Dana Allender

About Dana Allender

Dana founded SUN (as in, “Here Comes The Sun” by The Beatles) to help tech founders sell their “stuff” – closing deals while building skills along the way. He’s the sales help you need before the sales help you hire!

His interest in this came from his own early sales experiences, needing to “build the airplane while flying it” like many founders and small business owners – with the urgency to sell immediately while still learning (and documenting) what worked and what didn’t. Since those early days, he’s also found from speaking with hundreds of founders and small business owners that sales coaching and “off the shelf” playbooks were helpful but, in many cases, weren’t enough. Just like a founder needs to get their tech “in the wild” and in the hands of users to get feedback while continuing to iterate on the solution; building an early stage sales process, uncovering opportunities and closing deals is no different. This is where “performance and passion” intersect for Dana – problem solving, selling and coaching.

His own B2B enterprise and startup sales experience sparked his desire to help founders get those first, gritty deals over the line by teaching them how to ask questions, ask why to those answers, listen a lot and learn to tell stories. He also works with them to document the “best, right practices” they learn from these conversations in order to generate repeatable, scalable sales motion. The most important thing about his approach is that he does it with them, talking to customers and closing deals together.

He has served as an advisor, a mentor as well as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at JumpStart and JumpStart Ventures (Cleveland, OH) and the Youngstown Business Incubator (Youngtown, OH). He is also a Preferred Partner in the JumpStart Trailblazer Software Accelerator. In addition, he mentors through Alloy Development’s OhioXcelerate (Cincinnati, OH), the University of Akron Resource Foundation ICorps (Akron, OH), Venture for America (Detroit, MI) and is mentoring RevTech Labs Fall 2024 Fintech and Insurtech Accelerator (Charlotte, NC). He also partners with other incubators and accelerators including MAGNET (Cleveland, OH) and the Bounce Innovation Hub (Akron, OH). He is a member of the Angel Capital Association, Ohio Angel Collective and OhioX and received investing certification through VC University. Along the way, he has also worked with numerous economic development partners including Greater Cleveland Partnership, Team NEO and JobsOhio. Each provides resources to emerging tech startups and small businesses, which include talent acquisition, workforce development and a myriad of grants and funding options.

With a desire to create “process for repeatable, scalable motion” in his own sales efforts as well as his years of advising founders, he has committed to share those experiences and learnings with others. The sectors he has worked in includes fintech, regtech, insurtech, manufacturing and smart mobility sectors which utilize artificial intelligence, internet of things, blockchain and other emerging technologies. Problem solving, storytelling and intellectual curiosity are key elements to his success and to those who he has helped.

In October of 2024, Dana was asked to join Clear Process Solutions’ executive team as Chief Revenue Officer, driving the all go-to-market efforts and building out the revenue organization for the consulting and technology agency which is based in Northeast Ohio with team members across the globe .

Dana lives in Rocky River, just outside of Cleveland, Ohio with his family and dogs (Lance and Loki, yes, Loki from the Marvel collection!). His coaching doesn’t end with founders, as he coaches kids’ travel basketball as well. Watching youth sports including soccer, football and baseball takes up a lot of time too. He’s also learning (still) to play the guitar, which you can see prominently displayed behind him during a zoom call. And, though he hasn’t mastered the guitar yet, he knows we’re all still learning and, like the founders he works with, he’ll keep doing the work – not letting perfection get in the way of progress!