Brent Adamson

Why organisations work with Brent Adamson

• He co-authored the two books that redefined how serious B2B organisations think about commercial effectiveness; the Challenger thesis is now the reference point most large sales transformations are measured against.
• His research at CEB and Gartner, conducted over nearly two decades with thousands of B2B sales organisations, gives him a dataset on buyer behaviour that almost no individual practitioner can match.
• He gives commercial leaders a specific diagnosis of why win rates fall in complex deals, decision complexity, information overload, implementation uncertainty and value opacity, and a vocabulary their teams can act on.
• He works at the boundary between sales and marketing, which is where most B2B revenue problems actually live, and addresses both functions as one commercial system.
• His sensemaking and buyer-confidence work has moved the conversation past closing technique into the harder question of how customers come to a decision they will defend internally.

Biography highlights

• Co-author, The Challenger Sale (Portfolio, 2011) and The Challenger Customer (Portfolio, 2015), with Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner and Nick Toman.
• Chief storyteller for CEB, now Gartner’s, sales, marketing and customer service practices, 2003 to 2022; Distinguished Vice President at Gartner.
• Current Global Head of Research, Advisory and Communities at Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management.
• Harvard Business Review contributor, including “Sensemaking for Sales” (January to February 2022) and “Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete” (2022).
• Originator, with colleagues, of the Mobilizer profile, Buyer Enablement and Customer Decision Confidence as working concepts in B2B sales.
• MBA, University of Michigan Ross School of Business; PhD in Applied Linguistics, University of Texas; former faculty member at Michigan State University.

Biography

The Challenger Sale argued, on the basis of CEB research across thousands of B2B reps, that the best performers do not build relationships and then sell. They teach, tailor and take control of the conversation. Published in 2011, it became the reference text for a generation of sales transformation programmes.

That book was the first chapter of a longer argument. With The Challenger Customer in 2015, Adamson and his co-authors turned their attention from the seller to the buyer, showing that the average B2B purchase now involves more than five stakeholders and that consensus, not persuasion, is the binding constraint. The Mobilizer, the stakeholder willing to drive change inside their own organisation, became the figure most B2B commercial teams now train to find.

From 2003 to 2022, Adamson served as chief storyteller for CEB, later Gartner, where he held the role of Distinguished Vice President. His “Sensemaking for Sales” article in the Harvard Business Review set out the next step in the work: in markets saturated with information, the seller’s job is to help the buyer make sense of what they already know, not to add to the pile.

He now leads research, advisory and communities at Ecosystems, a SaaS platform for collaborative customer value management. The throughline across two decades is the same question. What does an effective commercial organisation look like when the buyer has more information than they can use and less confidence than they need to act on it?

Key speaking topics

• B2B sales effectiveness and the Challenger model
• Buyer enablement and customer decision confidence
• Sensemaking as a commercial discipline
• Mobilizers and consensus selling in complex B2B deals
• The sales and marketing operating system
• Commercial leadership for digital-first buyers

Ideal for

• Chief revenue officers, chief sales officers and chief commercial officers leading B2B sales transformation
• Chief marketing officers in B2B environments aligning demand and revenue functions
• Sales enablement and sales operations leaders rebuilding methodology and training
• Boards and executive teams reviewing the commercial model in complex, multi-stakeholder markets

Audience outcomes

• A clear diagnosis of why complex B2B deals stall, framed around decision complexity, information overload, implementation uncertainty and value opacity
• A working vocabulary for buyer enablement, sensemaking and customer decision confidence that sales and marketing teams can apply together
• A concrete picture of the Mobilizer profile and what it changes about how teams qualify and pursue accounts
• A sharper view of where the commercial organisation needs to invest next, beyond seller skills, into how customers actually buy