Customer Success Leadership Community

I suggest probing a little further and asking why they are not showing up before pursuing a solution. I suspect, however, that yours may be a very common problem tied to a lack of effective change management--the people making the purchase decision are not the people being asked to show up for the training, or more importantly, to change what they do on a daily basis. 

People naturally resist change. Why? Two reasons:

1. Humans are twice as sensitive to losses as we are to gains. Change often involves a perceived loss of status (I'm no longer a recognized expert), certainty (I don't know what will happen next), autonomy (I now have to rely on someone else for help), relationships (I had friends at the other vendor's company), or fairness (I have enough to do right now!). Perceived loss activates our defense mechanisms, and common expressions are disengagement and passive aggression.
2. Changing habits requires significant time and effort. Our brains automatically shift routine tasks to our subconscious to conserve energy, and an estimated 42% of our day is just routine. Learning a new technology means breaking old habits and acquiring new ones, a process that requires neural networks to reconfigure themselves. Millions of neurons must change their firing patterns, which requires a great deal of reinforcement with new pathways and breaking down existing chemistry in old pathways. The brain naturally resists spending its precious energy reconfiguring itself, leading to status quo bias. 

@Ed Powers We face a similar problem as Jordan I watched the ADKAR method and so Im curious on how you apply it to customers (or theoretically how its applied) because the course is all about internal change management. So I believe I understand it enough to connect the dots but where im stuck is on what point in time do we leverage this method?

We have 4 discovery questions we ask at the very beginning of the call based on what information we think we need to identify the goal. Should ADKAR be applied in this stage in order to increase adoption rate or are you suggesting this as an outreach method to get ppl to the first training in order to execute other areas of ADKAR for adoption? ​

I suggest probing a little further and asking why they are not showing up before pursuing a solution. I suspect, however, that yours may be a very common problem tied to a lack of effective change management--the people making the purchase decision are not the people being asked to show up for the training, or more importantly, to change what they do on a daily basis. 

People naturally resist change. Why? Two reasons:

1. Humans are twice as sensitive to losses as we are to gains. Change often involves a perceived loss of status (I'm no longer a recognized expert), certainty (I don't know what will happen next), autonomy (I now have to rely on someone else for help), relationships (I had friends at the other vendor's company), or fairness (I have enough to do right now!). Perceived loss activates our defense mechanisms, and common expressions are disengagement and passive aggression.
2. Changing habits requires significant time and effort. Our brains automatically shift routine tasks to our subconscious to conserve energy, and an estimated 42% of our day is just routine. Learning a new technology means breaking old habits and acquiring new ones, a process that requires neural networks to reconfigure themselves. Millions of neurons must change their firing patterns, which requires a great deal of reinforcement with new pathways and breaking down existing chemistry in old pathways. The brain naturally resists spending its precious energy reconfiguring itself, leading to status quo bias.