The Chandler Family Professional Sales Center recognized Ashley Follenweider and Sheefali Kavthankar with the 2019 Earl D. Honeycutt Jr. Sales Leadership Award.
Seniors Ashley Follenweider and Sheefali Kavthankar received the Earl D. Honeycutt Jr. Sales Leadership Award during the Elon Sales Leadership Dinner on May 1.
Hosted by the Chandler Family Professional Sales Center, the annual dinner honors top professional sales seniors and celebrates the Elon sales program.
The award recognizes a senior majoring in marketing or minoring in professional sales who showed leadership in Elon’s sales program, has the potential of positively impacting an organization, and demonstrated an overall positive attitude in supporting their fellow sales students.
Raghu Tadepalli, dean of the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business and director of the Chandler Family Professional Sales Center, and Professor Emeritus Earl Honeycutt, founding director of the Chandler Family Center, presented the award to Follenweider and Kavthankar, noting their enthusiasm for the sales program, passion for the professional sales field, mentorship and coaching of fellow sales team members and peers, and professional representation of Elon during sales competitions.
After graduating from Elon, Follenweider, a strategic communications major, will join Viacom as a marketing and partner solutions coordinator, and Kavthankar, a marketing and entrepreneurship double major, will join Gartner as an account manager.
During the event, Tadepalli reflected on the Chandler Family Center's academic year highlights, which included the center moving into Richard W. Sankey Hall, co-hosting two Sales Meet and Greets with the Student Professional Development Center, the Elon Sales Team competing in the International Collegiate Sales Competition and the National Collegiate Sales Competition, partnering with Amica Mutual Insurance Company for the Amica Elon Sales Challenge, and hosting a sales speaker series, which brought alumni Jenny Adams ‘12, senior solutions consultant at Marketo; Laura Beckstead '14, senior solution engineer-marketing cloud at Salesforce; Lindsay Richardson '12, director of business development at Growth Geeks & Workify; and Bill Nahmias, managing vice president of sales productivity programs at Gartner; to campus to share career insights.
Tadepalli also thanked the Chandler family and center corporate partners Amica, Gartner, Omnicell, Paycom and SAS for their support of Elon's program.
Endowed in 2008 by Thomas E. Chandler, owner of Chandler Concrete Company, and his family, the Chandler Family Center promotes professional selling and sales management, provides high-quality instruction to both students and sales executives, and conducts research that advances the field of sales. The program’s strong sales curriculum and experiential learning component earned it the distinction as a “top university sales program” by the Sales Education Foundation.