ConnectAndSell Names Shawn McLaren CEO

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 3 /PRNewswire/ -- ConnectAndSell, provider of on-demand telephone conversations with prospects and customers, announced today the appointment of their board chairman Shawn McLaren to the position of company CEO. McLaren, the architect of ConnectAndSell's phenomenally successful sales growth over the last two years, joined ConnectAndSell in 2007. Prior to ConnectAndSell Shawn ran Securant before its sale to RSA. Shawn may be best known as the creator of the first storage management product for mainframe computers and the founder, CEO, and Chairman of The Cambridge Systems Group throughout its existence. Cambridge was the first pure play security software company in the mainframe world. Shawn was a pioneer in sales force process automation as he wrote a CRM used at Cambridge way back in 1978.

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"ConnectAndSell delivers the ability for our customers to speak five to ten times per hour with exactly the people they are trying to reach, and without anyone but the client speaking with these people first," said McLaren. "Nobody else can say to its customers, 'We literally manufacture selling time.'"

"We have declared The End of Dialing," continues McLaren. "No more navigating through gate keepers. No more spending your time leaving voice mail messages. No more automated dialers that leave irritating recorded messages. No more third-party appointment makers who know little or nothing about your products. Our customers' highly paid sales reps are freed by ConnectAndSell to do the highly paid job of selling.

"I have been fortunate to run companies where customer enthusiasm for the companies' products and customer support is very high. But what I have seen at ConnectAndSell takes this customer enthusiasm to a whole new level."

Following are representative customer comments:

Julio Acosta, Global Inside Sales Manger for Infoblox: "ConnectAndSell improved my team's productivity from completing 10 conversations per day to our current 12 conversations per hour; and these are conversations with people we're actually trying to reach, or with someone who can refer us to the right person."

Cliff Dorsey, VP of Enterprise Sales in North America for LivePerson: "When I heard that ConnectAndSell guaranteed at least five conversations per hour with exactly the people we wanted to reach, giving them a try was an easy decision."

Informatica Marketing Vice President Lennard Fischer: "Because ConnectAndSell allows us to effectively qualify a larger number of leads, we can move our lead generation investment to more cost-effective online mechanisms and away from advertising and trade shows."

Imperva's Vice President of Field Operations Jason Forget: "ConnectAndSell increased our contact rate by over 300% and energized our team at the same time! We train and prospect with our partners who cannot believe the phenomenal contact rate and consider it time well spent. ConnectAndSell increases our booked meetings and live conversations during campaign call blitz days and partners are amazed how quickly we connect with their customers."

Green Leads CEO Mike Damphousse: "One hour using ConnectAndSell is more productive than one day of cold-call prospecting without it."

EcSell Institute President William Eckstrom: "We actually had a 1-hour session where we connected with 22 prospects and set five meetings!"

Direct Impact Marketing, Inc. CEO Bob Lesser: "The introduction of ConnectAndSell has allowed us to deliver the same sales-ready lead volumes with improved quality. All with about a third of the FTE's (Full Time Equivalents) we had before. Plus, we now offer a market-beating service-level agreement for lead quality, volume and speed."

Ken Jisser, formerly CaseCentral's Direct Marketing Group Director and now a vice president at ConnectAndSell: "You cannot determine the intent of Web visitors until somebody has an actual conversation with them. Period."

Concludes McLaren: "ConnectAndSell enables your very best people, the ones who know most about your company and your products, to increase their one-on-one performance by five to ten times."

For more information about ConnectAndSell, contact Simon Blackburn at 760-390-2058 or [email protected].

About ConnectAndSell

ConnectAndSell delivers live conversations on demand, using a combination of proprietary switching technology and our virtual sales agents. A minimum of five conversations per hour is guaranteed or our customers do not pay for the online session. This allows ConnectAndSell customers to increase sales without increasing sales headcount.

ConnectAndSell, The End Of Dialing and "We Manufacture Selling Time" are trademarks of ConnectAndSell. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE ConnectAndSell