Ted McKenna
Founding Partner
Ted is co-author of the bestselling book The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, and a founding partner of DCM Insights. He is an accomplished sales and customer experience researcher whose work has appeared in the pages of Harvard Business Review and a sought-after speaker and advisor to sales, business development, and customer experience teams around the world.
Prior to co-founding DCMi, Ted held numerous executive leadership 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—of customers, doer-sellers, frontline sales & service agents, leaders, and board members—and applying analytics in various forms of content, products, and services. At Tethr, 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.