That would be a shame. This is a period when the stars of next year decide to be stars, and the rest miss the boat.

It starts with a big step back and a shake of the mental Etch A Sketch. We find there’s no time like December to take stock. Whether the last half of the month finds you winding down or frantically pushing through, when the holiday break finally arrives, you can pause to consider the big picture. And the big picture is more important to your business now than it ever has been.

The global economy, national politics, the maturation of relatively new cleantech industries and markets, the obliteration of traditional media by a proliferation of new interaction and communication avenues… all these things are working to change the very rules under which marketing organizations everywhere operate. What are you going to do about it?

New year, new… what?

Whether you’re a startup entrepreneur or a veteran CMO, there’s more opportunity here than might meet the eye. You’ll find it in the facts. Not just the ROI on your marketing spend or your customer sat metrics, but also the answers to questions you may not yet be asking.

Customer conversations

Who left you this year? Before a customer leaves you officially, they leave you psychologically. Who’s gone quiet on you? It’s the ones you never hear from who can most surprise you. They may not initiate a conversation to express their concerns, but if you do, you’ll likely learn more than you expect.

Sales tools

When was the last time you had a meeting of the minds with your new business lead(s)? Not a meeting where Sales and Marketing were both in the room, but a significant chunk of time set aside to vent a little spleen and hear the brutal truth about what’s working — and what’s not, and why — out in the field.

Strategic vision

What will leadership in your field look like in three years? What will you do to move your organization in that direction this year? How will you refine your in-house skill set, your offerings, or your business model? Will you be better off on 12/31/12 than you are on 12/31/11?

Take a minute to close your eyes and step into that future vision. What do your customer conversations sound like? What do your sellers experience in the field? What does your team look like? What are your products and services, and how do you talk about them? What does the day-to-day operation of your business look and feel like?

Now open your eyes and look around you at the ways those things are today. If there’s not much of a difference, dream bigger. If, on the other hand, they seem like entirely different worlds, you’ve got your work cut out for you. And that’s not a bad thing! It’s what the New Year’s calendar-flip is for. Planning. Pivoting. Regenerating the endlessly renewable human energy that drives innovation of all kinds. It comes around just once a year. And 2012 will come around just once in our lifetimes. Let’s make it great.

We’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating — especially if you’re a cleantech startup.

Game changing technologies and business models can be difficult to market simply because they are often difficult to explain. Technologists and scientists find it very difficult to talk about their innovation without going straight to the “gorp” — the technical language that makes a layperson knit his or her brow in confusion, or even exasperation.

Here are two suggestions that can help.

1. Speak conversational English. Yes, we know “ferromagnetism” and “superlattice” are real words. They might even be in your dictionary. But we’re willing to bet they’re rarely said out loud. At least not in public. Leave the geek speak in the spec sheets and white papers, and talk about what you do as if you were addressing a smart friend or acquaintance who has no idea what you do for a living. And if a familiar metaphor will help someone “get it,” don’t be afraid to use it. It’s not about your knowledge; it’s about their understanding.
2. Don’t confuse complexity with sophistication. Simplicity in communication is essential to understanding, and yet it’s anything but simple to achieve. At Posit, we love to allude to this quote, attributed to everyone from Abe Lincoln to Mark Twain: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Good one, isn’t it? It’s not at all easy to explain your technology in one minute, or ten. But it’s essential. And the only way to do it is to keep your story simple. What do you do? Why does it matter? Why will the person in front of you care?

Those are the principles. Here are some specific examples.

Don’t say: “…involves the reversal of flow through a membrane from a high salinity, or concentrated, solution to the high purity, or ‘permeate,’ stream on the opposite side of the membrane.”

When you can say: “…uses semi-permeable membranes to remove impurities from water.”

Don’t say: “…modernizing of the electricity delivery network using the latest digital and information technologies to meet key defining functions.”

When you can say: “…the Internet of energy.”

Be more straightforward with your explanations, and you’ll find you’re more successful in your interactions.

And if you don’t have the personal capability — or the internal capacity — to translate the former into the latter, or aren’t even sure how to tell the difference, consider adding a “tech translator” to your team. It’s okay to focus on “time to market” or “time to money.” Just remember they both hinge on “time to Oh!”

Why do you do what you do?

I love the commitment to renewable energy and cleantech – where that’s going to take us, our kids and our grandkids. I would love to be able to see what the world will look like in 20 years versus today. I’m also passionate about startups and entrepreneurs; I myself lived in that world for a long time. I like to be in a role where I can support their evolution, and see their growth and success.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?

It’s seeing the evolution of startups, watching nascent companies grow, thrive and prosper. And seeing the upside of that: the whole ecosystem that grows with it, so we’re left with a culture that’s devoted to cleantech and renewable energy. When it permeates the culture, it becomes part of the fabric of what we do and why we do it, as opposed to isolated pockets of success that may not interrelate or interconnect.

In your experience, what’s the one thing that most often gets in the way of great marketing?

Lack of execution. I see lots of great ideas, great plans. Most of those fail due to a lack of execution. It runs the gamut: marketing, sales, biz planning, strategic planning… Why do we have so many good ideas nobody’s heard of? I think partly because [inventors] are telling the wrong people. If you’re not telling people who can execute on the idea, nobody’s going to hear about it. Whether the potential market is huge or you think it’ll solve world hunger, I say “That’s great, but where do you start? You can only eat an elephant one bite at a time.” It’s less about how you’re telling the story and more about who you’re telling.

What’s the most important lesson that you’ve learned as a marketer/advocate?

You still have to execute. Many cleantech startups either have no plan and are flying by the seat of their pants, or have a plan but are not following it. They’re grabbing at the nearest thing that looks like the next tangible benefit, whether that’s money, a customer, a sale, or a product or solution that’s just not ready.

If you could wave your wand and make any product or service in the world a smashing overnight success, what would it be?

A highly efficient battery that works at any scale. A grid-scale battery.

We all know that funding is tight these days; VCs are extremely careful with their money, and competition for those dollars is fierce. It’s easy to think that the best way to capture investor attention is by positioning your offering as simply the newest-best-most-innovative thing to come along, with no competitors and an enormous addressable market.

But you wouldn’t be doing yourself, or your company, any favors.

Innovation is exciting. Invention is exciting. But more exciting to an investor? A solid business model, clear intellectual property, a differentiated offering, an experienced team, and a market that’s primed to buy. The business model, IP, team, and market components of your story are fairly objective data. It’s the differentiation piece that can be tough to uncover and articulate. We’ve talked about the four ways to differentiate. Now, let’s take a look at how to articulate your differentiators to best appeal to investors.

1. Recognize your competitors. If you think you don’t have any, you’re probably wrong. If you’re not wrong, ask yourself why you’re alone in the field. It could be that your idea isn’t as marketable as you thought. What makes for a great invention doesn’t always make for great business.

2. Identify your differentiators. List the aspects of your product or business model that make it different from your competitors’ – both the positive and the negative. You’re not going for spin here; you’re going for truth.

3. Decide which differentiators you will emphasize. We suggest, if you’re pitching to investors, that you choose those that will best support clear return on investment dollars.

4. Now, the chart. Many companies steer clear of a slide that outlines competitors. We say: don’t. Make sure you include one in your pitch. Magic quadrants are well understood. Another, simple, approach is a table that lists your competitors by name. In one column, highlight what makes you better than them (your differentiators). In another, highlight where you might fall short.

It’s not always easy, but we’ve found that being honest about what does (or does not) make you different can actually make all the difference to your perceived credibility. And when you’re asking for a check – no matter how large or small – that’s crucial.

Why do you do what you do?

This is a nonprofit (my first) and it requires different disciplines and different skills than running a conventional startup or a corporation. It’s a great challenge. You’ve got to do a lot with a little. But it’s an organization with a big profile and a terrific group of highly energetic people. One of my theses is that the cleantech space is driven by a moonshot mentality. But while going to the moon was a nice-to-have, cleantech is a must-have. So the people involved tend to be driven, passionate and—very important to me—good people. Cleantech entrepreneurship is at the intersection of economics, driving successful businesses, and the environment. It’s living in a better way on a better planet.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?

The people—working with this very, very special group of people. And not feeling that I’m leading them so much as being inspired by them. I clearly need to be a leader and a source of inspiration, but I derive a huge amount of inspiration here. When I walk into a Cleantech Open  room, the energy! It’s not me, it’s a movement.

In your experience, what’s the one thing that most often gets in the way of great marketing?

In terms of cleantech entrepreneurs, it comes right back down to the basics. Can you clearly, crisply, concisely and compellingly paint a picture of what you do, why someone might buy it and how it’s better than the alternative. If you can do that in a way that reflects genuine passion and employs concrete visual vocabulary rather than abstract terms and technical terms, then you’re already way ahead. People often don’t understand the importance of the USP [unique selling proposition]. It needs to stand out in all communications: why you uniquely solve their pain point and the benefits to them. Marcomm is very often about us and the product, not the customer. Another obstacle? People who have already made up their minds. In this space, it’s “Are you preaching to the choir or appealing to people who are in some way philosophically opposed?” As soon as you mention “clean energy,” you’re tarred with the “treehugger” brush. It’s tough, especially here in the U.S.

What’s the most important lesson that you’ve learned as a marketer/advocate?

You create your own good luck. Timing is a huge piece of this. There are macro factors, and there are micro factors. You can have the right product in the wrong market, or hit the right market at the wrong time. You cannot boil the ocean or try to be all things to all people. It’s the importance of choosing and owning and dominating market segments—or creating your segment or category. Keep going until you find the people who cannot live without your thing.

If you could wave your wand and make any product or service in the world a smashing overnight success, what would it be?

Something as close as possible to cold fusion. Maybe the ecatalyzer? Things that look really “out there” tend not to get very far at first. I’m very excited about some of the technologies I’m seeing here [at the Cleantech Open] this year. It seems there are a lot of big-picture ideas coming out of these companies. There are companies here who could take a lot of plastic out of the waste stream. If someone cleaned up the Pacific gyre, that would be great!

Cool stuff. If you’re ever in northern Colorado, and you’re the type who enjoys those reality TV shows about how things work, get in touch with the RamTracks office at CSU and have them arrange for you to spend an hour at this place. Housed in what was once the coal-burning power plant for the City of Fort Collins, the Lab is a testament to the fact that cleantech can be fun. Grad students, faculty and entrepreneurs can be found monitoring the performance of turbochargers being pushed to their limits, measuring the efficiency of biochar-burning stoves, analyzing batches of homegrown super-algae, and testing the effects of various fuels, gadgets and processes on engines the size of guest cottages. The whole building smells like solvents and sounds like you’re standing under a jet. If you like looking “under the hood,” your blood will quicken when you step into this place.

Upbeat environment. This is a special place in the world of cleantech innovation. While CSU is an academic launching pad for the scientists and engineers behind some of the most interesting generation, storage and efficiency technologies you’ll ever see, Fort Collins is the chosen home of dozens of early-stage companies founded by those same people. It’s an environment that rewards community loyalty with work-life balance. Which creates community loyalty … and around it goes. Trying methodically to improve something, often over the course of years, is hard work. And yet the positive vibe at the Lab is palpable.

Hands-on approach. We didn’t see a single laptop or iPhone. Not that we don’t love those things. (We do, a lot.) But these guys obviously spend a lot more time doing things than talking about them or writing about them. This is also not a place where the primary focus is on funding or marketing (yet). And frankly, it was nice to be in a deal-free zone for the afternoon.

Global outlook. One of first things you notice when you walk into the building (besides the sights, sounds and smells of all the experiments going on) is a giant wall covered with photos and the logos of companies that have spun out of (or into) the Lab. And it’s immediately clear that this is not a local enterprise, or a Colorado enterprise, or even a national enterprise. Products are designed and used worldwide. Talent comes here from all around the globe. And the companies commercializing the innovations born and nurtured at the Lab are operating in dozens of countries. It’s a state-school organization with a planetary perspective: think global, act global, live and play local. By the looks of it, it’s a recipe for success.

The analytical half of the equation is what we at Posit think of as “recon and report” or “R&R”: doing reconnaissance in a defined area and reporting on what you find. The creative half consists of blue-sky exploration and imagining new possibilities. The analytical half sees what exists; the creative half envisions what does not. It’s not only identifying white space in the matrix, but also playing with the labels on the axes.

Let’s say you’re a reusable shopping bag manufacturer. Analyze your direct competitors, existing customers and current market conditions in the “recyclable bag” space, and you’ll see one thing. Consider alternative consumer solutions to the plastic shopping bag problem, and you’ll see another. Imagine a product category that doesn’t yet exist, but that you may be ideally suited to establish, and your perspective shifts yet again.

Limiting your strategic thinking to R&R—keeping it “in the box”—is the intellectual equivalent of leaving money on the table. It can lead to me-too positioning, a culture that discourages innovation and missed opportunities for market disruption. Of course, strategic decisions based on “what if” thinking alone often lead to disasters of a different sort. It’s the synthesis of the two that defines sound, complete, strategic thinking.

Our approach? Imagine with abandon, evaluate with discipline. Whole-brain strategy is as much an art as a science, and it’s one of the hallmarks of wildly successful organizations.

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite as much fun as the quinceanera on the main floor ballroom on Saturday night looked to be. But it was fabulous nonetheless.

There are few things more valuable to a cleantech startup than free advice from successful VCs, serial entrepreneurs and business school professors. And I dare say there are few things more encouraging to an entrepreneur or investor than the caliber and spirit of the semifinalists in this year’s Cleantech Open. There are few things we find more encouraging either: 163 “damn the torpedoes” startups, founded and run by hundreds of courageous, smart, and resourceful people from across the country.

Also great to see? Valley legends like Steve Blank offer up gems like these:

“There are no facts inside your building, so get the Hell outside.”

“I don’t believe in customer data unless I can see pupils dilate.”

And music to our ears specifically, from other presenters:

“Make it simple; translate it into English. You have great stories to tell; tell your story!”

(Seth Mones of the Appollo Group)

“Clear communication differentiates winners from our semifinalists.”

(Rex Northen, Executive Director of the Cleantech Open)

We look forward to working with the teams from the 16 Rocky Mountain semifinalist companies. And we can’t wait to find out whose stories make the judges’ pupils dilate this Fall. They’ll be the companies we’ll all be reading about next year.

Why do you do what you do? I totally believe in the potential of Colorado’s clean technology companies to be an economic development driver for the state of Colorado. Colorado’s numerous assets have aligned to grow the cleantech sectors in a big way, and the CCIA is helping to coordinate the ecosystem so that everyone is working toward the same end game.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job? Helping cleantech entrepreneurs get what they need to be successful. Whether it’s introductions to strategic partners, connections to experienced talent, securing state funding or just making sure our elected officials understand the importance of the industry to Colorado, I get energy (no pun intended) from their passion.

In your experience, what’s the one thing that most often gets in the way of great marketing? For the trade association world, the variety of audiences you must connect with.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in your career? Be nice because politics makes for strange bedfellows.

If you could wave your marketing wand and make any product or service in the world a smashing overnight success, what would it be? My husband’s homeowner’s concierge service that he’s getting off the ground this fall.

Considering that fracking, the use of which to extract natural gas has increased from 1 to 20 percent between 2000 and 2010, produces serious environmental hazards, we wonder, as many do, why natural gas is being touted as a “clean” energy source. But there’s something else we wonder about even more:

Why, when it clearly doesn’t work in the long term, do we continue to try to bend the earth’s resources to meet our needs? Since we need the planet much more than it needs us, shouldn’t we be stretching ourselves as much and as quickly as possible to create energy that is infinitely renewable? The sun, the wind, subterranean heat, the tides — whether or not we decide, finally, to harness their power, they will continue to exist. This is truly clean tech. And this is where we should be placing our time, or efforts, our ingenuity, and our money.

As long as we keep attempting to bend the earth to our will, we’ll continue to head in the direction of our own extinction. The good news is that we have a choice. Instead of exhausting our resources, we can refocus on extending our options through conservation and innovation. We can learn to bend to accommodate nature. And we must.