Brent Adamson

Brent Adamson is a globally respected sales researcher and co-author of The Challenger Sale, helping commercial leaders rethink how growth really happens.

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“As always, Brent is able to captivate the audience with relevant research on the buyer journey / confidence, real world client examples and high energy on stage. He connects with the audience and provides thought provoking content, ideas and questions every time I hear him speak. We will welcome him back again in the future.”

Expedient

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Why book Brent Adamson for your next event

Brent Adamson delivers sharp, research-backed insights that challenge conventional sales thinking and give leaders practical tools to drive real change.
As co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, Brent brings proven frameworks trusted by commercial leaders worldwide.
A compelling storyteller and facilitator, Brent engages audiences with clarity, energy, and ideas that continue to resonate long after the event.

Non-binding request for Brent Adamson

Co-author of The Challenger Sale and one of the most influential voices in modern B2B sales

Brent Adamson is a world-renowned researcher, author, speaker, and advisor who has helped redefine how organizations think about sales, marketing, and customer engagement. Widely known for his ability to anticipate where commercial models are heading, Brent has been described as having one of the sharpest perspectives in B2B sales. As co-author of the best-selling and industry-shaping books The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, he has influenced how companies across industries approach growth, value creation, and customer conversations. A seasoned presenter and facilitator, Brent has spoken to tens of thousands of commercial leaders around the globe, combining deep research with clear, practical insight that challenges audiences to think differently and act decisively.

Brent Adamson – Redefining Modern Sales

Brent Adamson stands among the most influential thinkers in modern B2B sales and commercial strategy. For more than two decades, his research has shaped how organizations understand customer behavior, sales effectiveness, and the changing role of sales and marketing. His work is known for challenging long-held assumptions and replacing them with clear, evidence-based models that reflect how buying and selling truly work today.

As co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, Brent helped introduce concepts that continue to guide sales leaders worldwide. These books are widely regarded as turning points in sales thinking, offering frameworks that move beyond relationship-based selling toward insight-driven, value-focused engagement. His ideas have become part of the everyday language of commercial leadership.

From Research to Real-World Impact

Brent’s influence extends far beyond books. He has been a frequent contributor to major business publications, including the Harvard Business Review, where his articles such as “Sensemaking for Sales” and “Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete” explore how complexity, customer indecision, and internal dynamics are reshaping commercial success. His ability to translate rigorous research into practical guidance makes his work especially valuable to executives navigating change.

Known for his commitment to “productive disruption,” Brent spent nearly two decades as the chief storyteller for CEB, now Gartner, supporting sales, marketing, and customer service practices from 2003 to 2022. In this role, he worked closely with senior commercial leaders, helping them rethink strategy, structure, and execution in fast-changing markets.

Speaker, Facilitator, and Advisor

As a speaker, Brent Adamson is engaging, direct, and deeply insightful. He combines sharp analysis with compelling storytelling, making complex ideas accessible without oversimplifying them. His presentations are designed to challenge audiences, spark new thinking, and equip leaders with concepts they can apply immediately. Brent has delivered keynotes, workshops, and leadership sessions to tens of thousands of commercial professionals across the globe.

Event organizers value Brent not only for his thought leadership, but also for his ability to connect with diverse audiences, from frontline sales teams to executive leadership. His sessions consistently leave participants with a clearer understanding of where sales is heading and what they must do to stay relevant.

Current Work and Future Thinking

Today, Brent is Co-Founder of A to B Insight, where he continues his research and advisory work with commercial leaders. He is also Co-Founder of Qoos, an AI-guided micro-coaching platform designed to support real behavior change in sales and leadership. These initiatives reflect his ongoing focus on helping organizations bridge the gap between insight and execution.

Brent’s forthcoming book, The Framemaking Sale, scheduled for release on September 9, 2025, builds on his long-standing research into customer decision-making and value creation. The book explores how sales leaders can help customers make sense of complex problems and align internally around meaningful change.

Academic Foundation and Personal Background

Brent Adamson’s work is grounded in a strong academic foundation. He earned his MBA with distinction from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Earlier in his career, he served on the faculty of Michigan State University as a Professor of German and Applied Linguistics. He also holds a B.A. with distinction in political science from the University of Michigan, master’s degrees in political science and German, and a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from the University of Texas.

Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Brent now lives in Leesburg, Virginia, with his wife, two daughters, and their rescue dog. His diverse academic and professional background contributes to his unique perspective on communication, decision-making, and influence.

Book Brent Adamson for Your Event

Booking Brent Adamson for your event means bringing one of the most respected voices in sales and commercial strategy to your audience. His insights challenge conventional wisdom, his research brings clarity to complexity, and his delivery leaves leaders inspired and equipped to drive meaningful change. Whether addressing sales transformation, customer engagement, or the future of commercial growth, Brent Adamson delivers ideas that matter.

Customer Reviews

Expedient

“Brent has been an outstanding resource and trusted source of counsel for many years to our company, to my colleagues, and me. He has deep conceptual capacity and, at the same time, can take some of the more complex aspects of marketing and/or sales excellence and translate them into the practical aspects of how we execute. That's where the real results happen. And that's a big reason why Brent will always be one of my most sought-after resources. He's also a great guy who I can trust with nuances and more proprietary issues. A true pleasure to work and a great track record for our company--this is a go-to guy!”

DuPont

Keynotes

Keynote by Brent Adamson:

Creating Customer Confidence to Make the Sale

In today’s marketplace, the number one problem companies need to solve in order to increase the likelihood of closing a sale is a lack of customer confidence. Brent Adamson uses his 19+ years of experience and research within B2B and B2C sales to bring you the secret to always closing.

The last three years have created deep, unending uncertainty across industries and the biggest loss isn’t in profits or personnel; it’s a loss of confidence customers experience within themselves. You’ve done your job of instilling confidence in yourself and your product/service, now what you need to do is build the customer’s confidence in themself and their ability to make large-scale decisions on the behalf of their company.

After years of research, Adamson discovered the four significant forces that are eroding and undermining customer confidence:

Decision Complexity:
While any big decision has some degree of complexity, this only compounds as more and more stakeholders get involved, each with their own competing interests and metrics.

Information Overload:
Not only are customers being exposed to high quantities of information, but it’s also high quality. This creates friction and confusion and eventually will stall the sale.

Implementation Uncertainty:
While this is often an after-effect of a sale, implementation uncertainty increases regret and decreases confidence, leading to more problems down the road.

Value Opacity:
When a value is unclear, or opaque, there is generally a wide gap between the value promise and the value realized by the customer.

More importantly, he figured out how to overcome them. The best sales teams and organizations will use the customer’s lack of confidence to set themselves apart from other teams. This is an opportunity to become a source of confidence creation for your customer and a time to build trust. To do this, you must create frameworks around each point of insecurity. When you solve what they are craving, you give them the ability to believe in themselves and the empowerment to make large-scale decisions for their company.

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Keynote by Brent Adamson:

The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships--and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them.

The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average-performing colleagues are not, drove Matthew Dixon and his colleagues to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.

Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance.

Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.

The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.

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Keynote by Brent Adamson:

The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results

The bestselling authors of The Challenger Sale overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now their latest research reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn’t enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge.

Picture your ideal customer: friendly, eager to meet, ready to coach you through the sale and champion your products and services across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you need. Most marketing and sales teams go after low-hanging fruit: buyers who are eager and have clearly articulated needs.

That’s simply human nature; it’s much easier to build a relationship with someone who always makes time for you, engages with your content, and listens attentively. But according to the latest research from Matthew Dixon and his coauthors—based on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world—the highest-performing teams focus their time on potential customers who are far more skeptical, far less interested in meeting, and ultimately agnostic as to who wins the deal. How could this be?

The authors of The Challenger Customer reveal that high-performing B2B teams grasp something 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 get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it’s that the stakeholders inside the company can’t even agree with one another about what the problem is.

It turns out only a very specific type of customer stakeholder has the credibility, persuasive skill, and will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. These customers get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first. In other words, Challenger sellers do best when they target Challenger customers.

The Challenger Customer unveils a research-based approach that will help sellers and managers to distinguish the "Talkers" from the "Mobilizers" in any customer organization. It also provides a blueprint for finding them, engaging them with disruptive insight, and equipping them to effectively challenge their own organization.

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