About
Built inside economic development, for economic development
Propel Development helps organizations approach outreach in a more consistent, thoughtful, and tailored way. We are small on purpose, and we work with a limited number of partners so the work stays good.
Craig has spent his career on the mechanics of how organizations find and win the right conversations: sales strategy, marketing strategy, sales enablement through technology, and the processes that make outreach repeatable instead of heroic.
He came to economic development from the sales side, and then spent years at the State of Ohio's economic development organization designing the sales processes used to attract companies to the state. That job made two things clear. First, economic development runs on outreach that almost nobody has the capacity to sustain. Second, the organizations doing it well were not doing anything mysterious. They were doing it consistently.
Propel Development was founded in early 2018 to be that consistency for other organizations. Today Propel works with regional and state economic development organizations across the country on attraction, expansion, retention, and international investment outreach.
Outside of economic development, Craig occasionally takes on lead generation and sales process work for manufacturers and B2B service firms where the same approach applies.
Partners
Who we work with
Regional and state economic development organizations pursuing attraction, expansion, retention, and foreign direct investment.
- REDI Cincinnati
- Team NEO
- Shreveport Next
- NW Florida
How we think about the work
Four things we believe
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The list matters more than the message
A brilliant email to the wrong list loses to a plain email sent to the right one. We spend our first effort on who, and only then on what to say.
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A reason to reach out today beats volume
An expansion announcement, a funding round, a conference next month. Timing is the difference between an interruption and a useful message.
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Nobody wants to be pitched
Our emails say who the organization is in one sentence and spend everything else on the company we are writing to. Outreach that reads like a brochure gets deleted like one.
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The follow-through is the job
Sending is easy. Answering the same day, chasing the referral, proposing the actual meeting time — that is where a program either produces or does not.
Interested in working together?
We take on a small number of partners at a time. If the fit is right, we will tell you. If it is not, we will tell you that too.