To onboard professionals with established workflows (like realtors), platforms should minimize friction. Instead of forcing adoption of a new tool, Conveyo uses a lightweight model with email digests and a concierge service. This respects existing habits and lowers the barrier to participation.
Acknowledge that partners are time-poor and inundated with requests. The best enablement meets them where they are by creating easy, self-service experiences. Provide customizable collateral with pre-filled messaging and prescriptive guidance to eliminate friction and encourage immediate action.
For internal tools, don't rely solely on product-led growth. A hybrid approach combines a frictionless product experience with a proactive "sales" strategy of advocating for the tool's potential, constantly proving its value to leadership, and removing friction for users.
For a mature product, a key growth lever can be removing identity friction. By allowing users to bring their existing accounts (e.g., Gmail) instead of forcing a new one (e.g., Yahoo.com), you lower barriers, solve the 'cold start' problem, and can dramatically increase adoption by delivering immediate value.
When rolling out the Odin platform at Uber, the team intentionally avoided a big-bang launch. They started with their own systems, then expanded to friendly teams, using an incremental approach to build momentum and prove value before approaching more resistant groups.
When customers are hesitant to adopt a new product due to uncertainty about its value or ease of use, lower the upfront cost of trial. Create a low-risk way for them to experience the benefits firsthand, like a car test drive or a 'white glove' training session, to resolve their uncertainty directly.
To drive adoption of automation tools, you must remove the user's trade-off calculation. The core insight is to make the process of automating a task forever fundamentally faster and easier than performing that same task manually just once. This eliminates friction and makes automation the default choice.
Vendors often create overly sophisticated partner programs, believing more features add more value. However, complexity hinders adoption because partners lack the time to understand intricate systems. Simplicity is not just a preference; it is a prerequisite for effectiveness. A straightforward program will always outperform a complex one.
To drive adoption, CloudPay positioned its intent platform (Demandbase) as a daily dashboard for AEs. Salespeople start their day by seeing which of their nominated target accounts are actively engaging, turning an abstract marketing tool into a tangible, prioritized sales workflow.
When implementing a new productivity system, success depends more on team comfort than on the tool's advanced features. Forcing a complex platform can lead to frustration. It's better to compromise on a simpler, universally accepted tool than to create friction and alienate team members.
To become indispensable to SMBs, a marketing platform cannot be a standalone tool. It must deeply integrate with the specific, proprietary systems that define an industry's workflow, such as a real estate agent's CRM or a mechanic's booking software. This ecosystem-first approach eliminates the friction of switching between tools, making the marketing platform a natural and effective extension of the SMB's core business operations.