Streamlining the Renewable Energy Sales Process
The complexity of the economic and technical factors, and the difficulty to model then present them to clients, is the greatest limiting factor to the adoption of renewable energy solutions by new customers. There are three steps that a renewable energy sales and installation company can take to significantly increase their efficiency in this area and close more projects:
- Develop a project model that encompasses all economic factors (such as the cost of materials, labor and incentive packages) and technical factors (design and installation factors from the engineering side).
- Employ a software solution that allows you to analyze models based on specific project details and run bounded linear analyses to maximize and/or minimize factors that are important for that client.
- Incorporate that modeling software into your proposal generation and client management workflow.
Economics and Technology and the Sales Process
A variety of economic factors including rebates, incentives, costs savings and inflation protection are the driving force in the vast majority of successful renewable energy projects. The ability to quickly develop and adjust economic and technical models is the key to showing a client the specific factors that make them an ideal candidate and the broader scope of a proposed investment. In order to do this, engineering and sales departments must work together to develop a two way model that will allow salespeople to adjust models without significant reengineering.
Selling renewable energy should be as simple as saying, “installing solution x will cost you this today, allow you to claim tax-rebate y, and produce $z of power each year, so…” Unfortunately, it’s seldom clear upfront which economic factors will be most appealing to a client. One client may be more interested in a quick ROI, while another may be looking for a maximized return over thirty years. One may be extremely motivated by non-economic pressures while another may be more patient and want to wait for a specific incentive to reappear. Some may be interested in maximizing the resale value of their installation while others may be interested selling back to the grid and focus on cost per kWh.
Each customer requires reforming the project model to maximize or minimize particular factors while setting constraints on others. For example, “what’s the best ROI you can offer for a system that outputs at least 500 kW on a given rooftop that has to begin during the next six months?” Without a coherent model that incorporates all of the technical and economic factors, this process can be extremely time consuming and costly. Meanwhile, the client may be speaking to other companies or allocating their funds to other areas of their budget.
With a solid model and a software package to calculate it, a sales team could confidently answer this in a few moments. Further, clients are often reluctant to give salespeople the full picture upfront, which means that a series of proposals, each designed to take into account a newly disclosed factor, are often required to close a single project.
Attaining and Keeping the Competitive Advantage
The ability to quickly issue and reissue proposals that directly address the specific wants and needs of your clients will give you the upper hand competitively and allow your team to reach out to more potential clients.
The first step is to create a sound operating model that describes your sales and installation process. Sounds simple, but as with all things that should be easy, there are countless complexities. A company’s model is shaped by everything from its relationships with vendors, to the geological and political landscape of the area to the skills and personalities of the team. The real work in creating this model is the work of developing a clear, systematic and comprehensive understanding of your business. The model should be organized into constants that will affect all projects, such as material and labor costs, and variable factors such as kWh, ROI and incentive packages. You may also want to create different models for various customer types, such as commercial, residential, preferred, etc…
The second step is to implement a software modeling solution that will allow you to quickly analyze scenarios and produce client proposals. At the outset of a potential project, the sales and engineering teams can use the tool as a central repository for all the information for the project. For example, the sales team enters the max budget and other factors. The engineering team inspects the site and determines that they have this much workable area and can support the following hardware options. Once these baseline factors are entered, various scenarios can be run for the initial proposed project. The sales team can then proceed to work with the client to refine the plan, providing multiple scenarios with complete projections with very little effort. In situations where the engineering team would have to verify that a scenario is indeed doable, the information is clearly presented there for them to sign off upon.
The final step is to integrate the software solution into the proposal generating and client management workflow. Clients react best to professional, branded proposals, that both clearly lay out the information in a simple narrative form and contain detailed appendices providing enough information to satisfy their diligence. Your model should include many individual values with units as well as detailed tables that project production and economic factors out over the life of the system. Copying and pasting these variables from a model generator into an office document is both time consuming and error prone. Integration with you client management workflow will likewise save much time and prevent error for sales teams dealing with large lists of leads.
David Erwin
Partner, Powersimple LLC
Honorary Board Member, Solairo Energy
December, 2009
Lua Basics
I was asked by a colleague to research the Lua programming language. We are creating interactive television apps and will be using it if/when we develop for Verizon Fios.
Lua is a meta language. It does little but call apps and code from other languages. It is extremely small, fast and extensible, allowing developers a lot of flexibility in creating precise structures to model concepts.
It's only reason for existing is to allow developers to work within systems such as cable boxes, games, other apps. For example, Verizon's Widgets are 'written in Lua'. In actuality, none of the actual functionality in the set top boxes is in Lua (looks like it is EBIF). Lua is used as a layer to access the EBIF functions, routines, etc... So what you get is a Lua toolkit that allows verizon to expose any functionality they want developers to have while not allowing any access to lower level box functions. Since Lua is open source, this also boils down to Verizon allowing developers to work on their ebif platform (which, as we know is closed and hard to get in to) using a widely available and open scripting language.
Bubble Timer
If you do anything that involves time, such as living, and have ever had the inclination to 'spend time' more wisely, etc..., check out Bubble Timer. The concept is simple, by tracking how much time you spend on things, you can analyze your habits as data and find concrete, practical ways to improve your use of your time going forward. Then, you can see how you've improved and improve your improvment, ad infinitum.
"Wait," you say (you being me), "there's no way I'll use it. The very factors that undermine my foundation will just undermine my efforts to track it." Not so hasty. That you said this is a sign that Bubble Timer is for you. The happy folks at Bubble Timer have made a very slickapp that makes tracking time as fun as poking at bubbles. So, from the depths of your darkest hours of blocked workage and frustrated communication, you can emerge as your child-self and poke at a few bubbles and revive the rational side of yourself with the joyful knowledge that you just gave your future self the ability to look back at this depraved moment with a scientific eye, one that may just prevent it from recurring quite so often. In short, it brings a glimmer of hope to despair and a framework for practical self-reflection to generally unproductive and self-perpetuating nagging, gnawing moments of self-doubt.
They also have an iPhone app, if you're into that kind of thing.
If you still not convinced, then check out the company's stance on privacy of data collected. Sean Johnson speaks out against RescueTime's (another time isv) tendencies toward usage of time tracking as a managerial tool as opposed to a tool for personal improvement. The discussion that ensues in the comments between Sean and a voice from RescueTime is THE best discourse on privacy-spyware implications in the office that I have read to date. If not that, the Heideggerian reference that is the title of his blog "Being and Time" should assure you that you're in good hands.
Stack Overflow
The link of the day is Stack Overflow. It is a forward looking democratization of the forum concept, populated by some of the more exceptional programmers and tech mangers out there and driven by one of the more sticky and innovative initiative systems out there. Aside from the valuable information and the catharsis of grokking with the old piers, users can gain extra cred through earning 'badges' based on participation and the community's reaction to that participation. This is a great crossover from the gaming world, challenging participants to explore dimensions of community that they may otherwise overlook or not engage by enticing them to achieve quantifiable performance goals. Love it.
Grok
"Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man."
- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a strange land.
I got this from wikipedia, then copied the main definition here for vanity's sake:
"To grok (pronounced /ˈɡrɒk/) is to share the same semiosphere or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity. Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein's view, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed. From the novel:
"... quote above ..."
The Oxford English Dictionary defines grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment." Other forms of the word include "groks" (present third person singular), "grokked" (past participle) and "grokking" (present participle).
In an ideological context, a grokked concept becomes part of the person who contributes to its evolution by improving the doctrine, perpetuating the myth, espousing the belief, adding detail to the social plan, refining the idea or proofing the theory."
"To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier... That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution."
- Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers of CDBaby and MuckWork on Startup Success
Even in this age of fear based news, war and famine, contentious politics and avian flu, it is difficult to be a pessimist with people like Derek Sivers in this world.
Derek Sivers is the man behind CDBaby and now MuckWork who parlayed the simple need to publish his own CDs into a company to sell his friends albums as well into a scalable web business into a massive payday, which he parlayed into a tremendous charitable organization designed to aid independent musicians in a much more comprehensive way.
In this interview Derek speaks candidly about his journey from a musician into the big business of music showing that tremendous success can come from following natural, compassionate intentions and be fed back into scaling those intentions to a tremendous degree.
http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/show-40-derek-sivers-cdbaby-and-muckwork/
If you're into the business site of the web, I highly recommend subscribing to this podcast. It's worth going back and listening to the entire season.
"It’s not until 10 months later when they’ve lost their ability to write a while loop that they realize they may have made a mistake ... If you find yourself in management and wish you were coding, don’t wait until you’re completely burned out and bitter; do yourself (and your company) a favor – and do it now. Get yourself back into the code jockey seat. If your current company won’t work with you, there are companies out there who will."
Rob Walling
http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2009/10/26/work-less-get-more-done-convenient-open-source-what-a-startup-is-really-like-and-more/
Going Open Source 2 – “Will work for greater vision”
This post is going to be like the movie The Usual Suspects. I'm going to show you the end then let those of you who are interested start from the beginning and take the long way back:
... so after dipping the strip into a bunch of sites, here are the ones that turned a favorable color:
The Micropreneur Academy and
47Hats - The MicroISV Digest
Subsequent posts in this series will focus on my journeys in these realms.
Do-do-de-loop x5 (the moving back in time noise with fingery hand waving)
In the first article in this series, I talked about my strategy of taking a code base that had been developed through a number of client projects and 'going open source' with it. There were two goals that I was trying to achieve with the work I outlined back then:
- to have a stripped down tabula rasa code base to build up from, and
- to come up with a detailed, itemized, prioritizable list of steps to build the first package release.
I now have a fairly realistic idea of the time commitment needed to have a coherent engine together. I have also designed a 'first module', if you will. In classic programmer fashion it is a module that will aid people in building other modules... 
So, yes, I do think I'm on track for the next step:
A step back
During this process, I realized a fundamental aspect of my approach to this project concerning what I call my point of action. As usual, I've been working from intuition, which leads to familiar patterns.
I've spent quite a lot of time with the code and the ideas and strategies to release it both to the open source community and as a basis for an ISV. I have a solid plan, mostly still in my head, to the steps I will have to take in order to achieve open source as well as perceive a need that this could fulfill on a subscription basis. These thought processes span a half dozen disciplines (marketing, accounting, support, etc..), all of which have to be implemented to support the greater idea.
It was not a surprise to me that I fell into the familiar pattern of diving into the code with the focus to take the code all the way to open source before putting substantial work into the other facets of a project / business that are necessary to support it.
If I go straight forward, I will have a sourceforge bill sitting on my monthly credit card accounts that leads to a spartan project page with a sad, lonely release with perhaps a dozen downloads and maybe one or two inactive contributors.
Tapping some experience
I've come across a lot of entrepreneurs that work to help entrepreneurs. There's a lot of genuine folks out there selling access to valuable experience and community, but there's also a lot of charlatanism. I have done a large amount of researched based on the free trials, posts and media out there.
My litmus tests for entrepreneur coaches:
- Have they done this themselves?
- If no, then close the browser tab
- If yes, then, did they get it right the first time?
- If they struck it the first time, close the tab but keep an eye on their blog/product. These folks are awesome inspiration but I've found that style and inuition doesn't come through in a practical manner.
- If they have tales from the trenches, more mistakes learned from than brilliant magical success and an authoritative tone of voice that's the result of excitement and energy tempered long by the pressures of experience then I keep them on the list.
- Do they have an active community surrounding their work?
- Better be yes, because I want to be able to say, "I've been working at this damn phase for months and not one person has come to my site!" then for them to say "Try x." and for me to spend one hour outside of my preprogramed approach comfort zone and smack myself on the forehead for all the 'learning experience' 'character building' hours behind me.
- Do they have good hair in their headshot? Absolutely essential. I mean they can't take themselves too seriously. If I wanted to staple myself to a rigorous routine I would go work in the financial district.
The following are the blogs / communities that I have decided to participate in to develop the greater vision
Great Google SEO Ranking Analysis
Ben Hendrickson and Rand Fishkin posted a tremendous article on Google's Algorithms digging into the way in which a ton of different factors influence that all important search ranking. This is a must read for anyone interested in the fine art of Google subservience that is modern SEO and webmastering.
Topics:
- Are Links Well Correlated with Rankings?
- Can Any Single Metric Predict the Rankings?
- How Do "On-Page" Factors Correlate with Rankings?
- Can We Build a Ranking Model that Gives more Actionable Takeaways?
- Conclusions & Take-Aways
seomoz.org is really tearing it up over there content wise. I like their tools as well but am a bit put off by the obscene amount of 'pro only' disabled features they stuff into their 'free' offerings. See their rankings page for another view of the smiling waving kings and queens on the web popularity parade float.
As usually, share and enjoy.