“If you don’t know what makes your people tick, then you’re missing out on a legal competitive advantage.”
Mind the gap
Jeremy’s work starts with the gap between a beautiful plan and its results. In his account, people are that gap: an ingredient of success that is easy to overlook and easy to take for granted.
He helps leaders decode what motivates and drives their people, and why individuals and teams behave as they do, at their best and at their worst. Once those hidden drivers are visible, leaders can see why performance stalls or accelerates.
His method is practical. He relies on short interviews backed by proven tools, and turns what he finds into plain-language maps of what drives each person and where the friction lies. Leaders then get simple interventions they can track, which raise ownership and reduce conflict.
Inside fast-growing firms
Before he turned to people and teams full time, Jeremy built sales enablement in technology companies that were growing quickly. At Thunderhead in London he was head of sales enablement and operations. He helped build an online academy with a ‘License to Sell’ onboarding programme, and a framework for sales planning that he called the Yellow Brick Road.
At ServiceNow he led sales enablement for EMEA from 2015 to 2016. He designed onboarding workshops that cut the time to a new hire’s first deal by 20 per cent, and rolled out the ValueSelling method across the field teams.
From 2018 to 2022 he was head of revenue and sales productivity at Nexthink, with the title VP of Broken Things. He built the function from scratch, with an enablement team of four specialists working across the company’s global sales channels. By his account, as the company moved from product sales to outcome-based selling, average deal size rose from $90k to $325k.
“To change results, change behaviour.”Jeremy Baker, Denting the Universe
What makes people tick
Jeremy has worked with the Predictive Index since 2012. It is a behavioural assessment that takes under ten minutes and shows what motivates a person and what a role needs from them. He uses it in recruitment and role design, and in leadership development and the resolution of conflict.
He is a practitioner of the Language and Behaviour Profile, which reads how a person’s language reveals the way they are motivated and make decisions. In 2017 he studied behavioural economics with Ogilvy Change.
In 2016 he founded Denting the Universe, his own practice, which works with sales and marketing leaders and their teams. It borrows from behavioural economics and from the techniques of hostage negotiators. The title of one of his articles, a question a VP of Sales once put to him before approving an offer, sums up the work: am I about to hire 007 or Johnny English?
Since 2023 he has been a PI associate with RPX2, helping technology and SaaS companies scale and coaching leaders and salespeople around the world.
From plan to delivery
In Group Partners programmes Jeremy sits alongside the frameworks and blueprints, and translates them into the behaviours and routines that teams live by each week. The aim is alignment that holds in the week-by-week reality of delivery.
In his own phrase, he decodes the human side of strategy, the people and the teams, and makes it work.
He is also a documentary photographer, working since 2017 on family occasions and life as it happens, and his camera is usually close to hand.
The path
From building sales teams to decoding the people inside them.
- 2011
Trains as a Language and Behaviour Profile practitioner.
- 2012
Begins working with the Predictive Index.
- 2014
Head of Sales Enablement and Operations at Thunderhead, London.
- 2015
Head of EMEA Sales Enablement at ServiceNow.
- 2016
Founds Denting the Universe.
- 2017
Studies behavioural economics with Ogilvy Change. Begins working as a documentary photographer.
- 2018
Joins Nexthink as head of revenue and sales productivity.
- 2023
Becomes a PI associate with RPX2.
- 2025
Joins the Group Partners Expert Network.
In his own words
“Brilliant leadership is like a great bass line. You can hardly tell it is there, but take it out and the whole song falls apart.”
“Business is a team sport, silos are so yesterday.”
“Sales effectiveness is the constant pursuit of an edge against your competition.”
“Once you see, you can’t not.”
“When you work with me, you work with me directly.”