Too many doors, not enough Yes

Sales processes are fascinating. I am particularly fond of that moment when the presentation is over, the questions have been answered, somebody has nodded more than once, and there is even that quiet feeling that the conversation has been really productive. And then, almost as a matter of courtesy, someone says, "Let's involve the others." It is one of the most reasonable sentences anyone can pronounce inside an organisation, but I have often had the impression that, precisely at that moment, the product has begun a journey from which many never return.

Not because somebody has rejected it. Quite the opposite: the first person has already understood it. They have recognised the problem, imagined the benefit and, at least mentally, started making room for the product in their daily work.

If products were bought by individuals, the story might almost end there. But organisations are not individuals.

What happens next does not appear in pipeline reviews, but everyone involved somehow knows it is taking place: the product leaves the environment where problems are concrete and decisions often belong to those who live with them every day, and slowly enters another landscape altogether, one populated not by machines or customers or maintenance plans, but by responsibilities, budgets, governance, integration, procurement policies and all those invisible structures that allow organisations to function without falling apart.

All of this is necessary. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a well-run company behaving differently. Finance is right to ask its questions. IT is right to be concerned about architecture and security. Procurement has every reason to protect established processes. Legal exists for a reason. Operations naturally sees the world through a different lens than Engineering. Each conversation is perfectly legitimate when observed on its own, and this is precisely why the phenomenon is so difficult to recognise. Nobody is creating friction intentionally. Nobody is trying to make the purchase more difficult. Yet together, without anybody ever deciding that this should happen, they gradually construct something that did not exist when the first meeting ended: a product that requires an organisation to agree with itself before it is able to agree with you.

I have started thinking of this as adoption friction.

It is not the effort required to install a product, nor the time needed for people to learn how to use it, but something that begins much earlier and is considerably harder to notice: the organisational effort required before anyone is actually allowed to say yes.

We never speak about this. Product discussions tend to revolve around capabilities, differentiation, pricing, positioning or user experience, all of which undoubtedly matter, while the path a product must travel inside the customer's organisation often remains almost invisible, as though it belonged exclusively to Sales. But that path was not designed by the sales team. It was largely designed the moment we decided what the product would promise, whom it would benefit and, perhaps without fully realising it, how many different people would need to recognise those benefits before the first purchase could take place.

There is something almost paradoxical about this.

As product managers, we are naturally inclined to strengthen the value proposition. We discover another benefit and decide to include it. Then another department that could benefit, another business case, another strategic angle. The product gradually becomes relevant to Maintenance, but also to Operations; to Operations, but also to Sustainability; to Sustainability, but also to Finance, to Compliance and to Corporate Strategy. From a distance, it feels like progress. The product appears richer, more complete and more valuable than before.

What is less obvious is that every additional promise brings another conversation, and every new conversation introduces another perspective that must somehow find its place among all the others. We celebrate the growing number of reasons to buy, while paying little attention to the growing number of people who now need to agree that buying is the right thing to do.

This is why I sometimes wonder whether companies occasionally diagnose the wrong problem. They invest in improving presentations, refining sales processes or expanding commercial teams, when the difficulty may have originated much earlier, during product definition itself. The challenge is not necessarily that the product is difficult to explain. It is that it has become difficult to buy.

Of course, some products are inherently strategic. They will always require several stakeholders, and rightly so. Not every purchase should be made quickly, nor should every organisation seek to reduce decisions to a single department. That would be an equally simplistic conclusion.

But there are many situations where a different entry point, a narrower first proposition or a product deliberately designed to solve one person's problem before promising to transform the entire organisation would travel a much shorter path.

After all, organisations do not adopt products because everyone becomes convinced at the same time.

Generally, they adopt them because someone was allowed to begin.