Revenue Traction in a Startup World

Portland Business Executive Kermit Yensen Joins Altus Alliance

July 15th, 2010

Portland Business Executive Kermit Yensen Joins Altus Alliance to Provide Sales and Business Development Traction Services to Oregon Companies

Seattle – July 15, 2010 – Altus Alliance, the Pacific Northwest’s leading revenue traction firm focused on startups and new ventures within larger companies, announced today that Portland business executive Kermit Yensen has become a partner and will lead the expansion of the company’s sales and business development traction services in Oregon.

Yensen brings to Altus Alliance over thirty years of executive, marketing and sales leadership at Oregon-based technology companies, including Massini Group, iMove, Tektronix, Pi Systems, and Hewlett-Packard. During his most recent tenure, as Chief Executive Officer of B2B database marketing firm Massini Group, Yensen provided overall leadership, with hands on involvement in company marketing and sales initiatives, resulting in 3x growth of revenue and strong profitability.

Prior to Massini Group, Yensen served as CEO of iMove Corporation, where he closed two rounds of financing and launched the first portable spherical video camera. He also held the position of Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for the Measurement Business Division of Tektronix, and served in a number of product marketing positions at Hewlett Packard, including Director, Product Marketing and Director, European Marketing Center.

“Kermit offers our clients the perspective of a seasoned start-up CEO, along with sales and marketing expertise to help them drive revenue growth,” said Dave Jones, Managing Partner at Altus Alliance. “This is exactly the skill set we want to bring to our practice in Oregon.”

In his new role, Yensen will help technology and healthcare companies in Oregon accelerate revenue traction through implementation of Altus Alliances’ core service offerings: Market Driven Baseline, Business Development Traction, and Sales Process Optimization.

“Altus Alliance has a successful, proven methodology for enabling revenue growth among early stage and growth stage companies, including more established companies moving into new market sectors. The methodology and partners fit well with my background, and I am looking forward to introducing Altus Alliance to the Oregon business community,” said Yensen, Partner at Altus Alliance.

Yensen earned a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School and has a B.A. in Economics from Denison University.

About Altus Alliance

Seattle-based Altus Alliance is the Pacific Northwest’s leading revenue traction firm serving new ventures with customer-driven sales strategies executed through direct or channel sales results, cost-effective sales processes and structure, and placement services. Since 1999, Altus Alliance has accelerated revenue at over 75 public and private companies, including DocuSign, All Star Directories, AdReady, Netscape, Bloomberg Financial, and Sony. Altus Alliance partners each have a proven track record of start-up success as well as Fortune 100 experience at such companies as Apple, Dell, IBM, Intel, HP and Oracle. Altus stands behind its work with a highly leveraged business model based on compensation for revenue impact or direct delivery. For more information visit www.altusalliance.com, email info@altusalliance.com or call 206.438.1890.

Media Contact: Annie Eissler, Mixtur, annie@mixtur.com, 206.965.9505, x2238

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Altus Alliance Hits $100 Million Milestone

June 15th, 2010

Seattle-based sales and business development traction firm Altus Alliance surpasses $100 million in revenue generated directly for “new venture” clients

Seattle, WA – June 15, 2010 – June marks a major milestone for Altus Alliance, the Pacific Northwest’s leading revenue traction firm focused on startups and new ventures within larger companies. This month Altus Alliance surpassed $100 million in revenue generated directly from the sale of products and services on behalf of its outsourced sales and business development clients. In addition, the firm has contributed another $150 million in revenue indirectly for clients through alliances and proprietary sales process optimization practices.

“Altus helped us define our target customers and close most of our key accounts, “ said Mark Vrieling, CEO of ScreenPlay Inc. “Within a few quarters we transformed a bi-product of our core offering into a significant revenue contributor that later eclipsed our other offerings.”

Since launching in 1999, Altus Alliance has helped over 75 startup, technology and healthcare clients accelerate revenue traction through three core service offerings, including:

Market Driven Baseline: Developed in collaboration with ex-Veritas CEO Mark Leslie and Stanford University, Altus Alliance’s Market Driven Baseline service leverages the principles of the Sales Learning Curve to validate product and go-to-market assumptions during the initial sales effort and before a company incurs the high cost of deploying a sales force.

Business Development Traction: With decades of both Fortune 500 and startup experience under their belt, Altus Alliance partners and associates validate a sales and market strategy by managing the sales process and closing direct deals and partnerships leading or along side the management team.

Sales Process Optimization: By implementing proven sales process methodologies, institutionalizing those sales processes and then creating a winning selling environment, Altus has helped many companies build, re-engineer, or fine-tune their sales organizations.

“Altus Alliance’s business development and sales services, whether through our consultative practices or hands-on engagements, have helped 75 new ventures gain revenue traction while mitigating execution risk,” said Dave Jones, Managing Partner at Altus Alliance “New ventures must constantly evolve in response to market feedback and rarely have the time or resources to maximize their odds of success on all fronts. Altus’ leveraged business model, grounded in revenue delivery versus high fees, offers new ventures experience, best practices, and top line results that they might not otherwise be able to afford. With a proven process and team in place, our clients are able to grow revenue from a solid foundation.”

“All Star’s revenue grew to $37 million while working with Altus Alliance. By implementing their scalable sales management practices and methodologies focused on tracking, accountability and compensation, we improved sales by over 35% in a complex and rapidly growing environment,” said Doug Brown, President and CEO, All Star Directories.

About Altus Alliance

Media Contact: Annie Eissler, Mixtur, annie@mixtur.com, 206.965.9505, x2238

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Webinar: 8 Demand Generation Best Practices

February 9th, 2010

One of the best-of-breed firms Altus works with is Heinz Marketing led by Matt Heinz. As Altus partner, Dave Chase, has stated “I’ve had hundreds of people work for me in my career. Matt is hands-down the best marketer I’ve ever had work for me.” Thus, when Matt puts on a webinar like this one, we strongly encourage you to attend or to have the appropriate folks attend who this topic would be relevant for..

Ever wondered why some SaaS businesses are achieving record sales, while others flounder? The difference is not the economy, and rarely their industry. The difference is strategy & execution that begins with effective demand generation that segues into the sales conversion process where Altus has focused most of its attention. Examples in the webinar come from companies that had record 2009 revenue. In some cases, they were struggling until they hit on the right demand generation process.

Click here to register.

Here is how the Matt described the event:

In this Webinar, you will learn:

- Which marketing channels are working, and which aren’t

- Compelling offers that generate leads AND closed sales

- How companies are generating sales-ready leads from the social Web

- How to get started with nurture marketing today (without new tools or content)

- Specific case studies from some of the SaaS industry’s most successful marketing & sales campaigns

PLUS, each attendee will receive a demand generation audit checklist, specifically prepared to help you evaluate your current demand generation strategy and make immediate changes to improve performance, response and revenue.

Join us Thursday, February 18^th, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. Click here to register.

Tags: Demand Generation, Lead Generation, SaaS
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5 steps to better relations (and results) between sales & marketing

December 21st, 2009

Guest post by Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing [Altus has teamed with Matt's firm for their expertise in Lead Generation and Social Media in tandem with our Sales Process Optimization and Business Development Traction practices]

Too often, sales & marketing blame each other for a lack of results. The leads aren’t good. Sales doesn’t follow up. The excuses go on and on.

If this sounds familiar for your organization, there are things you can start doing right away to mend fences and start on a path towards not only better relations, but far better revenue results.

Call a sales & marketing summit, and don’t let anyone leave the room until the following five things are agreed upon:

Common Lead Definitions: What, exactly, is a qualified lead? What are its characteristics? Get as detailed as you need to be, but make sure both sales & marketing agree on that definition. That way, when leads are delivered to sales, they at minimum meet the basic criteria you’ve both agreed on to make them worth the sales team’s time for follow-up.

Initial Response Time: If the leads are good (and meet the minimum qualified definition), you need a “service agreement” for how quickly those leads will get their first response. If the lead is waiting for something (a white paper, for instance) response time should likely be no longer than 24 business hours. In other cases, 48 hours may be acceptable. Decide what’s right for your organization and customer, get sales management’s buy-in, communicate it clearly to the sales team, and put in place reporting tools to make it super-easy to track this on a daily basis (and send both you and the sales rep alerts when leads fall outside of the service agreement).

Lead Follow-up Steps & Channels: How many times should a lead be attempted before the sales rep gives up and moves on? Should all of those attempts be via phone, or should there be a mix of other channels — email, social media channels, in-person, etc.? If you don’t reach agreement on this critical process, every sales rep will have his or her own idea of what’s right. Some will call once, leave a message, and consider the lead dead. Others will call the poor prospect 20 times. Create a standard with sales not only to ensure leads are thoroughly vetted, but also to ensure sales is moving on to fresher opportunities if there’s nobody at home.

Clear Lead Stages: A lead comes in. The rep starts to attempt a call back. They reach the lead and determine it’s a good prospect, or long-term prospect, or just not qualified. How do they report this information to you? What lead stages have you set up in your lead management or CRM system to not only make it easy and clear how you want sales to categorize their working leads, but also to report to management progress & quality of leads (not to mention improve your lead generation ROI performance moving forward)? Don’t go overboard – 15 lead stages gets way too complicated – but 4-6 stages is reasonable and actionable for most sales environments.

Handing Leads Back to Marketing: According to MarketingSherpa and others, the vast majority of leads generated by B2B organizations in particularly will buy – just not right now. Those leads (once they’re identified as such) need to be passed back to marketing for active nurturing. Make sure there’s a clear process for sales to do just that – ideally with the click of a button.

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All businesses should think of themselves as publishers

December 2nd, 2009

The presentation embedded below is the keynote presentation given by Altus Alliance partner, Dave Chase, at the Join the Conversation event earlier this year.

The presentation was given at the Join the Conversation event in May 2009. All businesses are essentially publishers these days. As both a longtime marketing executive and a publisher, Chase shares his experience as a publisher to these new “publishers”. Included in the presentation are topics heretofore thought of as a publisher’s responsibility but have parallels for businesses of all sizes in their marketing. These include the following:
* Editorial planning
* Breaking News
* Syndication
* Content as marketing
* Metrics & Analytics

This shows how a marketer thinking like a publisher can cost effectively communicate with their community.

We Are All Publishers Now

View more presentations from dchase.

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Docusign garners National Association of Realtors investment

November 27th, 2009

Altus client, Docusign, has been on a tear. The latest validation of their momentum was the investment reported by TechFlash that came from the VC arm of the National Association of Realtors. Docusign was one of Altus Alliance’s first Sales Process Optimization (SPO) clients a couple years ago. The results of that engagement have led to several other SPO engagements with their venture investors.

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Ten Laws for SaaS Sales & Marketing Success

November 17th, 2009

Altus partner Dave Chase collaborated with Matt Heinz to produce a complement to the oft-cited Bessemer Top 10 Laws for being “SaaS-y” that was recently updated (see link below). The introduction is pasted below. For the entire article, go to Sandhill.com’s site that has the full Ten Laws for SaaS Sales & Marketing Success.

Last week, Byron Deeter and his colleagues at Bessemer Venture Partners wrote a terrific piece entitled “Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws for Cloud Computing and SaaS. “ The article laid out why it is critical for SaaS-based businesses to abandon many of the long-held tenets of historic software business models and adhere to a new set of laws. Where Deeter did a nice job of laying out “why” managing a Cloud/SaaS software business must be done differently, we have created a set of ten laws to explain “how” to succeed at SaaS Sales and Marketing.

Our SaaS Sales and Marketing Laws are based on success stories that span many sectors – from higher education to online advertising to HR solutions to energy efficiency to vertical markets, such as the dental industry. Our experience implementing these ten laws at dozens of companies has been a consistent 50 percent-or-greater reduction of customer acquisition costs combined with a dramatic increase in revenues.

One great example of the laws in action involved a SaaS company that had an expensive field sales model. Over the course of six months, the field sales force was replaced by an inside sales team and a structured sales process was put in place. The result: A 16-fold increase in Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenues. The combination of lowering costs and increasing revenues led the company to achieving its first profits. It went from a $400,000-per month loss to its current status as one of the high fliers of the Seattle tech scene with a very bright future.

As Mark Leslie of Veritas fame stated in his seminal “Sales Learning Curve” paper in the Harvard Business Review, the risk for technology startups has shifted from technology execution to go-to-market strategy. Sales and Marketing is one of the pivotal aspects of go-to-market strategies. Leslie’s Sales Learning Curve principles permeate the philosophy of the laws outlined below and leads to a much lower sales burn than what is typically experienced.

Click to see the full Ten Laws for SaaS Sales & Marketing Success article.

Tags: bessemer, Sales Learning Curve, startup revenue
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Top 10 Laws for Cloud Computing

November 17th, 2009

Byron Deeter of Bessemer Ventures has an update to his well-regarded Top Ten Laws for Being “SaaS-y”. Since we launched Altus’ Sales Process Optimization practice a few years ago, we have worked with a couple dozen SaaS clients. It was coincidental to see that Bessemer also has a connection with Mark Leslie who pioneered the Sales Learning Curve concept that permeates all of the Altus practices thanks to Mark graciously spending time with us a handful of years ago.

With SaaS models most of the time the revenue per customer is less than $100,000 per year making it difficult to pencil out a traditional shoe leather sales model. Consequently, we have gained extensive experience with low cost customer acquisition models. Deeter does a great job of laying out the “why”. In a follow-on piece, we’ll address the “how”.

Here’s the opener for Byron’s piece.

At Bessemer Venture Partners we fundamentally believe that the emergence of Cloud Computing – and the three core components of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – is going to completely change the economics of the multi-billion dollar software industry. We have been fortunate to be investors in many of the early Cloud winners (such as Postini, Netli, Trigo, and Cyota), and continue to invest actively behind one of the largest Cloud portfolios in the venture capital industry. Periods of tremendous transformation create tremendous opportunity, and we consider ourselves privileged to be working with many of the great entrepreneurs who are currently creating the next giants of the “software” industry.

When we first published Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y “ on Sandhill.com almost two years ago in conjunction with our annual Cloud/SaaS CEO Summit, we were overwhelmed with the positive response and feedback we received. We have heavily modified many of the best elements that we believe are still relevant, and have added several entirely new concepts for this update publication on Cloud Computing and SaaS.

Tags: inside sales, SaaS sales model, Sales Learning Curve
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More Healtchare innovation in the Northwest

November 6th, 2009

One of the reasons Tim Fitzpatrick recently joined Altus Alliance was that we have seen a wave of exciting new companies as well as new opportunities within established companies. In fact, we are seeing a big need from horizontal technology companies seeking to verticalize into healthcare.

That is what Tim did while for Citrix and what Dave Chase did when he started Microsoft’s healthcare business transforming it from the worst-performing vertical for the company to one of its strongest performers.

While most of the companies we are working with are in the Healthcare I.T. arena, innovations aren’t limited to the I.T. side of healthcare. Second Avenue Partners has backed Qliance which is disrupting the health insurance business. Chase profiled Qliance on the Seattle Startup Buzz blog. Given the track record of Nick Hanauer and Pete Higgins, it is a great endorsement of Qliance’s model.

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Sesame Communications posts 47% year over year growth

October 16th, 2009

We are pleased to report that Sesame Communications who we have worked with over the last year is being recognized for their great revenue growth over the last year. At a time when “flat is the new up”, growing by nearly 50% is very impressive and we are happy to be associated with them.

The following is the press release they put out on the wire today:

Today Sesame Communications, a dental industry pioneer in online patient connection management, has been recognized by the Puget Sound Business Journal (PSBJ) as one of the 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in Washington State for 2009. The selection was based on the company’s level of net revenue growth over the past three years. The PSBJ and RSM McGladrey accounting firm conducted research to verify the company’s net revenues and growth rate. Sesame was honored at the PSBJ’s October 15th evening reception as one of Washington’s fastest-growing businesses, and featured in the October 16th issue of the Journal on newsstands today.

“The tougher economy, increased competition among clinicians, and a strong patient preference to interact with service providers online have all accelerated the adoption of the Sesame 24/7 Suite of services,” said Frith Ann Maier, CEO of Sesame Communications. “Dentists now see that being online means being in touch with patients where they spend their time.”

This recognition comes on the heels of Sesame’s endorsement by the Washington State Dental Association as its preferred online service provider. With over 2.7 million patients around North America getting information from their dental professionals through Sesame’s email services and online information access portal, the company expects to continue its growth pattern.

An emerging growth company, Sesame has steadily built its market penetration with substantial year-over-year growth and sustained profitability since its inception in 2000. In 2008, the company posted 47% revenue growth and its pace has accelerated in the first half of 2009. Sesame has anchored its growth in a comprehensive suite of solutions helping dentists effectively connect with patients, ultimately translating to practice profitability. Sesame’s service offerings for dental providers include high scoring patient appeal rated websites and search engine optimization, 24/7 information access, electronic patient feedback mechanisms, appointment reminders, online doctor-to-doctor collaboration, as well as online marketing modules. For more information about Sesame’s services, go to: www.sesamecommunications.com

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