Businesses can stumble badly in their financial projections if they over-estimate customer adoption rates. And if you work in product marketing or sales environments where everyone must “drink the Kool-Aid,” you’re potentially at risk, especially in B2B markets.
In consumer markets, where the decision maker and the end-user are often the same person, motivational issues are less likely to affect post-sale adoption rates (unless the product is a “lemon”).
By contrast enterprise employees have relatively little control over the choice of technology-related tools they must use at work. Faced with a mandated change, employees may have all sorts of conscious or unconscious reasons to stall or minimize use of the new tool or application. Especially if it requires behavior or process changes, or new learning. Passive resistance flourishes — which is bad news for sellers counting on rapid uptake of their “Kool-Aid.”
People are resistant to change, for lots of reasons, including unconscious biases. One such bias is people’s tendency to highly overvalue the status quo.
Entrepreneurs and salespeople also suffer from biases, what I call “the Kool-Aid factor,” a form of irrational optimism. This can cause them to over-estimate the speed as well as the degree of adoption for new enterprise applications or other types of employer-mandated tools and resources. Sellers often have inflated views of the value of what they have to offer, relative to the prospective end-user’s perception of its value. Add in the end-user’s inflated perception of the status quo, and you have a sizable value gap.
As shown here, the combination of these flawed assumptions can lead to almost a ten-fold value disparity (thanks to Joyce Hostyn for the infographic):
Why? There are significant cognitive biases and psychological barriers to adoption that sellers overlook at their peril.
A thoughtful post by Open Text’s Customer Experience Director, Joyce Hostyn, outlines her thinking on the stages that people must pass through before they’re willing to change habits or adopt new applications at work. Joyce also points to several must-read articles on the topic.
Her visualization of the stages people must pass through before they become advocates or champions of the “next new thing” is quite helpful. Although aimed at customer experience designers, Joyce’s diagram of the experience journey offers a useful POV for people who forecast revenues tied to assumptions about adoption scenarios within enterprise environments.
If you must “drink the Kool-Aid,” take note of your customers’ motivational climate, and factor in how their adoption journeys will affect your product/service uptake.
Revised on June 4, 2010
