Ted McKenna
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Ted McKenna is a co-founder and CEO of SellingInnovations and is one of the world’s leading experts in sales, business development, and customer experience. 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), Ted’s research frequently appears in the pages of Harvard Business Review . He 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.
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 and applying analytics in various forms of content, products, and services. As part of a large-scale study of 2.5 million sales calls, 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).
Ted holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Iowa and resides with his family in the Chicago, Illinois area.