August 22, 2025

Bizcast: Ted McKenna on his book, “The Activator Advantage”, in conversation with Subhanjan Sarkar

56 minutes

Ted McKenna is a best-selling co-author of The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision and The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently, and is a sought-after speaker and advisor to sales, business development, and customer experience teams around the world.

An accomplished researcher with work appearing frequently in the pages of Harvard Business Review, Ted is now Co-Founder and CEO of Selling Innovations, which provides research-based training, enablement and advisory support to B2B commercial organisations. Ted is also a founding partner of DCM Insights (DCMi), a company that uses data and research-backed frameworks to help professional services firms improve business development. Before co-founding DCMi, Ted held numerous executive leadership positions in product, strategy, research, advisory, and enablement for Tethr, Russell Reynolds, and CEB (now a part of Gartner).

Ted McKenna

The Activator Advantage

In this episode, Ted McKenna talks about his book, The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently,” which he co-authored with Karen Freeman, Matthew Dixon and Rory Channer. Research into the buying of services in today’s current scenario threw up interesting data that is the subject of this book. Buyers of services, unlike earlier in the day, do not mind shopping around for services. Long-term relationships and delivery of quality are no longer a guarantee of continued patronage.

The Activator is a profile that manages to get more business in today’s service industry contexts. These are people who are driven to create connections and continuously engage with their buyers. They believe that engagement, creating contacts, and providing support are key functions of their business. So, say for example, while lawyers ultimately do have specific roles to fill in, Activators are likely to spend more time talking to their clients and trying to understand their problems.

There are four other profiles that the research also distinguishes, namely the Expert, the Confidant, the Debater, and the Realist. But the Activator is by far the most successful in terms of securing new business in a world where “brand loyalty” is no longer a reality.

Run time – 00:56:43 mins.

Links for Subhanjan

[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/subhanjansarkar

Links for Ted McKenna:

https://www.sellinginnovations.com

https://www.dcminsights.com

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