Brent Adamson

Brent Adamson is a world-renowned researcher, author, presenter, trainer, and advisor to B2B commercial executives.

Known as having the “biggest crystal ball in B2B sales,” Adamson is the co-author of the best-selling, industry-changing "The Challenger Sale" and "The Challenger Customer." He is also a frequent contributor to well-known business publications, including the Harvard Business Review, which featured his recent articles “Sensemaking for Sales” and “Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete.”

Across the last 19 years, Adamson has been privileged to work with some of the greatest thought leaders in B2B and B2C sales and marketing, building and leading exclusive communities of highly progressive commercial executives. Known as a world-class facilitator and speaker, Adamson has presented to tens of thousands of commercial leaders both in-person and virtually all over the world, ranging from executive leadership teams to large keynote audiences.

Especially well known for his passion for “productive disruption,” Adamson served as the “chief storyteller” for CEB, now Gartner’s, sales, marketing, and customer service practices from 2003 to 2022. Across that time, Adamson’s research has focused most closely on the critical, boundary-spanning intersection of selling and buying, seeking to understand the rapidly changing nature of effective commercial collaboration. Most recently, Adamson and his colleagues at CEB, now Gartner, have introduced industry-leading concepts such as Buyer Enablement, Sense-Making, and Customer Decision Confidence. Adamson is also the former Global Head of Research and Communities at Ecosystems, a cutting-edge SaaS platform designed to help companies identify and track dimensions of value creation with their customers.

A native of Omaha, Nebraska, Adamson received his MBA with distinction from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Before that, he served on the faculty of Michigan State University as a Professor of German and Applied Linguistics. In addition to his MBA, Adamson holds a B.A. with distinction in political science from the University of Michigan, along with an M.A. in political science and German and a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from the University of Texas.