Meet Ted McKenna
Ted McKenna is one of the world’s leading experts in sales, business development, and customer experience and a co-author of the bestselling book The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision and the upcoming book The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently (April 2025). His research frequently appears in the pages of Harvard Business Review and he is a Co-Founder and CEO of SellingInnovations which provides research-based training, enablement and advisory support to B2B commercial organizations. Ted is also a founding partner of DCM Insights, a company that uses data and research-backed frameworks to help professional services firms improve business development.
His book The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, co-authored with Matt Dixon, was released by Portfolio/Penguin in 2022 and has been translated into many languages. The JOLT Effect has won acclaim as “the most important advance in sales thinking since The Challenger Sale” (EVP of Sales, Salesforce), “essential reading for sales professionals in every field” (Daniel H. Pink, #1 NYT bestselling author), and “pivotal research to break down everything sellers need to know to overcome customer indecision” (CEO, Russell Reynolds Associates).
Ted’s work has been published in the print and online editions of Harvard Business Review on many occasions, including customer indecision, behaviors that boost inbound sales, and helping customers during crises. His most recent large-scale study, “What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently,” was a featured article in the November/December 2023 issue. He was also a contributing researcher on projects that appeared in HBR’s 10 Must-Reads on Sales, including “Dismantling the Sales Machine” (November 2013) and “The End of Solution Sales” (July-August 2012).
Beyond his research and writing, Ted is an experienced business leader, having held numerous executive positions in product, strategy, research, advisory, and enablement for Tethr, Russell Reynolds Associates, and CEB (now, a part of Gartner).
Ted is an expert in analyzing behaviors—of customers, doer-sellers, frontline sales & service agents, leaders, and board members—and applying analytics in various forms of content, products, and services. At Tethr, Ted worked on mining unstructured conversational data using advanced data science and leading AI/ML tools to build models, scores, and behavioral frameworks (the most well-known model is the Tethr Effort Index). Previous roles called for deploying syndicated research methods to mine more structured sources such as surveys, diagnostics, demographics, and jobs data (including research contained within the bestselling book, The Challenger Sale).
He is a sought-after speaker and advisor to management teams around world, having presented his findings at a wide range of industry conferences as well as to hundreds of senior executive teams around the world, including those of many Fortune 500 companies.
Ted holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Iowa and resides with his family in the Chicago, Illinois area.
