, there’s more! If you are an event sponsor, you may also be able to get a list of who is registered for the conference. These people can be added to the marketing campaign prior to the event which makes adding notes on the targets easier since they are already associated to the campaign you created. You can also choose your targets knowing with near certainty that they are attending the conference.  

Event Hosting

Does your firm host webinars or client events? If the answer is yes, you probably target a specific segment of your clients and prospects to market your events. Like the targeted campaigns mentioned above, you can quickly segment your contacts to identify who you want to invite to your event. When using a marketing campaign in Deltek Vision to assist you, you can easily add these contacts to your campaign and track who attended. This information will help your firm evaluate the success of the events you do.

More Benefits to Using Deltek Vision Marketing Campaigns

By using Deltek Vision marketing campaigns, you’ve seen that you can easily track touchpoints with leads, prospects and clients to gain visibility into the entire lifecycle of developing business. Furthermore, you can learn what works and what doesn’t work when marketing to contacts to create more business. However, once you create a marketing campaign, you can also create a project in Vision for that marketing campaign. You can bill your time and expenses associated with it to better improve your ability to track the ROI of your marketing efforts. So, what are you waiting for? Start using marketing campaigns in Vision today to show the success of your marketing efforts.

Attending a professional conference is a great way to learn solutions to obstacles you currently face, new ways to challenge yourself, and learn about trends in your industry. Additionally, you should never hesitate to ask your employer to allow you to attend a good and relevant conference on their dollar. Furthermore, managers should require employees to go to professional conferences to get out of the office and learn new things they can bring back to share with their coworkers. So, what are the benefits of attending a professional conference?

Network with Likeminded People

Sure, your LinkedIn network is huge. However, when was the last time you spoke to someone in your network face to face, or have you ever met them face to face? Professional conferences attract people from all different geographies from different continents to regional or smaller local conferences. In other words, conferences bring people together in one place in an environment that promotes talking to others. So, don’t be shy! Get out there and meet new people.

Get Fresh Ideas

In reality, you sit in our workspace and either not talk to coworkers about your ideas and their ideas because you are the only person in that role, or you’re talking to the same people about the same ideas every day. As a result, you tend to grow stale on the subject that you’re respected as an authority upon. Therefore, this is probably the number one reason to attend a professional conference.

When attending a conference, you get to attend seminars and panel discussions led by respected industry leaders and take part in roundtable sessions. Here you can get fresh ideas on challenges others are facing industry trends. Remember, you’re going to be inundated with a lot of information, so make sure to stay attentive and take notes.

Present Your Ideas to Others

In today’s age, your company’s brand is built on the brand of its employees. Prospects and clients are more likely to make a purchase from a company that they know, and trust employs thought leaders in their respected industry. This means employees must build their personal brand by showing they are a thought leader in their industry.

Becoming a thought leader requires making presentations about your ideas to peers to develop your “authority” reputation. It will also give you confidence in your work. Here’s a tip, make your presentation fun and interactive to keep the audience’s attention.  

Meet an Expert

You read their blogs and books, and if they have a television show or podcast, you probably tune into that too. Even more, their a mentor to you, but you’ve never talked or corresponded. However, that doesn’t have to be the case anymore.

Industry experts attend the conferences you should want to attend. They give presentations about their ideas, you know…the ones you read about, but now you can easily interact with your mentor and ask questions while attending a conference. Most importantly, experts also attend the conference social events, giving you a chance to have a face to face conversation. Keep in mind, they’re humans too. So, don’t get nervous when having your one on one time.

Make the Most of Every Professional Conference You Attend

Last tip! Keep a pen handy and remember your business cards at all times! Conferences are short, and you’ll be having a lot of fun. Remembering what you talked to someone about and having them remember you isn’t easy. With your pen, write notes other people’s business cards about what you talked about and make sure you have your cards, so they can do the same. There are so many benefits to attending a conference, but it’s up to you to make the most out of it.

Technically, business intelligence or BI has been around for centuries. It is simply the review/analysis of business data. Traditionally, this review had been focused on the past performance of financial data which was easiest to access. As this was financial data, the only people who had access were senior management teams and lower level employees were provided little, if any information. Fortunately, we have come a long way since the old days.

Old Days No More

Financial trends have become easier to access and report against, and we have gotten better at creating and using tools to let us peer into the murky future. Solutions such as resource (people) planning, project planning and CRM (client relationship management) now allow us to track what we see on our immediate horizons. With a combination of these past-looking and forward-looking tools, we can provide a comprehensive view of our performance and where we see upcoming opportunities.

New Problem with Amount of Available Data

So, here’s the new problem. We have access to so much information that it is easy to get overwhelmed. There needs to be a way to draw our eye to a potential “opportunity.” We have also restructured enough that simply having a team who looks at the information and communicates the “opportunity” down the channels isn’t enough. We now require everyone in the company to see the potential and act on it. 

Power of Modern BI Tools

Modern BI tools are the solution to this problem. They allow for consolidation of information into a single data warehouse, so management can see the trends, but this information can also be maintained ‘real-time’ or very close to it depending on the situation. The information can then be presented in a cohesive format that provides an easy view of how the company is performing against its goals.

Furthermore, this information can be disseminated through all the employees (as appropriate) so they can then make informed decisions about their day to day priorities. Additionally, with our mobile workforce, modern BI provides people access to what they need when they need it. Ultimately, the best BI will offer a visual that will call out an issue (or opportunity to improve) and then allow direct access to the data to see what the detail is. 

Example of How Modern BI Works

Below is an actual Division Manager view that shows her the team’s utilization, backlog and outstanding AR. She might look at the AR third column (with the big past due amount) and want to see the specifics:

A simple click of a button will drill down to the clients and let her know there really is only one problem:

She can even go down further to the detail level and see more:

This information will be available to her at the job site, the soccer match or while she grabs a coffee on the way to work. Modern BI tools are very convenient and effective.

Ensuring Successful Firm Performance with Modern BI Tools

Today’s BI is the best way to stay in touch with your company’s performance. A responsive, well thought out BI tool will allow the company to focus on performance metrics that can easily be drilled down to the individual and rolled up to the management team. This modern BI will enable everyone on the team to pull in the same direction and ensure success for the entire company.

Acquiring and maintaining accurate client data is absolutely necessary for both marketers and business developers. Marketers need it to provide valuable content to clients and business developers for a successful sales pipeline. Additionally, as with any other firm department, both marketers and business developers need a way to track their efficiency and effectiveness. With iAccess, this all can be achieved. Here are five things you probably weren’t aware of that iAccess can do for marketing and business development:

Business developers and marketers spend lots of time on the go rather than at their desks. With iAccess, you can use the web browser in your mobile devices to update your CRM and keep data current. We recommend saving it as a bookmark or using the “Add to Home Screen” option for even quicker access on the go. 

Furthermore, the iAccess Business Development workspace enables you to contribute and maintain key pipeline information wherever you are as long as you have an internet connection. 

2. Enter and Edit Contacts, Opportunities, and Touch Points

Using iAccess, you can work with Contacts and Opportunities as well as set up touch points. Under the Contacts tab, you can perform basic searches and add contacts. The contact area provides quick access to key information for your contacts such as title, phone numbers, company, location and email address. You can even add image links into contact records.

From the Opportunities tab, you can view all your current opportunities as well as add new opportunities. You can easily change and view data such as the opportunity stage or see what client you are working on. Additionally, you can view and update the touch points as well as quickly add a touch point within any of the tabs by clicking on add touchpoint under the Touchpoint tab.

If the standard saved searches don’t provide the information you need, you can create a custom search. When you create a custom search, you can save it for the future, so you do not have to continually recreate the search parameters. 

3. Easily Sort, Filter, and Export Opportunity Reports

Opportunities are found within the Business Development workspace of iAccess. Here you have critical information at your fingertips. You have the option to sort opportunities by active opportunities, all opportunities or just those that you are associated with as part of the team. See the opportunities instantly as you filter and organize. These reports can then be exported to wherever you want them to go.

4. Track Your Department Spending

Another nice feature of iAccess is that you can use it to track department spending and can make sure you are being effective and efficient with your resources. If you set up budgets for Promotional Projects, you can easily see where you are Job to Date (JTD) and Year to Date (YTD) for that project. In that project record using the Project Management workspace, iAccess provides visuals to  see the labor and expenses that have been charged to the promo number and what budget is left.

5. Update Contact Notes Using Talk to Text 

A final iAccess benefit is that you can use “talk to text” to update Contact and Opportunity records. When you open iAccess using your mobile devices (explained above), you can use the talk to text feature to update any field. We like to update touch points and notes using this talk to text method. There couldn’t be an easier way to provide a meeting summary after visiting a contact. 

Let iAccess Work for Marketing and Business Development 

Now that you have discovered five things that iAccess can do for marketing and business development, are you ready to try it out? For more information, check out these past webinars to get an introduction to iAccess for business developers and to learn how to connect to Vision from anywhere with iAccess. Lastly, if you’re attending the SMPS Southwest Regional Conference, make sure to attend Lindsay Diven’s pre-conference Vision CRM workshop.

You’ve just spent hours creating a clever email with an enticing subject line to send your clients and prospects. As you prepare to push the button to send this email, you hope for a positive outcome of your campaign. Over the next 24 to 72 hours, you will log into your email marketing platform, such as Constant Contact or MailChimp, to check the performance of this email. But, which numbers really determine the success of an email marketing campaign? Let’s take a look.

The open rate is simple to understand but quite important. This is the percentage of the recipients that opened the email. Knowing how many people opened your email is significant because it will show you if your subject line drew enough attention to make opening it worth their time. Of course, the higher the open rate, the better.

Click-through Rate

Here’s probably the most important metric that allows you to know how successful your email marketing campaign has been. The click-through rate lets you know who actually read your email and took action by clicking on the included link. Seeing who clicked on the email allows you to know who’s interested in your content. This tells you who to target in the next stage of your marketing campaign. In other words, the more click- throughs, the more potential leads that have moved further into your marketing funnel.  

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate tells you how many of the intended recipients did not receive the email at all. There are two types of bounces, a soft bounce and a hard bounce. A soft bounce happens when the recipient’s mailbox is full, the server is down, or the email is too large for the inbox. On the other hand, a hard bounce means the message is permanently rejected because the email address is invalid or doesn’t exist. Obviously, the more bounces, the less potential for exposure to the email content.    

Unsubscribes

Like click-through rates, unsubscribes allow you to assess the quality of your content. If a person signs up to receive your emails and newsletters but unsubscribes, it is usually because the content is not what they expected. So, unsubscribes can show you how many recipients have determined that the content is not valuable or interesting.

Spam Reports

While unsubscribes are bad, being reported as spam is worse. This usually happens for one of two reasons. Either you send emails to people that never signed up to receive them or you send emails to people with irrelevant content. Email marketing platforms can and will suspend accounts that have a high spam rate. Therefore, not spamming is a priority in your email marketing campaign.

Refining Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Using A/B testing is a great way to improve your email marketing campaigns. This is a controlled experiment that compares two versions of the same content to determine which messaging improves your email marketing success rates. There can be a variation of the subject lines, the messaging in the email and the verbiage used in the call-to-action. Remember, in the end, the main goal is to get your email marketing campaign through to its intended audience and have it be well received. How you accomplish this is up to you.

Now that I have your attention, I must admit I totally hijacked that title from my good friend and fellow Full Sailor Rana Blair. In January, she presented a webinar on using Deltek Vision’s iAccess features to enhance the project management function of your firm. It was such a big hit, that we decided to continue the conversation in February. We’ll shift the focus to iAccess’ capabilities for enhancing client/contact management, tracking your pipeline of new work, and preparing for Vision’s future.

I’m convinced Rana was right. We’re at a point where there truly are NO MORE EXCUSES. Now is the time for all good client-facing associates in professional services firms to have immediate access to critical client information. If you don’t, no big deal, your competition will figure it out for you.

Commit to Using Deltek Vision as Your Corporate Contact Manager

It still boggles my mind how many Deltek Vision users don’t do this, sometimes even with the CRM module in place. One of my favorite parts of the module is the remote access to Vision CRM through iAccess. You can roll out access to critical client and contact information to anyone with a license and a data connection. While we typically refer to the CRM module as more of a marketing and BD toolset, contact information is used across the entire firm.

While iAccess screens possess many of the same fields and functions as the traditional “smart client” for Vision, you can easily arrange for custom tabs and fields to appear as well. None of this works, of course, unless you’ve done a decent job at migrating existing critical data and launched a good process for capturing additional information as it comes into your firm.

Gain Clear Insight into the Next 6 to 12 Months of New Work

Pipelines do not have to be complicated, but at a minimum, they should allow your firm to pull from existing client information and maintain a weighted list of future revenue estimates. The basic information required to do this (client, name of pursuit, estimated revenue, start date, and finish date) is typically best-known by the individuals closest to the client. iAccess can assist you by minimizing the distance between those individuals and the fields where you house the information.

If you’re already well-versed at managing Opportunities in Vision, consider iAccess as a tool in your bag to help key rainmakers maintain and update information they typically receive first. Dictating updated information about an opportunity directly into a Vision record using your iPad isn’t all that far-fetched anymore. It can also be used for basic reporting to help the same people avoid stepping on each other’s toes with large clients. Distributed pipeline information in iAccess, built on Vision’s core foundation of clients and contacts, could give your business development team a great boost.

The Future of Deltek Vision Looks Like iAccess

If you’ve not heard of Deltek for Professional Services (DPS), the “reimagined” next iteration of the Vision platform, now’s the time to start thinking about when and how your transition will take place. While thinking ahead with your software vendor’s developing capabilities in mind is always a good idea, this transition is particularly important for Vision users. Many key characteristics of DPS are already present in Vision’s iAccess screens. With iAccess in Vision 7.6, you can start getting users comfortable with the browser-neutral and device-agnostic features that will eventually be pervasive throughout the DPS platform.

Not Quite Convinced Yet About iAccess?

Feeling a little uncomfortable with all this new stuff in the Deltek environment? Join me for some more discussion on iAccess and we’ll do our best to help you get there. We believe taking advantage of these capabilities will help you get the most value from your system and allow you to enhance your clients’ experiences with your firm!

Ironically enough, despite the advances of 21^st century technology, everyone is now busier than ever, and time is a precious commodity. It used to be commonplace to reach out to prospects and clients by phone, but these days it is time consuming and often an annoyance to the people you are contacting. So, what’s a more efficient way to share information on a regular basis with your clients and prospects? There is social media, but it warrants its own blog, and direct mail is slightly archaic. Email marketing, however, is an ideal way to capture your audience’s attention and build more business. Here are some ways your firm can use email marketing to build business.

Newsletters

Whether monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly, an email newsletter to your clients and prospects greatly benefits your marketing plan. For starters, you likely create informative material for your target audience such as blogs, webinars and whitepapers. This information is only helpful if people actually see it, so a regular email newsletter provides the perfect avenue to share your content with your target audience.

But wait, there’s more! Newsletters can also contain pertinent announcements like industry events and conferences your firm is attending or the hiring of new employees because of increased service offerings. Marketing via an emailed newsletter to your audience is a fantastic way to draw attention to your firm and build business.

Generate Brand Awareness With a Soft Touch

Building business requires building brand awareness. Email marketing allows firms to reach out to their clients and prospects in less intrusive ways than making a call or stopping in at the office. One way to look at email marketing is to consider it a soft touch technique to connect with your audience. 

There are endless opportunities that allow you to reach out to your clients and prospects via email. It’s a simple method to stay “top of mind” with your audience. Receiving something of interest this way will resonate well with your audience, and when a need comes up, your brand will be remembered.

General Promotion

Email marketing can also be used for general promotion. In this area, there are unlimited emails you can send. Is your firm attending an industry event? Is your firm hosting a webinar? Let your clients and prospects know with an email.

Your firm is already investing in attending an event or creating an informative webinar, so why not make sure you get the most out of it? With email marketing, your firm can promote these events to generate more participation which will increase the overall return on investment. Additionally, from the email marketing promotion of webinars or events, more business can ultimately be gained.

Be Smart With Your Email Marketing

As with phone calls and stopping by offices, emails can become an annoyance to your audience if not used wisely. You should consider some things before you start emailing away. First, you should segment the list of people that receive emails based on role in the firm. Next, you should use an email automation system, like Constant Contact or MailChimp, that allows you to track the performance of your email. You can see who opens your email, what they click on, and who unsubscribes. So, now that you have the basics for email marketing, start using it to build business for your firm.

After the ball drops every New Year’s Eve, the song “Auld Lang Syne” triggers everyone to begin a personal reflection of the past. Similarly, at the end of a year and on a professional level, business development and marketing professionals should look back at the previous year and evaluate the results of their efforts. How they use this information will help them strategize for the following year and improve upon performance. Here are some New Year’s resolutions that business development and marketing professionals should make to get the most out of next year.

New Year’s Resolutions for Business Development 

Improving client relationships is essential to generating more sales and revenue. Here are five ways to help nurture better client relationships.   

1. Streamline your client engagement/touchpoint activities. Distill your activities to the essentials to shorten sales cycles while providing high-value interactions with clients and prospects.
2. Get to know your clients better. Ask the right questions and actively listen to the client’s answers.
3. Coordinate and collaborate with the marketing team on a regular basis.
4. Embrace new technology. Communicate with prospects and clients and record information gained. Share this information with internal teams.
5. Stop checking in. Instead, use your database to connect with prospects using meaningful conversations or useful content. 

New Year’s Resolutions for Marketers 

While marketing requires evaluating the performance of efforts throughout the year, using this data to become more effective for the next year is a difficult task. Here are five ways marketers can increase the impact of marketing plans for the new year. 

1. Examine last year’s marketing campaigns and see which ones met your goals. Determine how you will use this information for next year’s planning.
2. Take a hard look at your process for collecting and maintaining your information/data. Make it a goal to get all your data centralized into one place.
3. Coordinate and collaborate with the business development/sales teams on a regular basis.
4. Create high-quality, value-based content that your clients and prospects need.
5. Understand the client experience journey from prospect to project delivery. How can you, as a marketer, improve your client experience to differentiate your firm? 

Increase Business and Revenue in 2018! 

With the New Year comes the potential to increase sales goals and revenue. This is the best time to make changes and adjustments to business development and marketing strategies. Follow these New Year’s resolutions to be more productive in your marketing and business development efforts for 2018.