Keenan

CEO of A Sales Growth Company

Keenan, who is known by a single name, is the founder and chief executive of A Sales Growth Company, a business-to-business sales training and consulting firm headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. The company's own site calls him CEO and president and gives him the self-styled title of Chief Antagonist. A 2016 podcast interview explains the idea: playing the antagonist makes him an agent of change, since change usually involves friction.^[1][4]

The firm sells instructor-led and online training in the Gap Selling method, Gap Prospecting training, sales-manager and enterprise training, consulting, sales enablement, kickoff planning and sales-organization assessments, along with AI coaching and a certification for Gap Selling trainers. It says it has trained thousands of sellers across hundreds of B2B sales organizations, from small teams to enterprises with hundreds of reps, and lists clients including GE Healthcare, Intel, Verizon, Palo Alto Networks, PitchBook, Baker Hughes, Couchbase and Marketo. Those client and volume claims are the company's own.^[1]

From A Sales Guy to A Sales Growth Company

The company's timeline starts with a blog and consultancy called A Sales Guy. The company's About page says it was founded in 2011, while Keenan's own biography page puts the founding of A Sales Guy in 2009, so the sources disagree on the year. Both agree on the later milestones: Gap Selling was published in 2018, and the company rebranded as A Sales Growth Company in 2021 as it expanded into a full training and consulting practice.^[1][2]

Keenan says speaking invitations followed once he started the blog. The company also reports that it introduced a Problem-Centric Operating System in 2024, designed to reinforce Gap Selling behaviors across a sales organization instead of leaving them as a one-time training event, and that in 2026 it published two further books, Gap Prospecting and Gap Revenue Performance.^[1][2]

Career before founding the firm

Keenan's biography page tells an unconventional story. He was diagnosed as hyperactive at age eight, failed his freshman year of high school, graduated after five years with a 1.5 grade point average, and began college at a small Boston junior college on probation. He later transferred to the University of Colorado Boulder, won a full scholarship to the Semester at Sea program, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science. Between school and sales he skied a season in Vail, delivered food in Boulder to pay rent, and briefly modeled in Miami.^[2]

His sales career began in 1996 at the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, selling memberships, where he says he broke sales records within a year. He was then hired to sell IT consulting services despite having no technology background, became a top performer and was named a partner after two years. He later became vice president of sales for a large competitive local exchange carrier, a telecom company, responsible for $300 million in revenue and 125 people nationwide.^[2]

Gap Selling and the problem-centric method

Gap Selling, published in 2018, is Keenan's best-known book. A getAbstract summary describes its core idea as the distance between a customer's current situation and the better situation they want to reach: sales value, it argues, is created in that gap. The summary adds that sellers can anticipate objections by probing carefully during discovery and preparing answers in advance, that solutions work best when tailored to each customer's specific problems, and that helping customers through change makes them more willing to buy. Positioning the seller as a resource rather than a pushy vendor, the book argues, earns a place as a trusted adviser.^[3]

The company says its frameworks include the Problem Identification Chart and the Problem-Centric Operating System, plus research titled How Buyers Want to Be Sold and several assessments, including a revenue-performance pulse check. It targets organizations struggling with long sales cycles, low average sale prices, poor win rates, losses to competitors or the status quo, and missed quotas.^[1]

Books and recognition

getAbstract also credits Keenan with an earlier book, Not Taught: What It Takes to Be Successful in the 21st Century, and identifies him as CEO and president of A Sales Guy Inc., the company's former name. The company's site says Keenan's work and frameworks have been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Inc. and Fast Company, and that A Sales Growth Company was named a representative vendor in the 2025 Gartner Market Guide for Sales Training Service Providers.^[1][3]

How he communicates

The 2016 podcast host describes Keenan's online presence as loud, bold and packed with content, and attributes his energy to deep sensitivity and caring intensely about his work. In that conversation Keenan turned questions back on the host about the show's purpose and value proposition.^[4]

Why he matters in sales

Keenan is one of the better-known voices in problem-centric selling, a school of thought that treats discovery as the center of the sale instead of the pitch. He built a personal brand into a training company with a named method, a book series, proprietary frameworks and a stated client list of large technology and industrial firms. His own path, from a rocky academic record to running a nationwide telecom sales organization before founding the firm, is the background the company publishes alongside the method.^[1][2][3]

On The Executive List

Keenan is ranked No. 96 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Strategy Officers discipline. The list row shows the company under its former name, A Sales Guy Inc.; it was rebranded A Sales Growth Company in 2021. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.