Sales & Business Development

For most of my career, I have worked somewhere between sales and marketing.  I started in advertising, moved into high-volume new account development, transitioned into outside sales, and eventually expanded into digital marketing and broader marketing strategy.  That experience has convinced me of something I believe strongly today:  Salespeople should understand marketing, and marketers should…

When people think about great salespeople, they often picture someone who is persuasive, confident, outgoing, and good at explaining a product or service. Those qualities can help. But throughout my career, I have found that one of the most valuable sales skills is much simpler: Knowing how to ask good questions. Sales is not about…

My name is Shawn Strawser, and after more than 20 years working in sales, advertising, business development, and marketing strategy, one principle has remained more important than almost anything else: People do business with people and organizations they trust. Technology has changed. Advertising has changed. The way customers research businesses has changed. Sales tools have…

Over the course of my career, I have seen sales tools change dramatically. When I entered advertising in 2005, prospecting looked very different than it does today. Phone calls played a much larger role. Email was important, but it was not surrounded by the same automation platforms, CRMs, analytics tools, and digital marketing systems businesses…

There are plenty of ways to measure success in sales. Revenue matters. Retention matters. Relationships matter. But one of the experiences that shaped the way I think about sales and business development came from a corporate inside-sales role where I brought in more than 300 new accounts within six months. The number itself is something…