Altus client Optimum Energy has made major strides in the last year reaching a wide array of commercial buildings. In this interview on the Seattle Startup Buzz, Optimum Energy’s CEO shares where they are having success, the stimulus package’s impact on them, what others can learn from their experience and even a bit about Ken Griffey and Lance Armstrong. Read this interview with Nathan Rothman.
Clean Energy Trend: Energy Efficiency
April 14th, 2009Healthcare I.T. Innovation event coming up
April 12th, 2009It’s clear there is an innovation revolution taking place around the health care industry. The need for transformation is huge given the size of the market (16% of GDP and relentlessly growing). I worked in Healthcare I.T. in the 80’s and 90’s and always described it the industry as a paradox. On the one hand, it was at the cutting edge when it came to medical technology but was in the dark ages when it came to information technology.
There’s an upcoming healthcare I.T. event coming up that was blogged about on the Seattle Startup Buzz blog on the P-I site.
More record sales for Altus clients in March
March 31st, 2009There’s too much doom and gloom news so hope you don’t mind a bit of glee being shared. Another client had a barnburner March which is great to see in this environment. Here’s a quote from Altus partner Bill Lawler’s email to our firm.
Implemented Quarterly ROB and killed it at the end of Q1. Big celebration here!! Very fun. Biggest day, Biggest month!! Now they get why we care about the Rhythm of the Business!! Closed down shop at 3:30PM (on 31st of month) and went for margaritas.
The Rhythm of Business is one of the core processes we leave behind during a Sales Process Optimization project. It makes a huge difference.
Great way to brighten a weekend: killer month of sales
March 30th, 2009It sure makes a weekend when we get an unsolicited email like this one from a client we wrapped up a couple months back. We like to work ourselves out of a job and leave behind a team that can thrive after we leave.
March is turning out to be a killer month for us and the team is really humming. Am feeling good about the structure that we architected and Sales Director is doing a great job driving AE’s and AM’s.
Seattle Startup Buzz blog launched
March 28th, 2009Altus Alliance partner, Dave Chase, was selected to be a blogger on the Seattle P-I covering the startup scene in the region. Here is how the blog is described.
Seattle Startup Buzz is for and about the startups and trends impacting new ventures in Seattle, Washington State and the Northwest. The truth is that economic growth and recovery in the Northwest will be driven one new venture at a time. Tell us about your new venture and why it will impact the Northwest.
Those posts that we believe are relevant to our constituents will be linked to from here. If you want to add the Feed to your RSS reader, My Yahoo, Pluck, etc. go to the Seattle Startup Buzz RSS feed page.
One of Chase’s first posts was about the Seattle P-I’s path to profitability as a pure play online site. Ten Mistakes the PI should avoid on a Path to Online Profitability. Go over there and add your thoughts on this post or if you have newsworthy information for the Seattle Startup scene, drop Chase a line at dchase (at) [altusalliance] – dot (com).
Climate Solutions: Pioneer in seeing NW’s Clean Energy and Smart Grid opportunity
March 24th, 2009The NGO Climate Solutions, based in Seattle and Olympia, is coming up on its 10 year anniversary. Since nearly its inception, Altus partner Dave Chase, has lent a hand to their efforts assisting in their strategic planning, marketing and whitepaper development. Well ahead of mainstream consciousness, Climate Solutions published their seminal papers in 2000 and 2001 outlining how the Pacific Northwest was/is positioned to lead.
- Accelerating the Clean Energy Revolution: How the Northwest Can Lead
- Poised for Profit: How Clean Energy Can Power the Next High-Tech Job Surge in the Northwest
Chase contributed to two of their later papers that are worth reading if you want to understand how the Smart Grid presents an opportunity for the Northwest. There is $4.3B in the stimulus package.
Sales Learning Curve: Why Smart Grid vendors must go slow to grow fast
March 23rd, 2009Internationally 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.”
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.
Nominate the best orgs in Seattle for Seattle 2.0 event
March 19th, 2009This award highlights startups, VCs, service providers (hint, hint 
), CEOs, Designers, Technologists and more Read more at Seattle 2.0. Go nominate your favorites.
Local media need dual business models, not dueling models
March 17th, 2009Altus Partner, Dave Chase, wrote a Guest Post for the leading Tech/Business site in Seattle — TechFlash. Dave has been actively involved in helping local Internet media businesses become profitable (a rarity). In this his piece Local media need dual business models, not dueling models, he draws parallels with the traditional dual business model of newspaper businesses that is rapidly becoming a solo business model with the dramatic decline in classified advertising. In today’s environment, distribution is defined less by physical distribution than it is things like quasi distribution as defined by Google PageRank.
He opens the piece as follows:
What made newspapers viable for so long was the fact that they had two products/businesses that were largely unrelated but bundled together. There was the news business — monetized by display ads — and the classifieds business — monetized by classified ads. The classified business was enabled by the distribution and audience of the news franchise.
He also highlights that most local salesforces aren’t the asset they were once thought of…
Having gotten closer to “the last mile” of the Internet, I’ve come to observe that in most situations the local sales organizations of the incumbent media are more encumbrance than asset.
He wraps up his piece as follows:
The sooner local media recognize dual business models — rather than dueling business models — the sooner we’ll see hiring rather than firing being the storyline of local media.
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