The Adoption Gap: Why Customers Don’t Change

We hear a version of the same story from B2B businesses all the time.

A prospect is interested. They recognise the problem, like the solution and want another conversation. So there is a follow-up call, then another. Perhaps a proposal is shared, questions are answered and other people become involved. And then, somehow, it stalls.

There is a budget issue. The timing isn’t right. Someone has left the business. Another priority has emerged. “Keep in touch” becomes the next step, with a suggestion to come back in a few months or at the start of the next budget year.

Sometimes the prospect eventually buys. The problem hasn’t gone away, they still need to solve it and, having considered the alternatives, the original solution is still the one they want.

So what happened? Were they interested or not? We think there is a more useful question. Were they able to make the case for change?

Interest is not adoption

This is particularly relevant to innovative B2B businesses because the person who discovers the solution is often not the person who can make the decision. They may understand the problem better than anyone else in the organisation and be a strong advocate for what you do, but they may not control the budget, own the wider business problem or have the authority to commit the organisation to doing something differently.

They now have another job to do. They have to make the change internally.

That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy for businesses to leave that part of the process to the customer. We explain our product, demonstrate how it works, provide the proposal and assume that our enthusiastic contact will take it from there.

But their colleagues are unlikely to have the same perspective.

The finance director may want to understand the return. The operational team may be concerned about implementation. The CEO may want to know what happens if the investment doesn’t deliver. Procurement may have its own requirements. Other people may simply question whether the problem is significant enough to warrant changing something that, however imperfectly, already works.

The advocate understands the problem. The organisation needs to understand the business case for solving it.

The status quo is a competitor too

We often think about competition as another company offering an alternative. But for many innovations, the real alternative is the way the customer already does things.

The spreadsheet. The manual process. The legacy system. The workaround. The existing supplier..

The current solution may be inefficient and everyone may know it. But it is familiar. People understand how it works, who owns it and what it costs. Changing it introduces uncertainty, effort and risk.

Research into status quo bias has shown that people tend to favour existing choices, even when stronger alternatives are available. In their 1988 study, Samuelson and Zeckhauser found a systematic tendency for decision-makers to remain with existing alternatives across a range of choices.

That doesn’t mean customers are irrational just the alternative to your innovation isn’t always another innovation. Sometimes it is simply doing nothing.

This helps explain why a prospect can genuinely believe your solution is better and still not buy it.

No decision is still a decision

There is a useful phrase in B2B sales: “no decision”. Research published in Harvard Business Review, based on more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, found that between 40% and 60% of deals in the analysis ended in no decision, rather than a decision to buy from a competitor.

That is interesting because it changes how we might interpret a stalled opportunity.

The customer hasn’t necessarily decided that the product isn’t good enough. They may not have decided that the problem isn’t important. They may simply not have reached the point where the organisation is confident enough to make the change.

And that is where the internal champion matters.

A champion needs more than enthusiasm. They need to be able to explain why the problem matters, what it is costing the business, what changes if it is solved and why this particular approach is worth considering. They need evidence to reduce uncertainty and a clear enough commercial case to take the conversation into the rest of the organisation.

In other words, they need to become the person who can make the case for change, not simply the person who likes the product.

B2B buying makes this harder because there may be a lot of people involved. Gartner’s 2025 research, based on a survey of 632 B2B buyers, found that 74% of buying teams experienced what it described as unhealthy conflict during the decision process. The buying groups surveyed ranged from five to 16 people across as many as four functions, and Gartner found that groups reaching consensus were 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal.

European research from 6sense points in the same direction. Its 2024 study of 674 B2B buyers found that the average European buying group comprised 9–10 internal stakeholders and that the average buying journey took around ten months from the start of research to purchase. By the time buyers engaged directly with sellers, they were already 67.7% of the way through that journey.

The person who first contacts you therefore has a difficult job. They aren’t simply evaluating your solution. They are navigating a group of people who may each see the problem differently.

This is where marketing has a role

This brings us back to the point we made in our previous article. Marketing isn’t simply there to create awareness or generate interest. It brings the customer lens into the business and helps identify and remove the barriers that stand between recognising value and adopting a solution.

That means understanding what the customer needs to make the decision, not just what they need to know about the product.

It means asking questions such as:

• Who else needs to be convinced?
• What will they need to understand?
• What is the cost of continuing as they are?
• What evidence would make the decision easier?
• What could prevent the change from happening?

These aren’t sales techniques. They are questions about how the customer actually makes decisions which need to be considered before the prospect reaches the point where they are asking for a proposal.

Closing the adoption gap

Sometimes there genuinely isn’t budget. Sometimes priorities change. Sometimes the customer isn’t ready. Sometimes the solution isn’t right.

But when a prospect eventually comes back because their underlying problem still exists, it is worth asking what stopped them the first time. If they recognised the problem, believed the solution could help and still couldn’t get the organisation to act, perhaps the issue wasn’t lack of interest. It’s likely the business case wasn’t strong enough to make the change possible.

That is the adoption gap.

And it is why we believe the biggest competitor to innovation is not another product. It is customer inertia.

For innovative SMEs, understanding that changes the role of marketing. The job isn’t simply to create interest and hand the prospect over to sales. It is to understand the customer well enough to identify what is stopping adoption and help them build the confidence, evidence and commercial case needed to move forward.

Because innovation only creates value when someone is willing to change.