In the News

The Deltek Vision to Concur Connector allows both systems to work together seamlessly, automatically synchronizing finance data throughout the entire spending process, from pre-spend approval to reconciliation. Manage every expense and invoice transaction accurately and with ease, and get a complete view of your finances in one place. 

Gain Complete Visibility and Greater Control of Your Finances with the Deltek Vision to Concur Connector

The war for talent acquisition has experienced a major shift in recent years. Historically, the employer held all of the power and candidates vied for the opportunity to prove their worth to the employer. However, in recent years, this dynamic has changed. Human Resources leaders and executives around the globe are faced with both talent shortages and a lack of candidates who possess the required skills to fill critical roles. Whether we like it or not, we are now operating in a candidate-led hiring market.

In a world where demand exceeds supply, we must manage the war for talent. HR must learn how to fight and win this desirable talent through innovative strategies to attract, recruit and retain the skill sets that our businesses require. It’s time to refocus, to get creative and analytical, and to win this war.

Four Proven Strategies to Win the War for Talent

1. Build a Better Brand

Branding is typically thought of as a marketing function. However, what happens when companies apply the same branding principles to their recruiting tactics? It is simple, these companies effectively manage the market perception of what it is like to work for their organizations.

Successful firms stay aware of the perceived image that current and past employees have about their employment experience. Making sure the perceived image is on target involves evaluating specific details such as the company culture, employee benefits and work environment.

Building a strong and strategic employment brand will:

• Create a sense of excitement about working for your company
• Highlight the company mission and product/service offerings
• Provide clear and compelling reasons to work for your company
• Evoke feelings of attaining prestige and professional reward with your company

A strategic approach to employer branding requires a non-partisan examination of how your company attracts, engages and retains talent. It would be beneficial to undertake an employer brand audit. The results will hopefully inspire your leaders to invest time and effort into building a brand strategy to expand your talent recruitment pool.

Successful companies go above and beyond to create a great candidate experience during the talent acquisition process. Human Resources and Marketing can team up to create this great candidate experience by focusing on these tactics:

• Improve Your Application Process – When is the last time you reviewed your company’s application process? Most application forms are unnecessarily cumbersome and lead to a large portion of candidates not completing the process because of the time commitment involved. You can improve your candidate experience by keeping your application process to a minimum while meeting all of the firm’s essential requirements.
• Write More Compelling Job Advertisements – A marketing mindset can help improve one of the first touch points with a potential candidate, the job advertisement. When writing, focus on the job description and opportunity rather than stringing together a list of requirements and qualifications. The job description should be intriguing in order to elicit interest and make candidates want to take the next step in the recruitment process.

During the talent acquisition process, both Human Resources and Marketing should work together to emphasize the advantages of working for your company – the great company culture, the reasons your company is a great place to work and the benefits. Using these measures will ensure that those with the right cultural fit have a great candidate experience during recruitment.

3. Create a Culture of Developing Internal Talent

The offer of learning and development is vital for attracting new talent. So why don’t firms spend more time providing learning and development opportunities for their own internal talent? Current personnel can fill employment gaps fast if they are given the chance to pursue another direction in the firm. All internal staff should be given opportunities to learn new skills and develop alternate career paths within the firm. By providing development options to internal staff, the firm will have better longevity with its personnel and keep the skill sets internal.

4. Collect the Right Data to Support Talent Development

Relevant data is crucial to business leaders. Our financial metrics, KPIs and future growth reports are all dependent upon having access to quality data. Maintaining information on talent recruitment and retention are no different, and Human Resources Information Systems make this critical employee data much more accessible.

Just like the other areas of our businesses, we must first understand how to capture accurate information and then how to use this data within the context of our businesses. Before we concentrate on capturing this information, we must assess the accuracy of the data itself as well as find better ways of presenting the data.

Firms that remain competitive in the war for talent are able to contextually embed talent-related data within their business systems. For example, these firms are able to link their staff’s professional development and performance activities to project management and customer service goals and metrics. This data allows company leaders to see real results regarding talent development.

Learn More About the War for Talent

Want to learn more about staying competitive in the modern war for talent? Sign up for our upcoming webinar to learn how your firm can better attract and retain millennial talent for your professional services firm.

In the Deltek world, the Blackbox Connector is the trending topic. From marketing professionals gaining insight within Deltek Vision from their Constant Contact mailers, to finance managing risk and controlling expenses through Concur, people are asking about getting more out of their Deltek Vision system. Have you heard the buzz surrounding the Blackbox Connector? If you haven’t, your first question might be, so “what is the Blackbox Connector?" If so, then this blog is for you!

What is the Blackbox Connector?

The Blackbox Connector is a no-code, low cost, integration solution for your Deltek Vision system with an easy to use API wizard. The purpose of the solution is to eliminate data silos by providing a better and more powerful way to create, update, reference and report on critical business intelligence across multiple platforms using Deltek Vision as your master record set. Our goal is to bring data together in a low cost, easy to maintain manner.

What Makes Blackbox Different?

Historically, integrations meant ‘expensive’ and required a lot of technical involvement. Not anymore. So what are the key differences between a custom integration and the Blackbox Connector?

1. IT teams are no longer bogged down with costly development cycles or constant evolving maintenance updates.
2. Users can utilize Blackbox’s drag-and drop mapping wizard to link critical fields across systems to synchronize the two systems in a manner consistent with your business.
3. Data accuracy improves across your entire organization by eliminating manual imports and duplicated efforts because the integration is automatic.

The results? Providing a low, yearly cost that includes continued upgrade for both solutions and a seamless connection to Deltek Vision.

How Does the Blackbox Connector Work?

The Blackbox Connector’s API Wizard enables you to easily connect Deltek Vision to third-party software. The configuration is as easy as setting up your phone to your Outlook email. Users will need access and links to both solutions and in minutes your software is connected. IT is provided scripts and user documentation through our Blackbox Connector portal. Standard mapping is pre-configured and users can further configure their field mapping using Blackbox’s drag-and-drop mapping wizard. The Blackbox Connector portal handles the behind the scenes data processing, including advanced error handling and testing of your connectivity scenarios. 

The connections are all made over web secure communication channels using web services to feed data to and from Deltek Vision – whether you host your Vision system locally or in the cloud, the Blackbox Connector platform can help your firm bring data together.

Why Blackbox?

The Blackbox Connector is a critical game changer with how organizations work within their Deltek Vision system. Our programmers are continuing to invest in commonly requested integration programs and your feedback can impact the next solution. Combine the best features of Deltek Vision with your other critical business systems to save significant hours for your staff and provide them with the tools needed to make faster, more-informed decisions.

Learn More.

Could the Blackbox Connector bring data together for your firm? Check out our website or schedule a demo to see how Blackbox can help your firm save time and money, while improving your overall experience in Deltek Vision.

Full Sail Partners today announced it joined the Concur Solution Provider program and can now refer clients, including those using Deltek, to Concur, the leading provider of spend management solutions and services.

This partnership expands the Full Sail Partners offering to include Concur solutions and allows Concur data to flow into Deltek Vision, helping professional services firms create a better expense reporting experience for their employees and also enable the firms to realize significant cost savings.

“We are ecstatic to introduce Concur to our clients,” said Tanya Drake, Full Sail Partners Technology Division’s Technical Consultant. “This partnership gives project-based clients the most efficient expense reporting solution ever. Our clients will experience firm-wide cost savings and eliminate mistakes and fraud with the automated controls and duplication verification. Employees will love the automatic pull of data to their expense reports, virtually eliminating manual entry of expense reports. It’s a win-win for both the firm and employees.”

Concur Travel, Expense and Invoice are the industry’s leading solutions to help businesses manage spend and gain insights that drive savings. Concur has more than 40 million users globally, and in 2015 the company processed transactions worth more than $70 billion in travel and expense spend.

Kelly Duquette, Principal Solutions Consultant at Full Sail Partners who has worked with the Concur product at a previous firm said, “We believe this is a great opportunity for the Deltek Vision community to leverage Concur to create a fast, efficient process that allows employees to spend less time on tedious tasks and more time focusing on their billable work.” 

Together, Full Sail Partners and Concur will enable HR and accounting professionals to better manage expenses and invoice processing from approval to payment posting. The expanded capabilities offered through Concur will enable professional services firms to capture paper and electronic invoices, enabling efficient, automated processing – from purchase request through payment, including 2-way and 3-way match capabilities. 

“Travel and expense is the second largest area of controllable business spend – a challenge especially significant to SMBs. With a partner-focused initiative like the Concur Solution Provider program, we can help partners like Full Sail Partners expand the value they provide SMBs while driving business growth and profitability,” said Christal Bemont, SVP and GM of SMB and National Accounts, Concur.

To receive details about this partnership and the Concur solutions offered through Full Sail Partners, please visit http://www.blackboxconnector.com.

Full Sail Partners provides technology services and solutions for more than 1,000 professional services firms nationwide. Blackbox Connector, a division of Full Sail Partners, helps bring data together with a no-code, low cost, integration solution connecting Deltek Vision users to any API-powered application within minutes. Full Sail Partners represents project-based products focused on integrating business processes by connecting front-end and back-end systems. We seek to help organizations identify the critical resources needed to create a faster, more efficient, and cohesive business infrastructure.

Recently, Beaudin Ganze Consulting Engineers, Inc. embarked on a rebranding initiative, officially becoming BG Buildingworks. A critical element of this rebranding effort was to notify the company’s key constituents to reaffirm that the rebranding was primarily a cosmetic change, and that BG Buildingworks would maintain their personnel and technical expertise.

Hear directly from Karen Crilly, BG Buildingworks’ Director of Marketing & Client Development, about this process. See how the firm was able to overcome challenges with their contact data in time to announce the rebranding prior to their 25^th anniversary.

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For BG Buildingworks, innovative solutions are at the core of their business. BG Buildingworks provides mechanical, electrical, lighting, technology, commissioning, energy analysis and LEED consulting services for projects ranging from those in higher education to government, commercial, hospitality, healthcare and more. They are experts in REVIT modeling, employing state-of-the art technology and tools to optimize energy-efficient building systems and improve the owner’s bottom line.

Through early program definition, focused project management, expert systems design and engineering and highly experienced construction phase services, BG Buildingworks provides owners with low-risk, high-return solutions for their facilities.

As a first time attendee to SMPS Build Business, I want to make sure that I experience all there is to offer at the national conference for professional services marketers. So before I head off to the City of Brotherly Love I thought it would be a good idea to ask some long time attendees for their advice on how to get the most out of this conference. Here are the 5 tips I found most useful.

Keep in mind, these tips can be used when attending any conference.

Five Essential Tips for Conference Success

1. Make intros memorable. You are sure to meet more people than you can remember. The same is true for the people you hope to make an impression on. The key to being memorable is to practice how you will introduce yourself. Introduction should intrigue your connection to make them want to learn more. “Hi, I’m Graham I’m a marketer” won’t cut it. Focus on how you and your company add value to your clients. Give the discussion purpose. Perhaps your newfound contact is facing a challenge and you can help them overcome it. Stand out from the crowd by leaving each new contact with a feeling of time and energy well invested.
   
2. Identify the best way to capture contact info. Do you have a plan for capturing important details gathered from your networking efforts? Do you plan on jotting details down on a napkin to send off to someone else to enter in your CRM system? Or perhaps you are planning on entering everything immediately using your mobile device. Thinking this process through before the conference will allow you to have a system in place to get the most out of your networking efforts.
   
3. Pre-schedule meetings. Prescheduling meetings is my favorite tip for attending any I believe that the primary focus of attending a conference should be to network and connect with people. The number one way to do that is to begin networking and connecting before the conference even begins. Try sending out emails to contacts that you know will be on site, or even create a landing page on your website advertising your attendance to the conference. Better yet, pick up the phone and set-up meetings to have drinks or lunch with contacts.
   
4. Have a plan, be willing to adjust. Have you seen the program for this year’s SMPS Build Business? There are a ton of awesome programs! Take your time before the conference to map out your roadmap for sessions you want to attend. However, show up to the conference willing to pivot and adjust on the sessions you attend. You never know when the opportunity will arise to attend a session with an old client or new prospect.
   
5. Dress accordingly. You are set for some long days ahead -- between breakout sessions, networking breaks walking the exhibit hall and everything else that goes into attending a conference. Make sure to wear the right shoes – taking care of your feet will keep you mobile and ready to network. Also, don’t forget to dress appropriately to accommodate for changes in room temperature.

Full Sail Partners, a Deltek Vision Premier Partner, has released the Deltek Vision Connector for Constant Contact, an integration of Deltek Vision and Constant Contact.

The Deltek Vision Connector for Constant Contact allows Deltek Vision CRM users to seamlessly create targeted Constant Contact email campaigns by leveraging real-time intelligence directly from Deltek Vision CRM. Once an email campaign is active, users are then able to analyze the results of these campaigns directly in their Deltek Vision system.

“We are really excited to help professional services firms maintain consistency between their Deltek Vision and Constant Contact systems,” said Peter Nuffer, Director of Solution Development at Full Sail Partners. “Users of this integration are refining their messaging and crafting more meaningful campaigns for their readers.”

Connectivity between Deltek Vision and Constant Contact gives users the ability to create more comprehensive email marketing campaigns, reduce labor intensive manual processes and better capture marketing ROI. This mutual relationship between data will allow your marketing team to save countless hours over the duration of a marketing campaign.

“As  one of the first users of the Deltek Vision Constant Contact integration, BG Buildingworks was excited to sync our contacts between our Deltek Vision CRM system and Constant Contact,” said Karen Crilly, Director of Marketing and Client Development for BG Buildingworks. “We used the integration to setup a campaign to announce our company name change. We were able to create a Constant Contact campaign directly from our Deltek Vision CRM system to notify over 4,500 contacts. The campaign went off without a hitch and we saw nearly a 30% open rate on our mailer.”

Interested in learning more about the integration of Deltek Vision and Constant Contact? Click below to learn more.

Can you name a single business that does not use some form of technology? From our personal lives to our professional lives, technology is engrained in everything we do. Firms are investing in technology at a rate never before seen. Yet, many of these critical system connections are siloed and do not talk to each other. Watch the video below to see how firms are connecting their critical business systems to get more out of their investment and share information between disparate systems

Welcome to part two of our Marketing Automation Series. In the last blog we looked at how automation tools can impact your SMB. In part two of this series we are going to dig further and examine the Deltek Vision marketing automation tools available to you within your system.

Deltek Vision Marketing Automation: Marketing Made Easier

1) Merge Fields & Templates

If you produce a lot of proposals or documents that follow a defined format (think SF330!), you will love merge fields and templates. Use this functionality to merge data directly from your Deltek Vision system to Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word. Not only will you greatly reduce the time dump required to create these documents but your marketing efforts will gain a level of accuracy and consistency.

Use merge templates to create:

• Statement of qualification responses
• Letter proposals
• Resumes
• Cover letters
• Project cut sheets
• Reference pages
• And more!

Check out this webinar to learn more about creating proposals with Deltek Vision and Adobe InDesign.

2) Workflows

Deltek Vision workflows can greatly reduce the manual processes you manage in Deltek Vision on a daily basis. Workflows are a series of actions that your Deltek Vision system will execute based on events and triggers that occur within a specified Info Center.

For example: A workflow could be used by a proposal manager to notify a project team when a new project has been created in Vision.

Check out this webinar to learn more about Deltek Vision workflows.

3) Integrations and Connectors

Allow your marketing efforts to go further than ever before by opening your Deltek Vision system to outside software and applications. Eliminating manual processes associated with disparate systems allows your marketing team to focus their efforts on creating a quality client experience for each customer.

For example: Integrate your Deltek Vision system with your website Content Management System to capture valuable lead and customer data in your Deltek Vision CRM. Once a website contact fills out a form on your website they will be automatically added to your Deltek Vision system. Your marketing team can then implement a series of workflows to generate a personal email follow-up note a week later. Additionally you may want to consider scheduling a workflow to notify your sales team of lead activity on your website.

View this webinar to see how Deltek Vision users are creating User Defined Info Centers to create dynamic workspaces within Vision CRM.

Learn More About Deltek Vision Marketing Automation

Want to see what real users are doing automate marketing and streamline processes with their Deltek Vision CRM system? Sign up for our webinar, ‘Let’s do this!’

2016 seems to be the year of the buzzword. Everywhere you look you see a new trendy term: Contextual marketing, growth hacking, marketing automation... the list continues! This blog is here to clear up the confusion and help your SMB get started with marketing automation.

  1. What are Marketing Automation Tools?

Marketing automation tools streamline tedious procedures, eliminate manual processes and give the entire organization insight into results of marketing efforts. Marketing automation tools allow us to find out more about our audience and enable marketing teams to create more impactful campaigns. Additionally, automation tools enable SMBs to do more with less resources.

  2. What is the Value of Marketing Automation Tools?

One thing to note is that marketing automation by no means replaces your marketing staff. These tools simply allow them to do more for your organization; providing your team intelligence and time saving mechanisms to make a greater impact on your organization.

Marketing can often be a love-hate relationship for many SMBs. Many firms view marketing as a hit-or-miss type of function. Either marketing positioned the firm to win the job, or they failed – there is often very little grey area. Marketing automation tools introduce a level of analytics and metrics associated to the cost of marketing efforts… bringing everything back to the almighty dollar!

  3. Won’t Automation Remove the Personal Touch?

Understand that there are varying degrees of marketing automation that can be established, and It’s important to take things one step at a time. 

Some people fear that marketing automation tools are going to remove the personal touch from marketing campaigns. Marketing automation tools often add MORE personalization to marketing efforts. These tools simply remove the time intensive processes out of the way, allowing you to spend more time creating a dynamic experience for each customer.

  4. What are Some Examples of Marketing Automation Tools?

These days there are dozens of marketing automation tools. HubSpot, Act-On, TweetDeck, Hootsuite… the list goes on and on.  These tools can help you manage tasks ranging from social media publishing to inbound lead scoring. But to get the most out of these tools you need to make sure that they connect and talk to your CRM system. Doing so will give you one centralized location to manage all of your marketing tools.

As you can see, it is important to invest the proper time and planning to think through your marketing and sales process and develop an automation plan that fits your organizational goals.

We would like to learn more about what your firm is using for marketing automation. In exchange, we will provide you a free download of the Vision Mail Management Info Center. Also, be sure on the lookout for our next marketing automation blog.