This week I was at an event run by a software company that wants to be its customers’ system of record. Three of its customers were interviewed on stage. Different companies, different industries, and all three ended up talking about the same thing: Getting people to actually use the software.
Adoption is the oldest problem in enterprise software, and still an expensive one. Companies typically use only about half of the software licences they pay for, according to Zylo. They sell software for finding unused licences, so of course they would say that, but they aren’t far off.1
For a system of record (SoR), whether it holds work, people, customers or money, adoption is even more challenging, because partial adoption just doesn’t cut it. An SoR used by 80% of people isn’t 80% useful. It’s just a record nobody trusts.
Having been on both the vendor and the customer side for large organisations, I’ve come to think the best way to encourage user adoption is what I call the Adoption Sandwich. It has three parts:
Bottom-up: The bottom slice is the users. Design an experience so good, with exactly the features people need, that they fall in love with it. The dream is for it to pass the pub test, where one of your users asks a friend who works elsewhere, “How do you even work without this?”
Enterprise software has rarely been built this way, because the person who buys it is not the person who uses it. And the larger the company, the further the buyer is from the user – or do you expect procurement people to use every piece of software within the org? This means vendors can design for the buyer, not the user, and bad UX becomes a cost the customer pays, in training, consultants and workarounds.
I had hoped that mobile phones and the apps on them would make end users demand more from their enterprise software too, but instead another pattern emerged: People just don’t use (or “adopt”) the tools they don’t like, or the parts of them they don’t like, and go back to Excel.
Top-down: The top slice is leadership. The CEO and CFO make the software the way the business runs, and standardise processes around it. And when I say “standardise”, I mean avoiding local exceptions unless they are tax, legal or statutory requirements. Each exception you build in makes the bottom slice a little thinner.
In more than 25 years of Prosci’s research on change, practitioners have consistently named active, visible sponsorship from the top as the biggest contributor to success.2 Visible is the important word. A mandate is a memo. Sponsorship is the CFO running the Monday meeting from the system and never asking for the spreadsheet version.
Middle-out: Every sandwich also needs a filling. It is the part that gets forgotten. Between the CEO and the user sits a layer of managers who decide what actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon. Gartner argues that technology adoption is hard even when senior leaders sponsor it, and that middle managers are crucial to it. It also reports that more than half of managers feel disconnected from strategy.3 If a team lead still runs their status meeting from a slide deck, the tool is optional for that team, whatever the CEO said.
What I’ve seen in 25 years is that none of the three works on its own. A mandate without a product people like gets the minimum compliance, at the last minute, with a spreadsheet on the side. A product people love without a mandate spreads team by team, until the company runs one process across five tools that don’t agree. Middle managers who haven’t been brought into the strategy are slow to make adoption happen.
But when all three line up, the adoption conversation magically goes away. Not because adoption is finished, but because it stops being a project. The question changes from “are people using it?” to “what is it telling us?”
Where this idea came from
When I was on the vendor side with Sibilo, I used to evangelise for enterprise software to be intuitive, familiar and easy to use, requiring minimal training, and I relentlessly focused on an amazing UX for end users.
When I moved to the customer side at BBH London, I thought I would carry that philosophy into the tools we bought, and work with vendors to improve their products. Lindsey Coleman kept telling me that wasn’t enough, and that we needed a top-down mandate. She was right, and three CFOs at BBH and its parent company, Publicis Groupe, proved it, each in a different way. So the school of Publicis is the inspiration behind the Adoption Sandwich.
Mike Saunter (BBH global CFO at the time) is very strategic, and was instrumental in the top-down sponsorship at BBH. He talked about our initiative, gave it visibility, and took us to other CFOs to showcase our solution. The top slice.
Radhika Radhakrishnan (BBH UK CFO at the time) would talk to the account leads through a BBH Pro dashboard every Monday. A brilliant example of top management bringing middle management along. The filling.
Michel-Alain Proch (Publicis CFO at the time) not only gave us top-down sponsorship, he made sure the vendors understood our bottom-up requirements. He would call me in to Paris for an early morning meeting, learn all the detail of what the users needed and why, and then meet the CEOs of the vendors to ask for those features. The whole sandwich.
At Publicis, there were other senior leaders like François Johannel and Sylvie OUZIEL who made sure middle management was brought along. Each of them empowering the others compounds the impact, and I can’t emphasise enough how powerful that is. Thank you all, I learned a lot from you.
As I was listening to the three customers on stage, all of this went through my head. And I took a note on my phone, which reads: “Could forward-deployed transformation consultants help with adoption?” But that’s for another Friday Thought…
References
- Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index, which puts average licence utilisation at 54%. ↩
- Prosci, Best Practices in Change Management research. ↩
- Gartner, CIOs: Partner With the C-Suite to Extend Change Leadership Through Middle Managers, July 2024. ↩