Not opinions. Not surveys. Evidence.
For the last two decades of our founders' careers, quantitative analysis has been our North Star. We go where the data leads, even when it contradicts what the field believes — and it often does. That's the whole point: getting past what sounds right to what actually moves deals.
The JOLT Effect is the heaviest load-bearing research we have at the moment — the largest, most thorough, and most current large-scale study of how today's B2B buyers actually decide, detailed in The JOLT Effect by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna. It began during the global pandemic, and that detail matters more than it sounds. For a period of time, every conversation between a seller and a buyer was on the record: recorded, transcribed, and open to analysis. What we found rewrote the sales playbook.
We haven't stopped researching since, and we won't. We keep a pulse on three things:
- What today's buyers expect
- How today's best sellers deliver
- How the best go-to-market organizations enable those conversations at scale
Everything we bring to a client — the ideas, the frameworks, the tactics — gets updated as those answers change.
SellingInnovations is a B2B sales research, training, and advisory firm co-founded by Matt Dixon, Ted McKenna, and Dave Anderson — the researchers and authors behind The JOLT Effect, The Challenger Sale, and The Challenger Customer. The JOLT Effect research draws on a study of 2.5 million recorded B2B sales conversations.
SellingInnovations was spun off from DCM Insights; the two are sister firms sharing co-founders and ownership. Research published before 2024 appears under the DCM Insights name, or under the institutions where the work was originally done.
Where the Research Was Published
The JOLT Effect
Matthew Dixon & Ted McKenna
The Challenger Sale
Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson
The Challenger Customer
Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner & Nick Toman
The Effortless Experience
Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman & Rick DeLisi
The Activator Advantage
Matthew Dixon & Ted McKenna, with Rory Channer & Karen Freeman
Articles
A sampling of our two decades of research, grouped by the question it answers.
Challenging the Status Quo & the Buying Group
- Harvard Business Review The End of Solution Sales As customers have become more educated, the traditional solutions selling approach has given way to more effective techniques.
- Harvard Business Review If the Customer Is Always Right, You're in Trouble Why deferring to a customer's stated requirements produces worse outcomes than reframing the ask to the more important outcome.
- Harvard Business Review Sales Reps Should Avoid Customers Who Are Ready to Buy A counterintuitive finding on where reps should spend their time: the customer with a fully formed requirement is often the least valuable one to chase.
- Harvard Business Review Selling Is Not About Relationships (part 1 of 4) The first of four parts introducing the Challenger profile, and the finding that relationship-building reps are the weakest performers in complex sales.
- Harvard Business Review The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask (part 2 of 4) Why broad, open-ended discovery questions signal unpreparedness rather than curiosity.
- Harvard Business Review Why Your Salespeople Are Pushovers (part 3 of 4) A global study of more than 6,000 sales reps across nearly 100 companies shows the importance of holding a point of view rather than conceding to customer asks, and what not making that shift costs.
- Harvard Business Review How the Rift Between Sales and Marketing Undermines Reps (part 4 of 4) Sales executives' top terms for their marketing colleagues included “paper pushers,” “academic,” and “irrelevant.” A disjointed sales and marketing strategy undermines your best sellers.
Coaching & Sales Leadership
- Harvard Business Review The Dirty Secret of Effective Sales Coaching Most leaders overweigh coaching time with their star sellers and the squeaky wheel or hand-raisers — leaving the sellers who would benefit the most from coaching in the dark.
- Harvard Business Review When Money Doesn't Speak Louder than Words A fairly structured compensation plan matters less than a seller's belief that it's fair — what that surprising finding means for sales leadership.
Conversation Data & AI
- Harvard Business Review How AI Can Help Sales Teams Craft More Personalized Pitches The difference between how high performers and average performers use AI in customer research and outreach.
- Harvard Business Review 4 Behaviors that Boost Inbound Sales Analysis of recorded inbound sales calls identifying the behaviors that separate the calls that convert from the ones that don't.
Customer Experience & Professional Services
- Harvard Business Review Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers The finding behind The Effortless Experience: reducing customer effort drives loyalty far more reliably than exceeding expectations does.
- Harvard Business Review What Today's Rainmakers Do Differently The Activator research: five business-development profiles among professional services partners, only one of which correlates with growth.
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We take on the questions commercial organizations can't resolve with conventional wisdom. Tell us what you're seeing.