Stop focusing on User-Adoption
Saying that probably sounds like blasphemy to many people in the business application space. Over the course of the last 15 years we’ve talked insistently about driving user-adoption. That drum has been beaten the loudest in the traditional CRM space and for good reason. Pundits, Consultants, Vendors, and others have all proclaimed at one time or another that <insert %> of CRM implementations fail because of lack of user-adoption.
I’ve seen hundreds of organizational change management techniques deployed during these projects to combat this issue and “improve user-adoption”. I started championing them about a decade ago and it’s nothing short of mind boggling to think about the velocity of change over the last 10 years.
What do you think 2030 will look like at the convergence of technology and driving business outcomes in marketing, sales, and service?
You have to fundamentally shift the way you approach deploying technology to support those key groups that are engaged directly with your customers. You have to be singularly focused on improving customer experience.
You might be thinking that there is no hope for you. Your organization couldn’t even execute on the fundamentals of basic activity and opportunity management. Stop trying and give up on user-adoption!
Instead spend your time searching for ways to redefine processes and use technology to make it easy for your customers to buy or procure your product/service. If your opportunity management process does that for them then you will have little issue with people using it for that purpose.
Your customers don’t have to love you. Often you just need to be easier to do business with than your competition. I don’t love Amazon more than my local retailer.
In the end, if any of your users, especially sales people resist using your technology to make it easier for the customer to buy or procure things… Then I would try to find them a new job and not waste time on application training.
I’d like to just clarify that I’m not discounting organizational change management disciplines. At this point they should be baked into your project management office or your consultant’s project methodology, preferably both. If you don’t have an organization that is prepared to change or help others change over the next ten years then good luck.
