In the News

We’re devoted to revolutionizing the way our clients do business. Sometimes that gets us noticed.

No big deal.

Posts by Lindsay Diven:

In a move highlighting the symbiotic nature of their collaboration, Full Sail Partners and Entrinsik jointly unveil the appointment of Wendy Gustafson, General Manager at Full Sail Partners, and Madhavi W. Chandra, Chief Product Officer at Entrinsik, as co-chairs of the Informer Advisory Council (IAC). This partnership will enable Entrinsik to gain a richer insight into the customer voice and needs through Gustafson's expertise. Simultaneously, Chandra's leadership will facilitate the infusion of Entrinsik's vision and best practice workflows directly into the Council's initiatives.

About the IAC

The IAC is a collaborative platform where a small group of selected customers and partners work closely with Entrinsik to guide the future of the Informer platform. Council members receive exclusive early access to new features and enhancements, enabling them to provide direct feedback and influence the product's development.

Chandra explained, “The IAC was established more than four years ago with a mission to create a mutually beneficial platform between us and our clients. The IAC is an intimate and exclusive community, and we are thrilled to progress to the next stage by appointing an external co-chair to collaborate alongside me. Wendy, who has been a dedicated IAC member for years and possesses comprehensive knowledge of Informer, is the ideal candidate. I am looking forward to working alongside her!”

Driving Competitive Advantage Through Early Access

The collaborative leadership in the IAC, uniting Full Sail Partners and Entrinsik, represents a landmark progression not only for project-based businesses and professional services firms but for the entire Entrinsik customer base. By blending the product voice of Entrinsik with the customer voice of Full Sail Partners, we are creating a synergistic avenue for product enhancement.

Gustafson’s co-chair position epitomizes this synergy, allowing Full Sail Partners to mold the direction and capabilities of Entrinsik's Informer platform in alignment with the broader needs of all stakeholders. This partnership offers clients—across all sectors—the privilege to preview, test, and shape features prior to their widespread launch, granting them an analytical edge in their decision-making processes.

Gustafson remarked, "I am honored to take on the co-chair role for the IAC. This allows for close collaboration with fellow council members to foster strategic relationships and facilitate domain-specific expertise. We aim to complement Entrinsik's ongoing efforts in delivering systems that meet diverse user needs."

Accelerating Client-Driven Innovation

This partnership represents a symbiotic union, leveraging the collective expertise of both Full Sail Partners and Entrinsik. In this relationship, Entrinsik gains unparalleled access to the authentic customer voice through joint leadership, enriching its understanding of user needs and aspirations. Conversely, Full Sail Partners benefits from Entrinsik's vision, absorbing best practices and advanced workflow methodologies that can be integrated into the field via the Council.

The Informer platform thus evolves at a faster pace, with new client-driven features being informed by real-world feedback. Early access to these features by the IAC members offers a practical advantage: Entrinsik can observe these functionalities in action, refine them based on actual use, and ensure optimal performance and relevance before a wider rollout. In this dynamic ecosystem, every insight, feedback, and innovation contributes to a product that's both technologically advanced and deeply aligned with user requirements.

Tailoring Technology Strategies for Professional Services

The participation in IAC’s activities allows for an in-depth interaction with the new features, ensuring that they are tailored to meet the specific demands of professional services firms. With direct insight to Informer’s development priorities and roadmaps, Full Sail Partners can help clients plan their technology strategies more effectively. This will lead to better integrated systems that not only meet but exceed the diverse requirements of project management, financial reporting, and other critical business processes.

About Full Sail Partners

Connecting thousands of project-based firms, Full Sail Partners identifies critical resources to create fast, efficient, and cohesive companies. As a Deltek Premier Partner and creator of the Blackbox Connector, our team helps professional services firms fully integrate their business processes by connecting their front end and back end systems. We provide technology consulting, business solutions, and application hosting for both Vision and Vantagepoint. Full Sail Partners has received the Deltek Partner of the Year and the Marketing Excellence Award multiple times throughout our firm’s history. Keep Your Business on Course.

For more information, please email Full Sail Partners’ Marketing Communications Department.

About Entrinsik

Founded in 1984, Entrinsik is a global leader in data analytics and business intelligence solutions. Its flagship product, Informer, empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions by providing self-service data discovery, visualization, and reporting capabilities. Entrinsik serves thousands of clients in various industries, including higher education, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, and financial services.

For more information visit: https://entrinsik.com/.

Amy Balassone

Full Sail Partners, a Deltek Premier Partner, is pleased to announce the promotion of Amy Balassone to account manager. Amy joins the sales team to provide account services for Full Sail Partners’ clients throughout the United States. In this position, she works as a liaison between Full Sail Partners and clients to help identify ways to gain more value from their products.

Formerly working exclusively in both marketing and sales, Amy has been with Full Sail Partners for six years. During her tenure, she worked with lead generation, marketing, and our Blackbox Connector sales teams. Through her various positions, Amy has gained an in-depth knowledge of how both the Deltek and Full Sail Partners’ products can help to improve business processes and efficiencies. Now as an account manager, she expands on her role in onboarding new clients and supporting existing clients through cloud conversions and add-on modules and services.

“All of my past experiences with Full Sail Partners have really set me up for success in this new role as an account manager,” stated Amy Balassone. “I am excited to continue to provide client services with a personal touch.”

Full Sail Partners is committed to excellent client service and building partnerships with our clients. As we move further into 2022, we will continue to improve our client management approach to increase engagement with our clients and anticipate their needs. Adding Amy to the account management team demonstrates this commitment to providing attentive and dedicated support to our client base especially as many of them are moving to the Deltek Vantagepoint platform.

“Amy is a very proactive person and being helpful and responsive to clients is something she is passionate about,” noted Joel Slater, Product Sales Manager. “She was promoted to account manager not just because of her past successful client service positions but also because she truly cares about what clients say and need.”

For more information, please contact Full Sail Partners’ Marketing and Communications Department.

For professional services firms, business development can be completed both with dedicated resources and/or “seller-doers.” Because our firms have touchpoints with multiple people at our client organizations, information gathering and sharing becomes a critical piece to the success of our business development. When our firms can successfully manage the numerous interactions, identify projects that add to our pipeline, and collect the right information to position our firm better than our competitors, we win more projects, improve client satisfaction, and increase loyalty.

CRM on the go

The abilities of Deltek Vantagepoint CRM can provide business developers, project managers, marketing staff, and executives with real-time information on all of the client touchpoints, project pipelines, marketing and service efforts. This ensures all firm goals are being met and provides for the shared resource of firmwide data. Deltek Vantagepoint’s CRM strengthens your business development in the following ways:

Record Interactions On-the-Fly

The power of a CRM comes when everyone records conversations or information related to interactions with clients and contacts. Vantagepoint CRM provides users several ways to record these Activities and Touchpoints.

Web Brower – You can access Vantagepoint to record a contact interaction from your computer, laptop, tablet or phone using any web browser.
Hey Deltek! – Watch out Alexa, because there’s a new voice command in town! Deltek has developed its very own voice automated service. You can use this now in the web browser and coming soon to the CRM mobile app. Simply record an activity by speaking to Hey Deltek!
Mobile CRM App – The Vantagepoint CRM app is available for both iOS and Android devices. Access all of your Firms, Contacts, Activities, and Projects inside the app. You can use your phone’s native talk to text feature to automatically log activities and meeting notes.
Outlook Connect – Coming in early 2021 is the new Vantagepoint Outlook Connect. This integration includes a contextual email pane to view contact details, search Vantagepoint and create new records from your email. You will also be able to sync your contacts and calendar directly from Outlook to Vantagepoint. Connect also includes a scheduling assistant to help you find the perfect meeting time without all of the back and forth emails.

Vantagepoint makes it easier than ever for busy business development and technical professionals to log the critical information needed to build strong relationships with your clients.

Easily Uncover Client and Contact Relationships

Vantagepoint associates its Hub and Record information throughout the database. There are Hubs for Firms, Contacts, and Projects that are all interconnected. This means that you can associate any firm that is involved in a project – from teaming partners to program managers and general contractors. And, each time a firm is associated to a project, that project then appears on that firm’s record in the Firm Hub. This same association works for contacts and employees as well. It also gives your business development team the insight into the relationships of your firm with your clients, contacts, employees, and projects – all in one location!

Support the Entire Business Development and Project Lifecycle

The business development process often begins with targeting clients, then getting to know contacts at those client organizations. Through this effort, projects are identified. At this point, your team begins preparing for the pursuit of that project through teaming, proposals, and/or presentations. The goal is to win that project and perform so well that you are awarded with repeat work.

Deltek Vantagepoint is designed specifically to support the entire project lifecycle beginning with the earliest business development stages. When you are targeting clients, you will be utilizing the Firms, Contacts, and Marketing Campaigns Hubs. In those you can begin to gather information about contacts and activities.

Then as a project is identified, it’s logged into the Projects Hub in a pursuit stage. You will continue to use this same record through the pursuit and proposal stages. When this project record is created, a plan is also created so your project manager can begin to allocate resources and develop estimates.

When you are awarded the project, you will continue to use that same project record and update the stage and budget. All of the intelligence gathered in the pursuit of the project remains in the same project record you will continue to use to perform the project. This gives your business development and marketing staff the complete picture and history for that entire project.

Bring Everything and Everyone Together

Not only does the Vantagepoint solution encourage a collaborative environment, but it brings all your firm’s business development processes into one unified platform. This enables business developers to do their jobs better. Be sure to check out our entire Deltek Vantagepoint mini-series to see how the product can help your employees and firm.

We’re changing the way project-based firms operate.

People can’t help but notice.
Who will be next?

Check out our latest newsworthy work: