Obama's tour of Solyndra Solar Manufacturing Highlights California Cleantech Momentum

The front-page headline in the San Jose Mercury News online edition screamed: Obama Touring Fremont Solar Start-up Solyndra.  Why it's always politically beneficial to local Democrats to have the CEO of the world's most powerful economy leave Wash. DC behind for a few days to visit Silicon Valley, something more important is going on here.  Major Cleantech start-ups are building their manufacturing plants in, of all places, California!  Both the poster-child for solar energy manufacturing, Solyndara, and its cousin in the auto industry, Tesla, appear committed to centralizing manufacturing in the Golden State.  This is surprising on a number of fronts.  Given California's deserved history as a weak destination to build out manufacturing due to cost and environmental regulation, there has been a steady erosion of manufacturing jobs overseas, and to other states.

Cleantech Consulting: Product Recommendation AND Implementation Too?

In a recent meeting with a San Francisco-based Cleantech (aka sustainability) consultancy, one of the founders said their mission was to work with corporations to help them baseline their current sustainability capabilities as they related to energy, carbon, waste and water.  This was done using a model, copyrighted, that assessed the client's position, followed by recommendations from the consultancy.  The model itself had a fancy name, and appeared to be based on similar models used in the previous decade by consulting companies that had helped them successfully reengineer their client's business processes.

This San Francisco consultancy does not implement product for its clients.  Not surprising.  A host of consultancies in previous decades built global BPR brands specializing in strategic consulting -- McKinsey, Bain, BCG and others.  In the early build-up of the Cleantech industry, sustainability consultancies are no different.  However, that may change.  With the rapid growth of early stage product companies across the Cleantech ecosystem - from intelligent commercial lighting to SaaS-based carbon emissions management products, commercial solar and water re-use and purification solutions -  there is a significant opportunity. 

Cleantech consultancies, like their professional forebearers, are in a strong position to not only influence sustainability product selection, but take-on the implementation.  And, in the process reap the revenue rewards that result.  Let's look at one example.  In the carbon emissions management product sector, there are a number of high profile, venture backed start-ups including Hara, Carbonetworks and Clear Standards (acquired by SAP).  Most of these products are sold as a SaaS-based platform, with subscription pricing 
that gives customer's the ability to itemize and track the inputs (water, electricity, chemicals) and outputs (the product, greenhouse gases, wastewater) that make up the business processes.

Mining Conference Exhibitor Leads With Inside Sales

So, you've heard everything that needs to be said about marketing at industry conferences and seminars? You've moved on to the promise, and results, of Web-based marketing and don't want to waste your precious marketing budget on those expensive, 'old-tech' events? Time to re-think. Exploited intelligently, the right conference or seminar can give your Cleantech start-up a surprising number of qualified leads.

Here's how: the traditional, and expensive, conference lead generation and branding campaign is very well documented. ID the related industry conference, negotiate with the conference organizers, contract for booth space, build your campaign around that booth. Then, integrate various marketing and sales components such as your Website, press releases, pre and post-conference direct mail and email, custom collateral, impressive booth graphics, installed base newsletter promo's, conference week dinner or bar sponsorships for key prospects, booth give-aways (anyone need a logo'd aluminum pen), can't live without prize raffles (every wonder why you never won the prize when you dropped your business card into the plastic fishbowl at the booth?... Marketing and Sales make sure only the top prospects 'win' the raffle, leveraging that for the follow-up sales call... I know, I know, unfair... now you can save that business card), even magicians or other acts hired to attract conference attendees to your booth. The list of integrated marketing activities prior, during and after the conference that, with a little innovation and stellar execution, result in the right (though expensive) outcome, is long.

However, there is another way. Leveraging clever pre-conference analytics, an inside sales team armed with the right call list, phone and email scripts, marketing back-office follow-up, and on-site conference support from your company's Sales Team, your company can skip the expensive conference booth and still capture those qualified leads you so highly desire. The trick is to realize that many of those leads are already at the conference exibiting, not just attending. The surrounding conference booths are staffed by both influencers and buyers from companies you want to do business with. Once you realize this, you now have defined targets that you can locate easily and approach intelligently. While the target volume is lower compared to the attendee volume flowing by your booth, the quality is much higher.

So, here is a short, linear summary of your lead generation campaign:

1. ID the appropriate conference to target your lead generation campaign toward
2. There are a number of clever ways to do this that are too numerous to mention in this post
3. Analyze the conference exhibitor list, the list is published by the conference organizers on the conference website EVERY time
4. As a bonus to your campaign, review the conference speaker's list on the conference website. Some speaker's work for the exhibitor companies, some don't. Some speakers work for companies you want as customers
5. Once you have your macro list, eliminate the obvious exhibitors and speakers that don't fit your target profile. Marketing should take this first screening cut
6. Next, qualify the list further with your Sales Team. Some on the list will already be customers, and may, or may not, need targeting at the conference (think up-selling)
7. Your Sales Team will tell you what companies on the list they want to priority target
8. Now, you have your final target list of exhibitor companies and conference speakers
9. At this point the next phase of your campaign project plan begins with...

Your Corporate Website: Sales Tool or Information Repository?

Conservation and Transportation Cleantech start-ups in particular are beginning to borrow a page from the technology product start-up playbook and converting their corporate websites from an information only site to an important sales tool.

Many early stage start-ups, due to time and resource constraints, initially launch a corporate website that tells 'the story'. IE: we learn all about the company's offering, the market problem it solves, the credentials of its management team, associated investors, possibly a bit of independent news about it, and even those ubiquitous press releases. A visit to the website might also offer up a few 'down-loadable's' including the corporate brochure, data-sheets and even white papers.

All useful information. However, what's missing? The selling! Tuned properly, the corporate website should qualify visitors as leads, while disqualifying others, and deliver those leads to a further qualification process. Let's look at a few examples... one example is to offer a free or discounted readiness assessment on the website. A SaaS/On-demand-based Cleantech product company in carbon emissions management could offer to its target customers a rapid readiness assessment. The assessment would offer to analyze the prospect's readiness to participate in, and financially benefit from, the growing global carbon marketplace. The deliverable would prove, or disprove, the company's potential for ROI based on any initial recurring or CAPEX costs. The assessment might even model the financial risk of delaying participation in a sophisticated, automated carbon emissions management program. While the assessment and resulting deliverable would be performed by real people collaborating closely with the potential customer, the offer, and call-to-action, would live on the website.

Another lead generation activity on the website that delivers proven results, in addition to loyalty or 'stickiness', is the online calculator. The calculator could be built around a baseline estimate of your company's carbon emissions vs. the 'industry standard' for like companies of similar size, for example, or a simple quality differential between using a legacy, manual solution vs. SaaS-based solution for carbon emissions management. The calculator would require only minimal interaction in the form of relatively simple information in-put by the website visitor. The results, however, are anything but minimal to the Cleantech company running the calculator. Using available Web analyzer tools such as LeadForce, which can give you very detailed information on visitors to your website, it is possible to get deep profile information on the calculator user without requiring that user to fill out an eForm prior to using it. With that information, the product company can profile the user, and prioritize outreach to further qualify. That is important, as it is critical to identify the 'bait' on your website that a visitor will give detailed business information to in order to gain access, and those the visitor will not.

Ahhh, the ever challenging balance between your goals of website stickiness and loyalty, lead generation, intrusiveness and the right to ask for someone's information.

Cleantech Expands in Financial Services... Baird Launches Practice

Baird, an international wealth management, capital markets, private equity and asset management firm with offices in the United States, Europe and Asia, announced that it has launched a Clean Technology focus. The launch makes Baird one of only a few financial services firms that provide equity research, policy research and investment banking capabilities in the sector.

The financial services firm's Chairman, Paul E. Purcell, explained: “Clean technology is an area of tremendous growth and, in many ways, a natural extension of several of Baird’s existing areas of focus. Adding this talented and experienced team gives us immediate credibility and a unique competitive advantage in this very dynamic sector. It establishes Baird as a premier clean technology equity capital markets franchise.”

Established in 1919, Baird oversees and manages client assets of more than $62 billion and was ranked #14 on FORTUNE’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” in 2009.

Baird is one of only a few, but growing, financial services firms that provide equity research, policy research and investment banking capabilities in the Cleantech sector. To learn more about Baird's launch, see this link: http://www.rwbaird.com/ab/news/baird-news/article.aspx?ID=39eABckzUYmPm-IlFUtXQxUdMGMfjIcoA2H1zw-WyF0Zq44ro9AZ0CpY8DjG2H8S

Cleantech Sector Jobs Booming...With an Asterisk

According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent non-profit, the fledgling renewable energy industry has grown steadily over much of the past decade, adding jobs at more than twice the national rate.

The non-profit, which focuses on improving public policy, informing the public and stimulating civic life through investments, reported that solar and wind-power companies, energy-efficient light bulb makers, environmental engineering firms and others expanded their work force by 9.1 percent from 1998 to 2007. The average job growth in all industries was 3.7 percent during the same period.

Impressive numbers, however, the report admits that its numbers end in 2007, pre-recession. Since that timeline, alternative energy companies have been hit hard by the recession, with a string of bankruptcies in the ethanol industry and layoffs in the wind-power industry.

An indicator of what's been happening recently in Cleantech is to look at the venture investment in the sector worldwide, which dropped 41 percent during 1Q09, compared to the previous quarter. This according to the Cleantech Group. To read the full Pew article, check out this link:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/11/BULF184G42.DTL&type=business

Web Conferencing: Your Way to Building a 'Sticky' Community

All the buzz these days is around building virtual communities – or social networks – using innovative technologies that employ voice, video, text or even avatars. According to Wikipedia, these “virtual, or online communities are used for a variety of social and professional groups interacting via the Internet.”

The success of these communities is undeniable, if measured only by the sheer size of some of the more well-known communities and by the money invested in them by other, larger corporations and venture firms. One example is Facebook, which has 120 million active users and more than $300M invested in the company so far.

While the power of these communities to influence actions and drive behavior is proven, there remains a solid, if unspectacular, technological augmentation in the form of web conferencing. Made commercially famous by the companies WebEx and PlaceWare*, web conferencing remains extremely popular today.

And yes, Virginia, there is a connection to Cleantech Marketing too... (famous quotation alert: borrowed from history's most reprinted newspaper editorial first published in the New York Sun on September 21, 1897 by veteran newsman F. Pharcellus Church).

According to Wikipedia, web conferencing is “used to conduct live meetings or presentations over the Internet. In a web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the Internet. This can be either a downloaded application on each of the attendee’s computers or a web-based application where the attendees will simply enter a URL to enter the conference.”

But then you already knew that. And your response might be, “So what?”

The real community building magic occurs in a form of web conferencing called a webinar. Generally speaking, a webinar is a one-way communication form with limited audience interaction. The magic occurs both in the way the limited audience interaction is conducted and in the overall systematic outreach to one’s webinar community.

Let’s examine the first point, the so-called “limited audience interaction.” Most commercial web conferencing systems – and there are scores of them – offer an electronic Q&A whereby the audience can ask questions of the speaker online. Many presenters prefer this format because there is no audio to worry about, and they can manage the quality of the questions. Who wants to answer an audio question the attendees can hear (some of whom may be your clients) that is either a) not relevant to the topic of the webinar, b) too difficult to answer, or c) disingenuous because it comes from a competitor who sneaked onto the webinar? Nobody. As such, the electronic Q&A format is often preferred. It also enables the presenter to selectively introduce questioners to one another during the webinar session so they can share tips on the webinar topic or share tips with all attendees online. The result: a managed community, one that gains topic insight value both from the presenter and other webinar attendees.

The second point, outreach, is very compelling. If you can deliver a systematic webinar experience, one that combines a regular calendar expectation; relevant topics presented compellingly by knowledgeable and capable presenters; online forum parameters that deviate little; and pre- and post-webinar communication that is not intrusive, then you’ve captured the magic. Furthermore, that magic translates into an ongoing interest from people to whom you’d like to sell (or influencers of those to whom you’d like to sell) to return again and again to your webinars. A sticky community is born using an old, standard tool. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, then why do so many early-stage technology companies execute their webinar programs poorly — losing all hope of building a relevant community? We will talk more about this topic on a future post.

* WebEx was founded in 1995 and was acquired twelve years later by Cisco for $3.2 billion. PlaceWare is a spin-off from the famed Xerox PARC and was acquired five years later by Microsoft and re-christened Microsoft Office Live Meeting,