Brent Adamson

Principal Executive Advisor, Sales & Marketing, CEB

Brent Adamson

Brent is well known for his passion for "productive disruption." He is a sought-after speaker and facilitator, with more than 20 years of experience as a professional researcher, teacher and trainer. Brent facilitates a wide range of executive-level discussions around the world for Fortune 500/Global 1000 executives in sales, marketing, and customer service, including global sales meetings, keynote presentations, board-level presentations, and hands-on best practice workshops. In over 12 years at CEB, Brent has been privileged to work with some of the greatest thought leaders in B2B sales and marketing.

As a Principal Executive Advisor at CEB, Brent serves as the company’s chief story teller broadly spanning subjects from customer loyalty to sales rep performance to organizational productivity. He is the co-author of The Challenger Customer and the best-selling The Challenger Sale. In addition, Brent is a frequent contributor on sales topics on Harvard Business Review’s blog and CEB’s sales blog as well as being published in Bloomberg Businessweek and Selling Power.

A native of Omaha, Neb., Brent joined CEB from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business where he received his MBA with distinction. Prior to that, he served on the faculty of Michigan State University as a Professor of German and Applied Linguistics. In addition to his MBA, Brent holds a B.A. with distinction in political science from the University of Michigan along with M.A.s in political science and German, and a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from the University of Texas. Brent resides in Leesburg, Va. with his wife and two daughters.

Sessions

Thursday, October 08, 2015 8:30am - 9:00am

The Challenger Customer
- Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor, Sales & Marketing, CEB
Four years ago, “The Challenger Sale” overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now our latest research in the follow-on book, “The Challenger Customer,” reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn’t enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge. To win today, you need a Challenger inside the customer organization—a Mobilizer. Join us as we reveal what high-performing B2B sales and marketing teams grasp that their average-performing peers don’t: Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson’s inability to connect to any one individual stakeholder. It’s far more often their inability to connect them to each other.