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ELISABETH WATSON JOINS ELA CONSULTING GROUP

Professional Services expert complements existing team, offers opportunity for the highest levels of customer satisfaction.

LINCOLN, Calif., Jan. 11, 2010 – ELA Consulting Group LLC, sales effectiveness and business process consultants, announced today that Elisabeth Watson has joined has joined the company as a Client Principal. Her career experience spans business process alignment training, best practices development, and software implementation.

Prior to joining ELA, Elisabeth was a Senior Director of Professional Services at software developer Ravenflow, where she specialized in RAVEN implementation, as well as best practices development and deployment. There, she fostered user adoption of RAVEN through change management, training, development and delivery.

“Elisabeth has a fantastic background in conceptualizing projects and putting together the professional services teams that bring them to life,” said Peter Krammer, ELA Consulting Group managing partner. “This experience creates a high quality experience for both our customer, and our customer’s customer. It’s a best case scenario for both ELA and our clients.”

Prior to Ravenflow, Elisabeth was the General Manager of Education Services at Indus International. At Robertson, Stephens & Company, Elisabeth provided business/technology “translation” between investment banking, venture capital, research, sales and trading and the technology vendors and staff, which drove the firm’s technology strategy. 

“All the work that I’ve done to develop my expertise and practice – including designing best practices and developing process improvement and merger integration services – culminates here at ELA,” said Watson. “My approach is completely in sync with the ELA approach; both are committed to a customer focused philosophy.”

Elisabeth holds an MBA from Georgetown University, and was an adjunct professor at San Francisco State University’s Graduate School of Business.  Prior to earning her MBA, Elisabeth taught high school in the New York City public school system.

StreetSmarts^® and ELA Consulting Group Forge Sales Effectiveness Partnership

The combination of the StreetSmarts^® sales knowledge sharing platform and ELA’s sales expertise offers a winning combination to companies with large sales forces.

Chicago, November 18, 2009 –  StreetSmarts^® Inc., developer of the on-demand knowledge and collaboration platform, and ELA Consulting Group, sales effectiveness and business process consultants, today announced the building of a joint, dedicated Sales Effectiveness Practice. By combining the strengths of the two market leaders, the practice offers a powerful solution to customers with the need to align people, processes and technology and then communicate critical information throughout large sales forces. ELA has provided management consulting and strategic planning in sales effectiveness for 30 years, while StreetSmarts^® is a best-in-class Sales Enablement software application that has been in the market for the past six years.

The market offers considerable opportunity for Sales Effectiveness solutions, as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) solutions are not enough for today’s dynamic sales organizations. CSO Insights’ 2009 Sales Performance Optimization Survey reported that 65% of surveyed companies are seeing little or no improvement in sales performance after making significant investments in CRM/SFA projects

“Many CSO’s (Chief Sales Officers) have shifted their focus from CRM/SFA applications because they are not contributing tangible business value and improved sales performance,” said David Batt, CEO of StreetSmarts^® Inc. “CSOs recognize that proper Sales Effectiveness solutions can drive tangible business value in a short period of time. ELA and StreetSmarts^® share a point of view that a joint practice combining consulting and best-in-class product will help CSOs move faster from their current business state to higher operational performance.”

Through the StreetSmarts^®/ELA partnership, sales organizations can expect to see precise and structured method for improving business results using ELA methodology, a scalable and sustainable process improvement model using StreetSmarts^®, as well as thought leadership of where to start within the organization and how the joint solution can provide tangible business results in under 90 days.

“Every sales organization is operating in an increasingly complex and demanding selling environment and they spend dearly on coaching, training, CRM and a variety of productivity tools,” said Peter Krammer, Managing Partner, ELA Consulting Group. These tools often fall short of desired expectations, Krammer noted. “Training is difficult to reinforce, CRM helps organize, but doesn’t help sales people do their job and coaching doesn’t always apply to every day experience. Most companies have a patchwork of solutions that are not integrated successfully.”

StreetSmarts^® reduces the time it takes for member subscribers to find the answers to the information they need. Subscribers can also ask questions through the solution and through its’ built in intelligence system, StreetSmarts^® is able to route those questions to the most appropriate expert for response and the answers are then fed back into the centralized system to be reused if and when similar questions arise.

About ELA Consulting Group

ELA Consulting Group focuses on sales effectiveness, change management and business process improvement. ELA works with companies to fine-tune and transform organizations by aligning leadership, employees and partners. ELA delivers a solution that results in all stakeholders sharing the same view of the market and understanding the strategies and tactics needed to implement them. As a result, they use the same metrics, demonstrate accountability with one another and work with processes that make sense.

About StreetSmarts^® Inc.

StreetSmarts^® 5.6 is based on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that unites company-wide knowledge and enterprise social networking components to deliver business value for enterprise wide knowledge based and line of business initiatives such as sales effectiveness, channel enablement, training reinforcement and transforming intellectual capital into actionable knowledge through information management.

Because of its adaptive, lightweight nature and built in usability features, StreetSmarts^® is able to provide a working solution specific to each client’s business requirements in a matter of days, rather than months of complex software deployments.   In addition, this also allows clients to quickly react to changing new business practices and external market conditions without the need for massive customization or programming.

For more information on StreetSmarts^®, visit www.streetsmarts.com.