Archive for the ‘Sales Learning Curve’ Category

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Five Mistakes to Avoid In Hiring Your First Sales Rep

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

You are the CEO of a hot new company.  You have an exciting product concept that will provide significant positive ROI for your business prospects.  Your engineering team has done a great job executing, transforming the concept to a robust product in record time.

You have been out selling your game changing product to your network of contacts, and have convinced several to install AND pay for your product. It is time to hire dedicated sales people. Beware – it is easy to believe that this it is simple to hire a sales team. It isn’t and these mistakes can cost you precious time and money.

The five mistakes are summarized here:

  • Hiring a strategy-minded VP of Sales instead of a strategic Sales Person
  • Hiring a number of sales reps prior to establishing a proven sales process
  • Paying sales reps on commission only
  • Hiring seasoned pros from big industry players
  • Attempting to leverage the reseller market

Five Mistakes To Avoid – Explained

  1. Once you are at the point of building out a sales organization, the type of experience described above may be valuable, at this point go find a strategic sales person, not a sales manager.
  2. Hiring a number of sales reps prior to establishing a proven sales process with one or two reps will guarantee you an increase in expenses, but not an increase in revenue.
  3. You need a strategic sales resource, a team player, by putting that person on commission you will get a tactical resource, focused on their own needs.  That may be appropriate later, but not now.
  4. Your old colleagues who are great sales people, used to making lots of money on high volume sales performance. Without an established product, they will likely be completely lost in this unstructured environment, whining about prospects that cannot make a decision, a product that is incomplete, and a sales support infrastructure that is not fully baked.
  5. You know there are resellers who would love to represent your product to their extensive customer base.  The challenge at early stage in your market development activity, you need to be fully in charge of explaining your new product to the marketplace, and responding to issues.  This is the ideal to listen and respond to customer feedback. There will be a time for a reseller strategy, but it is not now.

Your customers and prospects will look to you for answers. They will be expecting that your sales team will know how to help them. You have to make sure you have the right sales person for the right phase of your startup’s growth and allow you to gain revenue traction.

Note:  I would love to hear your experiences in managing your startup and how you’ve built your sales teams. I may be able to use your company and ideas in a future post.

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Startup America Ventures Need Sales Help

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

startupamerica_altusStartup America is a new government program that has the potential to change and improve our economy and small business growth in America. In this post, we share 5 Recommendations that we believe can help the program to be a success.

A brief overview of what Startup America promises to do:

  • Expand access to capital for high-growth startups throughout the country;
  • Expand entrepreneurship education and mentorship programs that empower more Americans not just to get a job, but to create jobs;
  • Strengthen commercialization of the about $148 billion in annual federally-funded research and development, which can generate innovative startups and entirely new industries;
  • Identify and remove unnecessary barriers to high-growth startups; and
  • Expand collaborations between large companies and startups.

Startup America is a well-conceived initiative. We believe both public and private organizations need to come together in a coordinated fashion to actually deliver a program and value that can be understood by the entrepreneurial community. The country has experienced successful public examples including the SBA, Dept of Commerce, Dept of Energy, and other grant programs. In the private sector, working examples of entrepreneurial programs include: Kaufman, Case, TechStars, investor groups, and a myriad of foundations.

Add a “Revenue Acceleration Program” to the Partnership

After seeing and participating in a number of these programs, we hope and expect that this next generation of startup support and education includes the critical phase of the initial sales and helping young companies find customers for their products/services.

Mostly these programs focus on the creation of a business plan (document) and the development of the initial product with little attention or remaining funds for the actual sales process.

Mark Leslie, founder and CEO of Veritas, and one of the Stanford professors who developed the Sales Learning Curve would say that a team and product that takes too long in the initial build-out (as it always does in the development) ends up rushing and pushing and spending too much money with a rushed and ill-defined sales strategy.

Our advice and contribution to the organizing committees is to create the framework into two phases: initial build-out and initial sales. Investments, education and support should be in those two phases.

What is essential in Phase Two (when a product is ready) is the development of the vertical segmentation, customer profile refinement, sales structure, value proposition (to name a few) all of which need to be rolled out and evolve based on real market experience.

We are not alone in advocating this approach. In addition to Mark Leslie, many prominent and well-known academics and professionals express how critical the sales and market timing stages are to a young company.

Many people cite Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm to explain how the market responds and adapts to a new product or service: Innovator, early adopter, early majority. Or the concepts of Infancy, Childhood, Adolescent, and Adult are used from Michael Masterson’s book: Ready, Fire Aim. We believe that early revenue traction can achieved for startups, if the proper resources are committed from Startup America.

* * * * * * *

Here are five recommendations that Altus Alliance partners want to share with Startup America:

1.    Expedite Disbursements: Once federal and state grants are awarded from government agencies, then please expedite the money disbursement to awarded venture start ups. Note: Now there are lags of many months to half a year– depending on the agency.

2.    Restore Qualified Programs: Restore grant funding to programs that have were slashed due to non-strategic across the board budget cutting – especially for R&D grants, and PhD hires. Example: New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology – closed in 2010 with no replacement grant issuing entity.

3.    Add Market Validation to R&D: Establish and increase market research and market validation related grants to enhance likelihood that funded R&D will more likely be commercialized in the marketplace. Currently there is too much emphasis on R&D and hardly any focus on commercialization. Perhaps the Department of Commerce could take the lead.

4.    Establish Net Loss Carry Forward Tax Program: Encourage all states to establish or maintain Net Operating Loss Carry forward tax policies. As a tax policy example, we applaud the US Federal Government for its Qualifying Therapeutic Development Project Grants which were part of the Healthcare Reform Act of 2010.These grants were established to cover past operating losses of life sciences companies. We advocate creating regulation streamlining and cycle reduction for U.S. patents and for FDA approvals because they would have a positive effect to current bottlenecked ventures.

5.    Recognize Sales Stages: Segment programs into pre-product and post-product development so that you create an ecosystem built on market realities. Product development, product creation happens on a different timeline than a Go-To-Market timeline and funding and other types of assistance should reflect this reality. Expand the channels for funding start ups and startup assistance – not just through traditional entities like universities, workforce state agencies and known players who may not leverage this spending in a way that truly impacts sales results, but instead create a challenge program open to those who know how to create new businesses and to reinvent the start-up ecosystem. Wired Bio-1 is an example of a program that was hamstrung and unable to make an impact with a grant from the United States Department of Labor Education and Training (USDOLETA).

* * * * * * *

Overall, we believe the biggest issues that small companies face is moving from the idea, or initial product phase, to their first customers and sustainable growth. We want to encourage Startup America to accept and build on the idea that there is much more to growing a successful company (one that can generate profits from revenue, tax dollars and jobs) than just getting them started. In order to succeed, almost every startup needs help getting revenue traction with the right customers. To close, we’ll quote Peter Drucker – “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Let’s help today’s new startups do just that.

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Webinar: 8 Demand Generation Best Practices

Tuesday, 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 18th, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific.  Click here to register.

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Top 10 Laws for Cloud Computing

Tuesday, 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.

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The Right Hire for Early Stage Sales

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Sales is an odd function in early stage companies.  The traditional salesperson is tasked with presenting the company story in front of as many prospects as possible.  If those prospects are not responsive, move on to the next.  The best salespeople get fewer no’s and cycle faster.  In a start up, the situation is different and the role even more critical.  Generating revenue is still paramount and product pitching is the daily focus;  but now the cash from those sales becomes the immediate and essential life-blood of the company.   Beyond revenue, Sales often carries the additional responsibility of ensuring customer satisfaction, accumulating market feedback, acquiring competitive intelligence, defining product requirements, assessing vertical and channel strategies, and being a key influencer in the company’s morale and momentum.  However, many startup leaders still hire their initial sales team based on the traditional sales profile and the desired quota performance with little consideration for these elements.

Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas and currently professor at Stanford, calls the traditional class of salesman “coin-operated”, suggesting they are great at execution and tenaciously drive a consistent and proven process.  But in order to perform they require tools, infrastructure, and support that simply do not exist in a startup.  The result is missed forecasts and high turnover in the position.

One client with a SaaS offering approached Altus out of board pressure due to lower than expected sales.  What we found was two Quota Club Kings as regional reps; they were in the field and miles away from the product with limited support.  The repair was a few months of assessing the best sales process, identifying the target customer, and bringing in two inside reps matching a profile more consistent with a product manager–to listen, learn and share their experiences internally.  Now with a closer connection to the right customer, the closing ratio and sales cycle improved.

Another scenario we find in early stage sales is the under-hire, where precious cash has been allocated outside of sales and the plan is a junior rep / CEO tag team. This model creates the opposite challenge with relatively junior people trying to find, qualify, and manage prospects for the CEO to close.  Now you have a lack of experience, no process, no tools and often an incomplete product representing your company in the marketplace.  These recruits tend to thrash, driving more activity than results just to create an impression of productivity.   The result again is a weak qualified pipeline, missed targets, and often “bad revenue”—a customer willing to listen but who is ultimately not a good match to the product.  Now you have product development thrashing too.

We saw an example of this with an online offering looking for key partnerships and distribution.  Here the lower cost junior rep was able to build a large list of companies and activities that were not strategic or prioritized and the CEO was not able to support the volume while managing his other duties.  The repair was a senior part-time business development profile that could identify and close much bigger transactions with far bigger players.

Many leaders and boards believe ‘sales is sales’.  The perception is that a good sales person will always be good regardless of when or where you drop them.   While sometimes true, it is certainly not the case in the early stages of a company.  The profile of the best sales people for early stage is what we (and Leslie) refer to as Renaissance Salesperson.  The Renaissance rep is one who is more driven intellectually than financially.  He wants to learn and therefore asks questions and listens to what customers, and ideally markets, truly want and need. He evolves to what resonates with buyers and adapts quickly from one call to the next.  He likes to share his findings with the company and help to shape and evolve the product while it is still in its infancy. Most importantly, he is resourceful and can inform and persuade prospects with little infrastructure, support or materials.  He is challenged, intrigued, and motivated rather than frustrated and demanding more resources.

We recommend early stage companies begin their sales with this renaissance profile, and in small numbers, until a replicable model starts to take shape.  It is critical at this stage for the company to learn and adapt quickly and understand that results do not come quickly or easily with a sales group versed only in mature products and markets. This is the time to build the system that will henceforth guide the company’s sales (and perhaps marketing) strategy.

Once you can see the beginnings of a repeatable and scalable model you can now shape the sales organization into a high-yielding machine.  And just as sales people are not all created equal, neither is the makeup of a sales organizational model.   There are many different structures that can be implemented to maximize the cost, speed, and efficiency of sales, i.e.:
Inside / outside
Qualify / close
First sale / growth sale
Volume / relationship based
Direct/channel

Consequently these different models require different profiles of salespeople in order to be successful.  Failure to clearly understand and define the role will again translate into a bad hire, turnover, and loss of momentum and profits.

This recommendation is often hard for CEOs to accept because they need more revenue and rapid adoption and therefore bigger investments in sales. Most companies we begin working with tend to build to an immediate sales model based on their experience or council from established and successful companies in which they used to work and to which they aspire to return. However, just as a company evolves and matures its development cycle through prototypes, so too do sales strategies and tactics.

Although counterintuitive, the fastest path to the greatest revenue is to begin slowly with fewer salespeople until you feel a foundation capable of building on. They will burn far less money and create an environment where traditional sales will succeed.

Didn’t we learn anything from the childhood Tortoise and Hare story?

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Website Conversion – Making your Website Work for You

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

This is the first in a series of Internet Marketing whitepapers drawn from my 15 years of doing marketing on the Internet. I start with the most common shortcoming I’ve seen with small company websites – i.e., the lack of focus on converting “lookers into bookers” on company websites. Instead many companies focus on getting traffic but don’t turn those into lasting relationships.

The goal is to capture the essence as there’s nearly infinite information on every topic. This is part of a larger endeavor to capture the intellectual property of Altus Alliance. In addition, these how-to’s have been a collaborative effort with Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing. Matt worked for me early in his career and remains one of the best team members I have ever worked with. He’s the kind of professional I like working with. He doesn’t have a PhD…he has a GSD (Gets Stuff Done). All of the topics we cover assume the tight resources of a startup business as opposed to having a large, specialized marketing team. No fluff in these papers.

For a copy of the whitepaper, please fill out the form below. Below the form is the introduction to the whitepaper.

Introduction

Most organizations spend more time and money promoting their websites than they do optimizing existing conversion rates of visitors to their site. Because increasing website conversion is one of the most effective ways to increase profitability at the visitor level, knowing how to measure and improve conversion is vital to success with Internet marketing. This is one of the longest sections due to its importance.

Conversion defined: Conversion rates are distinct measurements that determine how many of your prospects take your preferred action step. Typically, micro-conversions (for instance, reading different pages on your site, or signing up for a newsletter) lead to your main conversion step (making a purchase, or contacting you for more information).

The most common thing we hear from businesses when they are disappointed with their web marketing is something along the lines of “I got people to my website but the campaign just didn’t work”. Let’s draw an analogy with a real world experience. Imagine you had someone helping your business by getting people to step inside your store who expressed an interest in your product. You would think that that person did their job as long as they got people who were relevant to your business to step inside your store. That’s where your job as the business owner begins. Imagine if that shopper who stepped inside wasn’t greeted by anyone, couldn’t find where your merchandise was located, found old merchandise after roaming around, couldn’t find where to check out and when they finally crossed paths with someone all they did was they wanted to talk about how great their store was rather than find out what the shoppers needs were. This is the real world equivalent of the experience visitors to many websites have. It’s no wonder that results for many business websites are abysmal with this kind of experience.

Who is responsible for that shopper’s experience – the person helping get people inside your store or you? Successful businesses that have been around awhile intuitively know the experience they want their customers to have in their real world interactions whether they are an insurance agent or a retailer. They need to pay as much attention to the website experience or they are wasting a lot of money on their marketing and website and missing out on countless opportunities. One business we worked with had a website for five years that didn’t have a big impact on their business. Applying a few of the tips outlined below, they increased sales from their site 129% from March 2008 to March 2009 — a time when most saw big declines in their business.

A website that serves your business should also serve your site visitor and should be like a good butler — butlers anticipate needs and work silently, as a good website should. Unfortunately, most websites aren’t designed with conversion in mind and thus there are missed opportunities whether people find your website independently or you sent them there via your efforts in your place of business or via your advertising.

Remember that once the visitor is at your website, your goal is to convert her — to turn her into a buyer or a lead. In most cases, the conversion you should focus on isn’t an instant sale. The most common activity for website visitors is to do research before they make a purchase online or offline (in local businesses serving local customers, 80% or more of the purchases will take place offline). Thus, you shouldn’t have the expectation that every visit will turn into a sale. If that’s all you design your website around and measure your success against, you’ll be missing out on lots of future opportunity. As mentioned in the Email Newsletter chapter, email marketing to your permission-based list is consistently the highest ROI marketing tactic there is.

Of course, if someone is ready to transact you don’t want any barriers in their way. At the same time, it would be well advised to put 80% of your focus on driving a conversion that is a lower commitment on the part of the visitor. Highlighted below are several ideas that would provide an incentive for a visitor to give you information about themselves. By collecting their email and other relevant information, this opens up a communications channel that will be vital to your success.

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Sales Learning Curve: Why Smart Grid vendors must go slow to grow fast

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Internationally known technology and business analyst, Jesse Berst, publishes Smart Grid News reporting on the latest insights on the Smart Grid sector. This sector is one of the few growth sectors in today’s economy.  Altus partner, Dave Chase, wrote a guest piece entitled Sales Learning Curve: Why Smart Grid vendors must go slow to grow fast. Jesse moderated the Voyager Capital-hosted session that had Mark Leslie speak about the Sales Learning Curve which is where Dave Jones, Doug Schulze and Dave Chase originally met Mark Leslie.

Mark was instrumental in helping Altus form a practice around Leslie’s Sales Learning Curve framework. Altus Alliance remains the first and only consultancy to develop a practice around this now well-regarded framework that was subsequently published in the Harvard Business Review.

Chase opens the Smart Grid News piece with the question:

“Why does it always take longer and cost more to build a technology company than anyone expects?”

And then expands on that common refrain.

That lament is true for all high-tech firms, but nowhere so true as in the energy technology sector, which has all the usual challenges plus a target market (utilities) that is one of the most conservative on earth. Yet a simple fact defines every successful company — it figures out how to bring in more money than it spends. The Sales Learning Curve may be the best way to solve this fundamental equation. What’s more, it is not a “soft” technique with vague parameters. Rather, it is a concept that can be measured and monitored with the same rigor as the Manufacturing Learning Curve (MLC), which determines how long it takes to reduce manufacturing costs.

He draws the parallel with the MLC and highlights the curve in a sales context.

The Manufacturing Learning Curve shows how cost declines as volume increases. The Sales Learning Curve shows how the Sales Yield increases as learning increases. As illustrated nearby, the Sales Yield is simply the average production per full-time salesperson. Until salespeople sell more than they cost, they are a drain on cash flow and hiring more only makes that worse. Yet, according to Leslie, salespeople can’t sell more until the entire company has undergone some “organizational learning.”

Sales Learning Curve

The exact shape of the curve is different for every company and sector but the central tenet remains constant — during the “go-to-market” phase companies should “Go Slow to Grow Fast.” Just as athletes and musicians practice very slowly until they master a movement, companies must spend and hire slowly until they truly know what customers want and need.

Key message:

You can’t speed up the process by hiring more people or throwing more money at the problem. Organizational learning takes time. Customers must spend time with the beta product; reps must spend time with customers, and then spend time with the company’s engineers and marketers to translate customer preferences into better products and better marketing. The gating factor is not the ability to add new features or pump out new marketing brochures. The limitation is the time for the entire organization to truly understand and internalize customer needs.

We have worked successfully in the Energy Efficiency sector and seen that the organization that “measures twice and cuts once” can both reduce the sales cycle and increase the quantity and quality of their sales pipeline. For example, one company saw their pipeline go from a low-quality $3MM pipeline to a well-qualified $22MM pipeline.

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Chase published in Online Journalism Review

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Altus partner, Dave Chase, continues to opine on The Great Restructuring taking place in local media. His latest piece on business models in local media was picked up by the Online Journalism Review (OJR). The OJR is part of The Knight Digital Media Center.

The Knight Digital Media Center is a partnership of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight Digital Media Center was launched in April 2006 to focus on helping journalists succeed in the rapidly changing media landscape of the 21st Century.

At the heart of addressing the business model challenge for local media is developing a low cost customer acquisition model. Newspapers are only the first to face a crisis – it’s just a matter of time before local TV and radio face a similar crisis. In their situation, many of them rest on an asset that is no longer a major barrier to entry. As the newspapers found out that being the only ones to be able to afford an extremely expensive printing press didn’t provide them an advantage, the ability to broadcast into local markets with terrestial assets no longer provides a competitive barrier to entry for TV and radio.

In all of these cases, these organizations largely have salesforces made up of Farmers, not Hunters that doesn’t position them well to remake themselves with a revenue stream in a new arena.  Altus has been working on the solution to that issue and have seen success with many clients even in the face of a tough economic climate.

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Realists vs. Fabulists in Media

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Clay Shirky does a terrific job of laying out the scale of the disruption happening in local media equating it to the introduction of the printing press 500 years ago. Take a few minutes and read Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

Once people and organizations realize the scale of the disruption, fresh thinking is required that isn’t solely looking through the prism of the previous dynamics.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

The fresh thinking needs to touch every piece of the local media value chain from the tools to the production process to the nature of relationships with the organizations supporting the enterprise. The mindset defined by Mark Leslie’s Sales Learning Curve framework should be central as the entire organization needs to learn from the evolving customer preferences and feedback. The experimentation and learning culture Shirky espouses has to get applied from production through monetization.

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Dave Chase interviewed after New Business Models for News Summit

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

Chase was interviewed by David Cohn of Spot.Us about his experience at the New Business Models for News Summit that was put on by CUNY, David Cohn and Jeff Jarvis. He shared his experiences about building a successful hyperlocal local media business particularly in this challenging economic time. The interview can be watched here.

The company that Dave is working with is NextNewsNet that builds off of the success of SunValleyOnline and NewWest.Net. He has been applying both the methodologies of Altus’ Sales Learning Curve and Sales Process Optimization practices with the help of Bill Lawler. Bill’s background with Dell has been particularly helpful in developing a low cost customer acquisition model. NewWest.Net has already seen the quantity of HOT Opportunities increase 4-5x in the early stages of the project. If past experience holds, this will result in a significant increase in revenue.

The video is of Dave Chase doing a “lightning round” at the summit explaining what has been learned with SunValleyOnline and NewWest.Net that is being applied to the NextNewsNet business model is located here.

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