How to Address Adoption Barriers with Your Products
Many service providers and resellers excel at closing sales but struggle to retain customers. How quickly a business loses customers hinges on its quality of service, ease-of-use, customer experience and more. Coincidentally, these factors also affect a business’ adoption rate:
How likely customers are to integrate their day-to-day with a product or service;
How irreplaceable that product or service becomes to a business.
Adoption comes after the sale—it is the moment when a customer moves from trial to investment. To make this path easier, your business must tear down the barriers that give customers cause to rethink their decisions.
Ease of Implementation
A major adoption barrier relates to fulfillment: how will customers derive value from your service and implement its products. Onboarding pains like lengthy delays and arduous configurations make adoption a process rather than a goal. Thus, your customer support should aim to promptly and efficiently set up and train customers.
End-User Acceptance of the Product or Technology
Your service might promise huge financial savings, powerful features and unbeatable customer support, but it takes more than these benefits for a customer to adopt. After all, decision-makers are sometimes half-removed from the application of technology. While change might make sense, if the end-users cannot adjust, the service will grow into a disturbance. Thankfully, there are ways to address end-user challenges in your sales cycle.
Know the Transition End-Users Must Make
By identifying the pain-points your prospects face, you can illustrate how your products and services remedy them. Even if there’s a learning curve, the struggle is acceptable when it leads to improvement.
When a company likes its current technology, you should use similarities with your offerings to familiarize them. The more foreign the product, the harder it will be to adopt. Transition pains are huge barriers for big, slow-to-evolve companies.
Bolster the Perceived Value of Your Service
Despite how many benefits your products and services offer, if customers cannot perceive that value they will not invest. Perception and confidence go hand-in-hand. If your customers recognize the potential of your services but reserve skepticism, they are more likely to edge into it. You must instill total confidence in your operations so that businesses see reward and little risk.