Too many doors, not enough yes

Let's be clear: some products struggle because they fail to solve an important problem.

However, others solve it remarkably well but find themselves trapped in lengthy sales cycles, endless demonstrations and opportunities that seem promising until, quietly and without any obvious reason, they simply fade away.

After years working with industrial and technology companies and startups, I have come to believe that these are often two very different situations.

The second one has comparatively little to do with the quality of the product itself. It reflects the way the product has been conceived, packaged and brought to market. Somewhere along the way, it has become a product that no single person can reasonably decide to buy.

I tend to think of this as adoption friction.

I am not talking about the effort required to use a product once it has been purchased, but the organisational effort required before anyone is able to say yes.

It is a subtle distinction that has profound consequences.

Many industrial products are presented as solutions that simultaneously improve operational efficiency, reduce maintenance costs, strengthen compliance, generate better data, facilitate planning and support strategic decision-making.

None of these arguments is incorrect. In fact, they are often entirely valid.

The difficulty is that every additional promise usually introduces another conversation inside the customer's organisation.

Maintenance sees one benefit.

Operations sees another.

IT naturally asks different questions.

Finance evaluates the investment through an entirely different lens.

Procurement follows its own process, while cybersecurity or legal may enter the discussion later still.

None of these stakeholders is creating unnecessary bureaucracy. Each is simply fulfilling their legitimate responsibility. It would be unfair, and ultimately unhelpful, to blame them for slowing down the process.

Yet the product has unintentionally created a situation where its own value can only emerge once several independent perspectives have aligned.

That alignment is simply expensive.

Not only for the customer, who must dedicate time and attention to building internal consensus, but equally for the supplier, whose commercial effort gradually shifts away from explaining the product towards orchestrating a complex organisational conversation.

Sales teams are often expected to solve this challenge through persistence or better communication, when in reality they are compensating for decisions that were made much earlier, during product definition and market positioning.

This is why I wonder whether some companies diagnose the wrong problem.

What appears to be a sales execution issue may, in fact, be a product strategy issue.

Not because the product lacks value, but because it requires too many people to recognise that value before the first purchase can happen.

There is, of course, no universal answer. Certain products are inherently strategic and will always involve multiple functions. That is both natural and correct.

But there are many others where a different packaging, a narrower initial proposition or a more carefully chosen entry point could allow one department to experience the benefit before asking the rest of the organisation to come along.

That is a very different conversation from reducing functionality; it is simply recognising that products do not scale only because they create value.

They also scale because organisations are able to adopt them without first having to redesign the way they make decisions.