Shawn McLaren

Founder & Executive Chairman ConnectAndSell Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Shawn McLaren founded ConnectAndSell, a Silicon Valley company built on a single observation about outbound sales: that the expensive part of a sales rep’s day is not the conversation but everything that stands in front of it. Reps burn hours dialing, working around gatekeepers and leaving voicemail. ConnectAndSell’s platform removes that layer, putting reps into live conversations with the people they are actually trying to reach — a proposition the company once summarised as manufacturing selling time, and marketed under the slogan “The End of Dialing”. McLaren came to it from enterprise security rather than sales technology: he had run Securant through its sale to RSA, and before that founded, ran and chaired The Cambridge Systems Group, described as the first pure-play security software company in the mainframe world.

Career Highlights

• Founded ConnectAndSell, which its own history dates to 2006, after recognising that the bottleneck in outbound sales was reaching decision-makers rather than talking to them.
• Served as ConnectAndSell’s board chairman and was appointed chief executive in May 2010, holding the role until Chris Beall joined as CEO in 2011.
• Ran Securant, a security company, through its sale to RSA.
• Was founder, chief executive and chairman of The Cambridge Systems Group throughout the company’s existence — the first pure-play security software company in the mainframe market.
• Credited with creating the first storage management product for mainframe computers.
• Wrote a CRM system used internally at Cambridge Systems Group in 1978, decades before the category had a name — an early instance of the sales-process automation instinct that later produced ConnectAndSell.

Professional Journey

McLaren’s career began in mainframe software, and the thing he is best known for there is a first: the first storage management product for mainframe computers. He then founded The Cambridge Systems Group and led it as chief executive and chairman for the whole of its life, building what was described as the first pure-play security software company in the mainframe world. A detail from that period is more revealing than the titles — in 1978 he wrote a CRM system for Cambridge’s own use, which is to say he was automating sales process before there was a market for doing so.

He carried the security thread forward at Securant, which he ran until its sale to RSA. That put him in the position of having spent a career on two problems at once: securing enterprise infrastructure, and making sales organisations more efficient. ConnectAndSell is where the second one won.

The company’s account of its own founding places it in 2006, with McLaren identifying the inefficiency at the heart of outbound calling and setting out to build a system that would connect reps to decision-makers at scale rather than merely dial faster. Early customers adopted a human-powered dialing model that stripped the administrative work out of prospecting. By May 2010, with the company growing quickly, ConnectAndSell moved McLaren from board chairman to chief executive; the announcement credited him as the architect of the company’s sales growth over the preceding two years and quoted him declaring “The End of Dialing”. Customers from LivePerson, Informatica, Infoblox and Imperva were cited claiming step-change increases in conversation rates and contact rates.

That CEO stint was short. In 2011 Chris Beall joined as chief executive, and the same year the company patented its human-plus-AI approach to bypassing gatekeepers. ConnectAndSell went on to pass 100 million dials on the platform by 2015, expand into Europe with GDPR-compliant operations serving Germany, France and the UK, and add an AI product line — conversation scoring and coaching, phone-number enrichment, transcription and note-taking — under the CASSi name. McLaren stepped back from day-to-day leadership, remaining associated with the company as its founder and, per secondary sources, as executive chairman.

Education

No education record for Shawn McLaren was found in any source reviewed, including ConnectAndSell’s own site and the 2010 press release that gives his career background in detail.