Sustainability is great, but what’s important is a sustainable business advantage. Purchasers want to know what the ROI is on your process, technology or material. And if your product costs more, you need to do your value-added selling to demonstrate better overall payback. The public sector can be more environmentally conscious than private business, but when it comes to deciding how to spend beleaguered budgets, cost is still a driving factor.

This is common sense, but we’ve found that most of our cleantech clients still need a lot of help shaping and telling the business story in a way that resonates with each of their vertical markets. We always say that inventing a technology and communicating about it require two entirely different skill sets.

Case in point: Pavement Recycling Systems (PRS), $35 million infrastructure company in Southern California, came to Reality2 Marketing for assistance in growing its business. PRS had developed a number of innovative technologies including a system that rebuilds deteriorated roads by pulverizing, remixing and reapplying in-place asphalt.

The first order of the day was repositioning and rebranding of the foundational elements: the company’s website (the marketing hub – where everyone goes to check out a company), sales support materials (nothing beats a good brochure to reinforce a face-to-face meeting) and sales presentations (PowerPoints that tell a compelling story). Reality2 applied our “Reality-based” analytical process to identify the key business drivers and developed PRS’s positioning and marketing strategy. Then, we brought it to life in a new website, sales kit and presentation.

Outreach marketing programs such as email and advertising were launched only after the foundational elements (such as the website) were upgraded – a sequence Reality2 enforces wherever possible to optimize return on marketing investment.

The most recent marketing success is a lead-generating email campaign to city governments, with targeted messages to different decision-makers from mayors to city engineers, linking to interactive landing pages with videos, testimonials, cost/performance comparisons, and calls to action.

The brave man who stepped up to the plate was Keith Lewis, the CEO of a sensor company (SSS Technologies, soon to be Sarkitel Sensors) out of Alabama. The company description in the program guide says that they make an “ammonia sensor which, when used to control ventilation, can improve performance in poultry, hog and dairy operations.”

Keith, however, was on to me and skipped the usual tech jargon right away. I played the 6-year-old. “So, what do you do, Daddy?” I asked.

“You know when you pee and it smells bad sometimes?” was what Keith opened with.

Yes folks, marketing can be really fun, and funny, sometimes! A dialogue ensued that had everyone including the participants in stitches. Turns out, the bad smell is ammonia, and when 10,000 chickens are all peeing in a chicken farm, too much of that smell is really bad for both people and chickens. So when it gets too bad Daddy’s sensor turns on the fans. But why can’t the fans be on all the time? Because too much wind makes chickens catch cold or get sick.

Aha, an insight. The sensor activates extra ventilation only when ammonia levels require it, eliminating two health hazards for poultry and the people who work with them: toxicity and excess wind. Happy chickens get fatter and lay more eggs. Plus you save on energy costs.

If you have a technology company, try this “dialogue with a six-year-old” exercise yourselves. The act of simplifying can lead to startling insights about how to move from a technical description to a clear, understandable and distinctive value proposition.

This is because the skill set you need to communicate about a product is vastly different from the genius it took to invent and engineer it.

Most scientists and engineers get too complicated when they explain their product and business. They take the developer’s perspective instead of the customer’s. The same problem can show up on their homepage, which reads more like a spec sheet than an engaging entry point.

Time to simplify
It may be hard to do, but you need to simplify. It helps a lot to pretend that you’re talking to a six-year old. Find a partner of any age, make a statement, and have them keep asking you two questions:

- Why?
- So what?

This gets you past the buzzwords right to the heart of the matter. You’ll have some interesting insights too.

Where’s the main pain?
Try starting out by taking the point of view of the customer. What problem are they having that your solution fixes? What’s the main “pain” that you relieve? What kinds of struggles are they having with the current ways of doing things? Most engineers would start out by talking about how the technology works. When you’re in a commercialization or marketing mode you need to address what it does first. State the benefit.

Quick, in two sentences!
You need to be able to explain your technology in two easy-to-grasp sentences. The components are these sentences are:
- Your product category (the space you are playing in)
- The un-met need: the pain you fix
- How your solution is different from and better than the other alternatives. (“Unlike X, we Y”)

Only then do you can explain the unique breakthrough that makes this possible, again in simple language first.

Even your fellow engineers and scientists will thank you
Not only will top management, the “approvers”, be nodding (in understanding, not slumber) and getting their checkbooks out. Technologists, who may in fact be the direct “users”, will also appreciate getting a clear topline before digging into the details of your elegant solution.